The relationship between emotions, feelings, mood and behaviour

Antionio Rosa Damásio is a Portuguese behavioral neurologist. His research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making. His work has had a major influence on current understanding of the neural systems, which underlie memory, language, consciousness Philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes in the brain. He argues that the brain's computational circuitry fools us into thinking we know more than we do, and that what we call consciousness — isn't. ‘The best reason for believing that robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves.' This mind-shifting perspective on the mind itself has distinguished Dennett's career as a philosopher and cognitive scientist. Dan Dennett is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher. And while the philosophy community has never quite known what to make of Dennett (he defies easy categorization, and refuses to affiliate himself with accepted schools of thought), his computational approach to understanding the brain has made him the philosopher of choice of the AI community.