Because I have some interest in the brian, neuroscience and consciousness I was aware of Antonio Damasio and I decided to read his latest book. But I was mildly disappointed. I think this is because of my exposure to the metamodernist movement where, in my opinion, leading edge thinkers can be found.
However, I do think Damasio has much to contribute and Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious expanded my understanding of a difficult subject matter.
Before We Begin
In his introduction, Damasio outlines the general direction of his book.
My aim is different. I wish to know about the functional mechanisms that allow us to experience in mind a process that clearly takes place in the physical realm of the body.
…feelings are not conventional perceptions of the body but rather hybrids, at home in both body and brain.
…we are feeling creatures that think and thinking creatures that feel.
Part l: On Being
IN THE BEGINNING WAS NOT THE WORD
Damasio begins his story at the very early stages of evolution.
…living organisms responded intelligently to what they sensed… the smartness of these simple organisms did not rely on explicit knowledge of the sort our minds use today, the sort that requires representations and images.
THE PURPOSE OF LIFE
…the purpose of life: survival, to be sure, but with an abundance of well-being derived in good part from the experience of its own intelligent creations.
THE EMBARRASSMENT OF VIRUSES
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, I found this section very interesting.
…viruses remain a major cause of scientific and medical humiliation… We have made great progress in understanding the role of bacteria in evolution and their interdependence relative to humans, which is largely beneficial to us. The microbiome is now a part of how we understand ourselves, but nothing comparable holds for viruses.
…in spite of their nonliving status, we cannot deny viruses some fraction of the non-explicit variety of intelligence that animates all living organisms beginning with bacteria. Viruses carry a hidden competence that manifests itself only once they reach suitable living terrain.
BRAINS AND BODIES
Any theory that bypasses the nervous system in order to account for the existence of minds and consciousness is destined to failure.
What the body brings to the marriage with a nervous system is its foundational biological intelligence, the non-explicit competence that governs life as it meets homeostatic demands and that eventually is expressed in the form of feeling.
NERVOUS SYSTEMS AS AFTERTHOUGHTS OF NATURE
…nervous systems helped generate remarkable phenomena and functions that were not present before their arrival such as feelings, minds, consciousness, explicit reasoning, verbal languages, and mathematics.
ON BEING, FEELING, AND KNOWING
The history of living organisms began four billion years ago and has taken several paths. In the branch of life history that led to us, I like to imagine three distinct and consecutive evolutionary stages. A first stage is hallmarked by being; a second is dominated by feeling; and a third is defined by knowing in the general sense of the term. Curiously, in each contemporary human, something can be gleaned akin to those same three stages, and they develop in the same sequence.
…extraordinary. Once experiences begin to be committed to memory, feeling and conscious organisms are capable of maintaining a more or less exhaustive history of their lives, a history of their interactions with others and of their interaction with the environment, in brief, a history of each individual life as lived inside each individual organism, nothing less than the armature of personhood.
Part Il: About Minds and the New Art of Representation
INTELLIGENCE, MINDS, AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Intelligence, in the general perspective of all living organisms, signifies the ability to resolve successfully the problems posed by the struggle for life.
The contents of the spatially mapped patterns we built can be mentally inspected… the contents of mind are manipulable… When we play creatively in our minds, we do use our imaginations, correct?
Explicit intelligences are complicated. They require feeling and consciousness.
I leave aside one vexing issue: the intelligence of those monstrous, nonliving concoctions known as viruses. Once viruses enter a suitable living organism and even while their status remains “nonliving,” they “act” most intelligently from the point of view of their permanence. The situation, as noted earlier, is a paradox and an embarrassment that we must accept. Viruses are nonliving things that act intelligently so as to foster the expansion of their potentially life-producing cargo: nucleic acids.
SENSING IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING CONSCIOUS AND DOES NOT REQUIRE A MIND
Once we are capable of consciousness, what we become conscious of is the contents of our minds.
THE CONTENTS OF MINDS
A good many images in our minds, however, come not from the brain perceiving the world around it but rather from the brain conniving and commingling with the world within our bodies… The result is the production of hybrids called feelings. A normal mind is made of images, from the outside—conventional or straightforward—and from the inside: special and hybrid.
UNMINDED INTELLIGENCE
…we, lofty and minded humans, also benefit from unminded intelligence mechanisms at all hours of the day.
THE MAKING OF MENTAL IMAGERY
The relationship between what is mapped and the images we form is a close one. Creating maps with precision is essential, while vagueness is costly.
TURNING NEURAL ACTIVITY INTO MOVEMENT AND MIND
…neurobiological “mapped patterns” turn into the “mental events” we call images. And when these events are part of a context that includes feeling and self-perspective, then, and only then, they become mental experiences, which is to say that they become conscious.
FABRICATING MINDS
Consciousness is constructed by adding to the flow of mental images we call mind an extra set of mental images that express felt and factual references to the mind’s owner.
THE MINDS OF PLANTS AND THE WISDOM OF PRINCE CHARLES
…roots of trees in forests form vast networks that contribute to a collective homeostasis…. who needs a mind when one can do so much without it?
ALGORITHMS IN THE KITCHEN
When people think of “uploading or downloading their minds” and becoming immortal, they should realize that their adventure—in the absence of live brains in live organisms—would consist in transferring recipes, and only recipes, to a computer device.
Part Il: About Minds and the New Art of Representation
INTELLIGENCE, MINDS, AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Intelligence, in the general perspective of all living organisms, signifies the ability to resolve successfully the problems posed by the struggle for life… Explicit human intelligences are neither simple nor small. Explicit human intelligences require a mind and the assistance of mind-related developments: feeling and consciousness. They require perception, and memory, and reasoning. The contents of minds are based on spatially mapped patterns that represent objects and actions… The contents of the spatially mapped patterns we built can be mentally inspected… the contents of mind are manipulable… When we play creatively in our minds, we do use our imaginations…
I leave aside one vexing issue: the intelligence of those monstrous, nonliving concoctions known as viruses. Once viruses enter a suitable living organism and even while their status remains “nonliving,” they “act” most intelligently from the point of view of their permanence. The situation, as noted earlier, is a paradox and an embarrassment that we must accept. Viruses are nonliving things that act intelligently so as to foster the expansion of their potentially life-producing cargo: nucleic acids.
SENSING IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING CONSCIOUS AND DOES NOT REQUIRE A MIND
Once we are capable of consciousness, what we become conscious of is the contents of our minds.
THE CONTENTS OF MINDS
A good many images in our minds, however, come not from the brain perceiving the world around it but rather from the brain conniving and commingling with the world within our bodies.
A normal mind is made of images, from the outside—conventional or straightforward—and from the inside: special and hybrid.
Making memories largely consists of recording images in some coded form so that eventually we can recover something close to the original.
UNMINDED INTELLIGENCE
…we, lofty and minded humans, also benefit from unminded intelligence mechanisms at all hours of the day.
THE MAKING OF MENTAL IMAGERY
The relationship between what is mapped and the images we form is a close one. Creating maps with precision is essential, while vagueness is costly. A vague map can lead you to the wrong interpretation or worse: guide you to make the wrong movement.
TURNING NEURAL ACTIVITY INTO MOVEMENT AND MIND
…neurobiological “mapped patterns” turn into the “mental events” we call images. And when these events are part of a context that includes feeling and self-perspective, then, and only then, they become mental experiences, which is to say that they become conscious.
FABRICATING MINDS
We also know that the dominant images are commonly structured in a “pattern,” a spatial, geometric design where elements are laid down in two or more dimensions. This spatiality is at the heart of what a mind is. It is responsible for the explicitness of the mental components… Non-explicit competences are extraordinarily effective, but the wheels of their machinery remain unavailable to mental inspection.
THE MINDS OF PLANTS AND THE WISDOM OF PRINCE CHARLES
…roots of trees in forests form vast networks that contribute to a collective homeostasis… who needs a mind when one can do so much without it?
ALGORITHMS IN THE KITCHEN
When people think of “uploading or downloading their minds” and becoming immortal, they should realize that their adventure—in the absence of live brains in live organisms—would consist in transferring recipes, and only recipes, to a computer device.
Part IIl: On Feelings
THE BEGINNINGS OF FEELING: SETTING THE STAGE
Feeling probably began its evolutionary history as a timid conversation between the chemistry of life and the early version of a nervous system within one particular organism.
Something novel and extremely valuable had emerged in the history of life: a mental counterpart to a physical organism.
AFFECT
…what we “really” feel, in the proper sense of the term, is how either parts or the whole of our own organism are faring, moment by moment.
I call these feelings homeostatic because, as direct informers, they tell us if the organism is or is not operating according to homeostatic needs, that is, in a manner conducive or not to life and survival.
Feelings, as enacted in our organism and experienced in our minds, exert a tug and a pull over us, literally disturb us, positively or negatively. Why and how can they do so? The first reason is clear: they are “insiders,” and they have access to our interior!
Feelings: the mental experiences that follow and accompany varied states of organism homeostasis, whether primary (homeostatic feelings such as hunger and thirst, pain or pleasure) or provoked by emotions (emotional feelings such as fear, anger, and joy).
BIOLOGICAL EFFICIENCY AND THE ORIGIN OF FEELINGS
All feelings are conscious, and while disagreeable feelings signify situations that impede and endanger life, pleasant ones signify those that help life flourish. In the absence of feelings/consciousness, the mechanisms aligned with flourishing would not have gained favor so overwhelmingly.
GROUNDING FEELINGS I
The feelings that we humans experience could only have begun in earnest after the evolutionary rise of complex nervous systems capable of making detailed sensory mappings and images. The resulting primordial feelings were important stepping-stones on the way to the elaborate feelings humans can experience today.
GROUNDING FEELINGS II
Feelings reflect a chemical regulatory process, the initial condition without which they could not occur, but another condition must be met, and that is a dialogue between body chemistry and the bioelectrical activity of neurons in a nervous system.
GROUNDING FEELINGS III
Because the actual object of the feeling/perception is none other than a part of the organism itself, that object is in fact located within the subject/perceiver. Astonishing! Nothing comparable occurs with our external perceptions, for example, visual or auditory. The objects of visual or auditory perceptions do not communicate with our bodies. The landscape we see or the songs we hear are not in touch with our bodies, let alone inside them. They exist in a physically separate space. In the feeling realm the situation is radically different. Because the object and subject of our feeling-percepts exist within the same organism, they can interact.
GROUNDING FEELINGS IV
When we say that we “represent” or “map” objects in the world around us, the notion of “mapping” introduces distance between the “map” and “the things mapped,” as it should.
Our feelings are not detached at all. In practice, there is little distance between feelings and the things felt. Feelings are commingled with the things and events we feel thanks to the exceptional and intimate cross talk between body structures and nervous system.
GROUNDING FEELINGS V
Keeping alive is an uphill battle, and our bodies engage in a complicated and multicentric effort to make life not only possible but robustly so. The robustness of life is felt as “plenitude” and “flourishing”; a balanced life process is translated as “well-being.” “Discomfort” and “malaise” and “pain,” on the other hand, signify failure at the life management effort… I even need to maintain and nourish healthy social relationships with those around me so that circumstances arising in the social world do not impinge on the state of my interior and disturb the process of governing life in terms of homeostatic necessities.
GROUNDING FEELINGS VI
In brief, nature has provided us with the fire alarms, the fire engines, and the medical facilities. A sign that nature has been perfecting this strategy is shown by the recent discovery of central nervous system controls of immune responses… The new findings show that the hypothalamus commands the spleen to produce antibodies to certain infective agents. In other words, the immune system works with the complicity of the nervous system to promote homeostasis without asking us, the presumed conscious controllers of our destinies, any help with the matter.
GROUNDING FEELINGS VII
Not all homeostatic feelings are harbingers of bad news or signify danger ahead. When the organism is functioning with a good balance between what it requires to operate well and what it gets, when the environment is suitable in terms of climate, and when we are at ease in our social environment rather than in conflict, then the star homeostatic feeling is well-being, available in various guises and intensities. Well-being can become so abundant and focused that it rises to the experience of pleasure. Likewise, in the world of negative homeostatic feelings, malaise can be so acutely focused that it becomes pain.
HOMEOSTATIC FEELINGS IN A SOCIOCULTURAL SETTING
…we often overlook the fact that psychological and sociocultural situations also gain access to the machinery of homeostasis in such a way that they too result in pain or pleasure, malaise or well-being. In its unerring push for economy, nature did not bother to create new devices to handle the goodness or badness of our personal psychology or social condition.
Still, the pain of social shame is comparable to that of a raging cancer, betrayal can feel like a stab wound, and the pleasures that result from social admiration, for better and worse, can be truly orgasmic.
BUT THIS FEELING ISN’T PURELY MENTAL
Sometimes popular wisdom beats laborious science. That feelings are not purely mental; that they are hybrids of mind and body; that they move with ease from mind to body and back again; and that they disturb the mental peace, those are the points of the song and my points in this chapter. All I need to add is that the power of feelings comes from the fact that they are present in the conscious mind: technically speaking, we feel because the mind is conscious, and we are conscious because there are feelings! I am not playing with words; I am merely stating the seemingly paradoxical but very real facts. Feelings were and are the beginning of an adventure called consciousness.
Part IV: On Consciousness and Knowing
WHY CONSCIOUSNESS? WHY NOW?
Nothing can be known in the absence of consciousness. Consciousness was indispensable for the rise of human cultures and thus had a hand in changing the course of human history. It is difficult to overstate the importance of consciousness. At the same time it is easy to exaggerate the difficulty of understanding how consciousness arises and to promote it as an inscrutable mystery.
It is reasonable to ask if the efficacy of the responses that consciousness makes possible comes mostly from the negative or the positive side of feelings, from their negative or positive valence.
…there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience.
NATURAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness, then, is a particular state of mind resulting from a biological process toward which multiple mental events make a contribution… These contributions converge, in a regimented way, to produce something quite complex and yet perfectly natural: the encompassing mental experience of a living organism caught, moment after moment, in the act of apprehending the world within itself and, wonder of wonders, the world around itself.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
General biology, neurobiology, psychology, and philosophy of mind contain the tools necessary to solve the problem of consciousness and even go a long way toward solving the deeper and underlying problem of the fabric of mind itself.
As complicated as consciousness is, however, it does not appear to be—or have to remain—mysterious or impossible to figure out in terms of what it is made of, mentally speaking… The notion of mystery and the idea that a biological explanation lies beyond us do not apply.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS FOR?
Conscious minds help organisms clearly identify what is required for their survival, and feel their way through the requirements.
At this point I received the following notification.
MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS ARE NOT SYNONYMOUS
BEING CONSCIOUS IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING AWAKE
CONSCIOUSNESS (DE)CONSTRUCTED
EXTENDED CONSCIOUSNESS
WITH EASE, AND YOU BESIDE
THE REAL WONDER OF FEELINGS
THE PRIORITY OF THE WORLD WITHIN
A GATHERING OF KNOWLEDGE
CONSCIOUSNESS AND ATTENTION
THE SUBSTRATE COUNTS
LOSS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
THE CEREBRAL CORTICES AND THE BRAIN STEM IN THE MAKING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
FEELING MACHINES AND CONSCIOUS MACHINE
In All Fairness: An Epilogue
I did not have the motivation to type out additional quotes from Feeling & Knowing but I also did not want to leave my book report unfinished. A wonderful solution arrived unexpectedly in an email from Bonitta Roy and The Pop-Up School. I will close this report by quoting her with the assumption that she, because of her intellect, got far more out of this book than I did.
I wanted to share with you this delightful insight I got this morning while reading Antonio Damasio’s new, little book Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Let me put it into a kind of story framework:
Imagine a colony of cells who are cooperating with each other by sensing their environment and sensing into/with/among each other. Imagine that eventually they begin to create network effects such that if one individual senses something from a neighboring individual, they pass it on to the other neighboring individuals.
Now imagine this colony of cells are “captured” by a larger organism, such as the biome inside a human. Let’s say that the human eats something that is toxic to them. If there were no communication “back up” toward the human, then there could be no collaborative or synergistic dynamics. So the colony evolves to send signals that represent what they are sensing “up” to the higher level organism.
Imagine that these signals are what we sense as “feelings” — affect states that reflect our internal environment. They are distinguished from body sensations, because they originate from other individuals, in the context of their environment (“my body”) and thus carry different kinds of information.
Now consider that this is also just what the cells in my body are doing. Although it is not as easy to imagine my body as the “environment of my cells” as it is to imagine my gut as an environment for the biome— still my cells both form my body and are in a very real sense “afloat throughout my body.”
Like my gut biome, the cells are both sensing their local environment, and passing signals of information up which constitute “affect-laden feelings” that are perceived at the higher level of consciousness I call “me.”
This strikes me as profound, because it eliminates the need to think of the higher level conscious “feelings” as “emergent properties of cells.” Rather, there is an organic “sense-making up-hierarchy” that is composed of inter-intra- and extracellular information processing!