Rethinking the Brain Novel: Towards Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness (Panel)
Since the origins of the English novel, and the rise of philosophical materialism in the wake of Rene Descartes, David Hume, and John Locke, English fiction writers have been interested in capturing the neural activity of the brain through narrative style, form, and genre. In the same vain, in The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Antonio Damasio, having cited Hume and Descartes as precedents for contemporary neuroscience, contends that “consciousness may be produced within the three pounds of flesh we call brain” (28). Damasio’s comment translates a reductionism whereby the immaterial experience is reduced to the function of the neurons.