2021/10/04

안토니오 다마지오 느낌의 진화 The Strange Order of Things 2017

알라딘: 느낌의 진화

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느낌의 진화 - 생명과 문화를 만든 놀라운 순서
안토니오 다마지오 (지은이),임지원,고현석 (옮긴이),박한선 (감수)

arte(아르테)2019-05-20

원제 : The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2017년)

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392쪽

책속에서

첫문장
상처를 입거나 통증을 느낄 때면 상처의 원인이 무엇이든, 또는 통증의 양상이 어떠하든, 우리는 뭔가 조치를 취할 수 있다.

P. 23느낌은 뇌 혼자서 만드는 것이 아니라 수많은 화학 분자와 신경 회로의 상호작용으로 뇌와 신체가 같이 만들어 내는 현상이다.
1. 인간 본성에 관하여
P. 25문화라는 용어가 함축하는 노력과 성취의 주된 범주에는 예술, 철학적 탐구, 종교적 신념, 도덕적 능력, 정의, 정치제도와 시장, 은행과 같은 경제제도, 기술, 과학 등이 포함된다. 한 사회 집단을 다른 사회 집단과 구분짓는 생각, 태도, 관습, 방식, 제도 역시 전반적인 문화의 범위에 들어간다. 문화는 언어를 통해 그리고 애초에 문화가 만들어 낸 사물과 의식을 통해 전달된다. 이것이 이 책에서 문화 또는 문화적 마음이라고 말할 때 포함할 수 있는 현상의 범위이다.
1. 인간 본성에 관하여 접기

P. 40항상성은 생명체의 생물학적 구조와 체제를 선택해 왔다. 그 덕분에 생명체는 미리 설계된 계획 없이, 무의식적으로, 그리고 의도하지 않고 생명을 유지할 수 있었을 뿐만 아니라 진화 계보의 다양한 가지에서 발견되는 생물 종의 진화가 일어날 수 있었다. 이와 같은 항상성 개념은 물리학적, 화학적, 생물학적 증거들에 가장 잘 부합하는 것으로, 단지 생명 활동에 대한 ‘균형을 잡도록’ 조절하는 역할에 국한된 기존의 빈약한 항상성 개념과는 매우 다르다.
1. 인간 본성에 관하여 접기

P. 52환경이 좋을 때나 안 좋을 때나 생명이 그 상태를 유지하고 미래로 뻗어 나가고자 하는, 비의도적이고 부지불식간에 일어나는 욕망을 실현하는 데 필요한 일련의 잘 조율된 절차가 바로 항상성이다.
2. 비교 불가능한 영역
P. 60생명이라고 하는 불가능해 보이는 영역은 다음 두 가지 특성으로 규정할 수 있다. 바로 생물 내부의 구조와 기능을 유지해서 생명을 조절하는 능력과 자신을 복제해서 자손을 남겨 영원한 삶을 지속하고자 하는 특성이다.
2. 비교 불가능한 영역
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저자 및 역자소개
안토니오 다마지오 (Antonio Damasio) (지은이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

오늘날 가장 탁월한 심리학자 중 한 명으로 꼽히는 학자다. 현재 서던캘리포니아 대학 돈사이프 인문·예술·사회과학대 신경과학·심리학·철학 교수 겸 뇌과학연구소 소장이다. 신경과 전문의이자 신경과학자인 다마지오는 느낌·감정·의식의 기저를 이루는 뇌 과정을 이해하는 데에 지대한 공헌을 해 왔다. 특히 감정이 의사 결정 과정에서 차지하는 역할에 대한 그의 연구는 신경과학·심리학·철학에 중대한 영향을 미쳤다. 수많은 과학 논문을 발표했으며 미국과학정보연구소에 의해 ‘가장 많이 인용된 연구자’로 선정되기도 했다.
미국 의학한림원, 미국 예술과학아카데미, 바바리안 인문과학아카데미, 유럽 과학기술아카데미 회원이며, 그라베마이어 상(2014년), 혼다 상(2010년), 아스투리아 과학기술상(2005년), 노니노 상(2003년), 시뇨레 상(2004년), 페소아 상(1992년) 등 수많은 상을 받았다. 로잔 연방 공과대학, 소르본 파리 데카르트 대학 등 유수의 대학들로부터 명예박사 학위를 받았으며, 일부 학위는 아내인 해나 다마지오와 공동으로 받았다. 대표작 중 번역된 것으로는 《데카르트의 오류》, 《스피노자의 뇌》(2007 아·태이론물리센터APCTP 올해의 과학도서 선정) 《느낌의 진화》 등이 있다. 접기

최근작 : <느끼고 아는 존재>,<느낌의 진화>,<데카르트의 오류> … 총 29종 (모두보기)

임지원 (옮긴이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

서울대학교에서 식품영양학을 전공하고 같은 대학원을 졸업했다. 전문 번역가로 활동하며 다양한 인문·과학서를 옮겼다. 옮긴 책으로는 『공기』, 『에덴의 용』, 『진화란 무엇인가』, 『섹스의 진화』, 『스피노자의 뇌』, 『넌제로』, 『슬로우데스』, 『루시퍼 이펙트』, 『급진적 진화』, 『사랑의 발견』, 『세계를 바꾼 지도』, 『꿈』, 『육천 년 빵의 역사』(공역), 『교양으로 읽는 희토류 이야기』 등이 있다.

최근작 : … 총 43종 (모두보기)

고현석 (옮긴이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

《경향신문》, 《서울신문》 등에서 국제부·사회부·과학부 기자로 활동했다. 인문·사회과학·우주과학을 넘나들며 다양한 분야의 책들을 우리말로 옮기고 있다. 연세대학교 생화학과를 졸업했으며 번역한 책으로는 안토니오 다마지오의 《느낌의 진화》, 《스페이스 러시》, 《불공정한 숫자들》, 《로봇과 일자리: 어떻게 준비할 것인가?》, 《인종주의에 물든 과학》, 《세상의 모든 과학》, 《외계생명체에 관해 과학이 알아낸 것들》, 《이스탄불 이스탄불》, 《최초의 가축, 그러나 개는 늑대다》 등이 있다.

최근작 : … 총 25종 (모두보기)

박한선 (감수)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

신경인류학자이자 정신과 전문의다. 서울대학교에서 인류학 박사학위를 받았으며 서울대병원 신경정신과 강사, 서울대학교 의생명연구원 연구원, 성안드레아병원 사회정신연구소 소장, 서울대학교 비교문화연구소 연구원 등을 지냈다. 현재 서울대학교 인류학과에서 진화인류학, 진화의학, 신경인류학 등을 강의하며 정신장애의 진화적 기원에 관해 연구하고 있다. 지은 책으로 『내가 우울한 건 다 오스트랄로피테쿠스 때문이야』『마음으로부터 일곱 발자국』『감염병 인류』(공저) 등이 있고, 옮긴 책으로 『진화와 인간 행동』『여성의 진화』 등이 있다.

최근작 : <단 하나의 이론>,<매거진 G 3호 우리는 왜 여행하는가?>,<감염병 인류> … 총 27종 (모두보기)

출판사 소개
arte(아르테)
도서 모두보기
신간알리미 신청

최근작 : <더 포스터 북 by 슬로우어스>,<또 올게요, 오래가게>,<더 포스터 북 by 토마쓰리>등 총 412종
대표분야 : 추리/미스터리소설 20위 (브랜드 지수 87,406점), 에세이 25위 (브랜드 지수 234,402점)

출판사 제공책소개

“태초에 느낌이 있었다. 그리고 이 모든 것을 이루었다!”

『데카르트의 오류』, 『일어난 일에 대한 느낌』,
『스피노자의 뇌』
‘다마지오 3부작’을 이해하는 핵심적인 저작!

박테리아부터 문화까지
살아 있는 모든 것을 만든 ‘느낌’

과학이 세분화되어 온 오랜 역사 이후, 안토니오 다마지오는 생물학적·사회적 존재의 네트워크와 소통하는 마음의 네트워크에 대한 연구를 중심으로 다양한 과학 분야의 지식을 재결합하는 패러다임을 제시한다. 이는 새로운 과학 혁명의 시작이다!
_마누엘 카스텔스(캘리포니아 대학 사회학 명예 교수)

다마지오의 글은 화려한 문체와 다양한 사례의 제시 그리고 의학, 신경학, 철학, 문학 등을 넘나드는 기발하고 광범위한 추론적 전개로 유명하다. 『느낌의 진화』를 보고 나서 다시 다마지오 3부작을 펼친다면 아주 재미있게 읽어 나갈 수 있을 것이다.
_박한선(정신과 의사·신경인류학자)

세계적인 학자들이 손꼽는 석학 중의 석학!
‘감정’ 연구의 권위자 안토니오 다마지오의 신작

안토니오 다마지오는 세계적인 신경과학자로 감정과 의사 결정에 관한 연구에서 최고의 권위자로 손꼽힌다. 신경과 전문의이자 신경과학자인 그는 느낌·감정·의식의 기저를 이루는 뇌 작동 과정을 이해하는 데에 지대한 공헌을 해 왔고, 그의 연구는 신경과학·심리학·철학에 중대한 영향을 미쳤다. 우수한 과학 논문을 다수 발표해 미국 과학정보연구소에 의해 ‘가장 많이 인용된 연구자’로 선정되기도 했으며, UN에서 주최한 ‘국제뇌교육컨퍼런스’에서 뇌과학과 신경과학 분야 석학으로서 ‘신경과학, 교육, 그리고 문화’라는 주제로 강연을 하기도 했다.(2008) 국내에서도 과학계에서 다마지오의 명성은 대단하다. 과학계 안팎의 ‘책벌레’들이 모인 아시아태평양이론물리센터APCTP에서 꼽은 과학 도서 10종에 스티븐 핑커, 리처드 도킨스의 저서와 함께 안토니오 다마지오의 『스피노자의 뇌』가 선정되기도 했고(2007), 뇌과학자 정재승, 철학자 강신주, 생물학자 최재천 등 과학과 철학 및 각계 전문가들이 그의 책을 과학 명저로 꼽았다.
『느낌의 진화』는 ‘Self comes to mind’ 이후 그가 8년 만에 펴낸 신작을 우리말로 옮긴 것이다. 이 책은 출간되자마자 브라질, 이탈리아, 프랑스, 독일, 포르투갈, 스페인, 일본 등 총 8개국에 번역 계약됐으며, 《뉴욕타임스》, 《가디언》, 《르몽드》, 《네이처》, 《퍼블리셔스 위클리》, 《커커스 리뷰》 등 유력 매체에서 서평으로 다뤄 화제의 책으로 보도되었다. 이 책에서 다마지오는 감정이 의사 결정이나 행동, 의식, 자아 인식에 아주 중요한 영향을 미친다는 그의 핵심 주장을 진화적 관점에서 논한다. 그는 생명의 탄생부터 인간 문명의 발달에 이르기까지 긴 진화적 과정 동안 느낌과 감정이 생명 유지에 핵심적인 역할을 담당한다고 주장한다. 이 책의 원제, ‘만물의 놀라운 순서: 생명, 느낌, 그리고 문화의 형성The Strange order of things: life, feeling, and the making of cultures’이 보여 주는 바, 생명과 문화는 우리가 알고 있는 것과는 전혀 다른 방법으로 진화해 현재에 이르렀다. 그리고 이것을 이해하고자 하는 노력은 보다 나은 미래를 위해 우리가 고려해야 할 사고방식과 맞닿아 있다.

생명과 문화는 어디에서 시작해서 어떻게 유지되는가?
느낌과 항상성을 통해 인간중심적 사유를 뒤집는다

생명은 어디서 시작되었는가? 마음·감정·의식은 어떻게 만들어졌는가? 사회적 행동과 문화는 어떻게 형성되었는가? 안토니오 다마지오는 이 모든 시작에 ‘느낌’이 있다고 주장한다. 1부 「생명 활동과 항상성」은 이 주장을 뒷받침하기 위해 박테리아와 사회적 곤충, 자포동물 등 여러 사례를 제시한다. 우리는 흔히 단세포생물에서 다세포생물로 진화하면서 복잡한 사회적 행동을 습득해 나간 것으로 생각한다. 문화에 대해서도 마찬가지로 지능이 어느 수준 이상 발전한 후에 문화가 나타났으리라 추측한다. 하지만 이러한 이성 중심 사고는 생물학적인 진실과 맞지 않는다. 느낌이 있었다. 느낌은 인간이 질문을 던지고 대상을 이해하고 문제를 해결해 나가는 과정, 즉 창조적 지성이라고 여겨지는 정신 활동의 촉매제로서 지성 이전에 존재해 왔다.
그리고 느낌과 함께 주목해야 하는 개념이 바로 ‘항상성’이다. 느낌은 항상성의 대리인으로서, 항상성이 부족한 경우 부정적인 느낌으로 나타나고 항상성이 적절한 수준으로 유지되고 있을 때 긍정적인 느낌을 받는 식으로 둘은 연결되어 작동한다. 여기서 항상성은 균형과 안정과 같은 “중립적 상태”가 아니다. “좀 더 편안하고 좋은 상태를 향해 스스로를 상향 조절하는 생명의 작용”이다. 항상성은 고등 생물뿐만 아니라 단세포동물, 뇌는 고사하고 심지어 핵도 가지고 있지 않은 박테리아 수준에서도 발견할 수 있는 생명의 기본 메커니즘이다. 이러한 항상성은 자연선택과 합리적인 이성에 의한 선택의 이면에 있는 가치이기 때문에 항상성을 진화의 맨 앞에 놓는 다마지오의 주장은 “만물의 놀라운 순서” 그 자체이다. 다마지오는 어쩌면 최초의 생명체가 마주했을 항상성의 요구가 유전물질보다 먼저 나타났을 수도 있다고 주장한다. 이 책의 한국어판을 감수하고 해제한 박한선은 “안토니오 다마지오가 평생 연구해 온 신경계의 형성과 감정, 의식의 출현과 창조성 등을 진화적인 관점에서 재조명했다는 점에서 큰 의의가 있다”고 평한다. “생명의 역사에서 유전자의 출현 시점보다 항상성의 요구가 더 먼저 있었다는 것”, 그리고 “복잡한 신경계도 사실은 감정을 조절하는 더욱 정교한 도구로서 뒤늦게 진화했다는 것”. 이러한 주장이 놀라운 이유도 진화적 관점에서 리처드 도킨스로 대표되는 ‘복제자 먼저replicator first’ 이론과 반대의 논의를 펼치고 있기 때문이다.
2부 「문화적 마음의 형성」에서는 인간의 지성을 가능하게 했던 신경계와 뇌의 작용을 주로 다룬다. 항상성의 작용이 지능을 만나면, 다양한 자극의 특징을 지도화한 뇌 작용의 결과물을 토대로 이미지를 창조하고 ‘마음’을 구성하게 된다. 다마지오는 신경계가 하는 수많은 기능 중에서 가장 중요한 것이 이 ‘지도 만들기’라고 주장한다. 전통적으로 신경계가 시각이나 사고 과정을 처리하듯 느낌을 처리한다는 가정이 우세했지만, 우리의 몸과 신경계는 분리할 수 없이 서로 얽히고설켜 있고 그 복잡한 과정을 통해 형성된 지도가 곧 마음이라는 것이다. 감정이 일어나는 순서도 순차적이지 않다. 박한선의 해제를 빌리면, 감정은 단순히 “뇌의 상태만이 아니라 표정과 자세, 근육의 긴장도, 심장의 맥박, 다양한 내분비 활동 등의 신체적 변화가 통합”되어 나타난다. 그렇게 “환경적 맥락과 과거의 기억, 여러 상황 등이 종합적으로 나타나면서 복잡다단한 감정을 유발한다.”
3부 「문화적 마음의 작용」에서는 느낌과 항상성이 어떻게 문화적 도구를 생성하는 것에 영향을 미치는지를 다룬다. 1·2부에서 다룬 조정자로서의 느낌과 항상성 작용이 문화에서도 발휘되어 왔음을 설명한다. 문화적 현상들이 지금까지 살아남은 것은 그 현상들이 유용한 기능적인 목표를 성취함에 따라 문화적 진화 과정에서 선택되었기 때문이다. 다마지오는 종교적 믿음, 도덕성, 정치적 관리 체계를 예로 들며, 문화의 목표는 “고통을 줄이는 것”이고 그로써 “유기체가 영향을 받는 과정을 재조정하고 제약을 가해 항상성을 회복”하려는 특성을 가진다고 주장한다. 예술, 철학, 과학도 느낌과 항상성 상태를 이용한다. “고도로 잘 보존된 신경화학 메커니즘을 이용해 스트레스를 줄이고, 쾌감을 만들어 내고, 인지적 유동성을 높이는 방향”으로 이끌어 “건강에 유익한 효과”를 미치는 식으로 선택되어 왔다는 것이다. 다마지오의 주장에 따르면 결국 머나 먼 과거부터 현재와 미래까지 지속하는 것은 느낌과 항상성이다.

문화의 위기 상황의 진짜 원인은 무엇인가?
희망과 비관의 두 세계 사이에서 찾은 가장 종합적인 사고!

『느낌의 진화』에서 안토니오 다마지오는 생명과 문화 현상에 대한 새로운 관점을 넘어서 현재 우리가 일상적으로 지니고 있는 사고 체계를 뒤집는 패러다임의 변화까지도 꾀하고 있다. 한 예로, 현재의 가장 뜨거운 논쟁거리인 인지과학·인지신경과학·인공지능 등이 지나치게 인지 능력과 합리성에 기대어 왔다는 다마지오의 비판을 보자. 그는 인지과학계가 마음과 문화의 진화 역사에서 감정이 한 역할을 고려하지 않고 합리적 문제 해결, 창조적 지능, 발명, 예측, 언어와 같은 능력만 강조해 왔다고 본다. 특히, 유기체를 알고리즘으로 환원시킬 수 있다는 사고에 내재된 문제점을 지적한다. 이 사고의 배경에 기질과 환경이 별개라는 생각이 숨어 있다는 것이다.
신경과학자로서 다마지오는 오늘날 느끼는 문화적 위기, “그 어떤 때보다 많은 것을 알고 있지만 그 정보들을 판단하고 해석할 수 있는 시간이나 도구가 없는 대중”, “정보를 통제하고 대중에게 알려지는 모든 것을 알고 있는 기업과 정부” 사이에서 일어나는 위험을 언급하면서 이러한 문화적 위기에 ‘생물학’이 있는지, 즉 근본적인 원인이 있는지 묻는다. 흥미롭게도 생물학적 측면에서 보면 이러한 실패가 오히려 당연한 것이라고 말한다. 기본적 항상성의 생리학적 근거와 주요 관심은 항상성의 경계 안에 있는 유기체의 생명이기 때문에 어느 정도 지역적인 성격을 유지할 수밖에 없기 때문이다. 문명 차원의 아주 큰 집단에서는 항상성이 자연발생적으로 작용할 수 없다. 우리는 종종 사회, 문화, 문명을 유기체에 비유하곤 하지만 실제로는 전혀 그렇지 않다는 것이다. “어느 정도의 통합과 유리한 환경의 혜택을 목표로 한 문명의 단호한 노력이라는 반대 방향의 힘”이 작용하지 않는다면 문화적 ‘유기체’들은 한 덩어리로 합쳐지지 않는다.
그럼에도 더 나은 사회를 위한 노력이 생물학의 영역과 별개의 영역이 아니라고 못 박는다. 현재의 문화적 위기에 대한 해결 방법이나 그 실행들은 그 생물학적 기원으로부터 자유로울 수 없다. 그렇기 때문에 우리의 의도는 시시포스의 신화와 같이 늘 좌절을 겪을지라도 늘 그랬듯이 새로운 시도를 해야 한다고 말한다. “자연이 부여한 생명 조절 법칙으로 고통과 쾌락이라는 보이지 않는 손에 의해 조절되는 세계”와 “생명을 영위하기 위해 문화적 형태를 발명해 기본적인 다양성을 보충함으로써 우리에게 주어진 조건들을 변화시키는 세계”. 그 사이에서 끊임없이 더 적절한 상태를 추구해야 한다는 것이다. 박한선에 따르면 “의사이자 연구자이며 교육자”인 안토니오 다마지오의 우려와 조언은 “더 나은 인간 존재를 향한 그의 그치지 않는 따뜻한 의지”로서 “코나투스의 가장 좋은 본보기”라고도 할 수 있다. 접기

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대가의 숨결이 느껴진다!
스피노자의 뇌를 읽으면서도 느꼈지만, 인간은 이미지를 통해서 이해하는데 느낌이나 감정을 객관적인 언어로 표현한다는게 어렵다는 이야기다. 하지만, 이 책은 시간이 나는대로 조금씩, 조금씩, 아껴가며 재독중이다....

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<스피노자의 뇌>를 재미있게 읽고, 다마지오의 책은 두번째로 읽는다. 흔히 ‘감정‘은 ‘이성‘보다 덜 중요하고, 때로는 부정적인 것으로 인식될 때가 있는데 그런 인식을 완전히 뒤집는다. 감정(정서)야말로 생명유지에 핵심적 역할을 한다는 것!

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느낌의 진화와 아름다움의 진화

지난봄에 나온 과학서도 많이 밀려서 막간을 이용해 살펴보고 있는데 대략 댓권 정도는 이번 여름에 소화하려 한다. 그 중 하나로 저명한 신경과학자 안토니오 다마지오의 <느낌의 진화>(아르테)가 있다. 제목만으로도 ‘느낌‘이 오는 책. 대략의 소개는 이렇다.

˝다마지오는 감정이 의사 결정이나 행동, 의식, 자아 인식에 아주 중요한 영향을 미친다는 그의 핵심 주장을 진화적 관점에서 논한다. 그는 생명의 탄생부터 인간 문명의 발달에 이르기까지 긴 진화적 과정 동안 느낌과 감정이 생명 유지에 핵심적인 역할을 담당한다고 주장한다. 이 책의 원제, ‘만물의 놀라운 순서: 생명, 느낌, 그리고 문화의 형성The Strange order of things: life, feeling, and the making of cultures’이 보여 주는 바, 생명과 문화는 우리가 알고 있는 것과는 전혀 다른 방법으로 진화해 현재에 이르렀다. 그리고 이것을 이해하고자 하는 노력은 보다 나은 미래를 위해 우리가 고려해야 할 사고방식과 맞닿아 있다.˝

번역본이 나오자마자 원서도 주문해서 지금은 같이 보고 있는데 느낌과 감정에 관한 새로운 견해를 제시하고 있어서 흥미롭다. 다마지오는 느낌을 항상성과 관련하여 이해한다. ˝느낌은 마음에 표상된 항상성이다. 느낌에 가려진 채 작용하는 항상성이라는 기능은 초기의 생명 형태와 오늘날 몸과 신경계의 놀라운 협업을 이어주는 연결고리이다.˝(15쪽) 느낌에서 마음으로, 다시 마음에서 문화와 문명의 축조로 이어지는 과정에 대한 기술이 흥미롭게 전개될 듯싶다.

나란히 읽을 책은 조지프 헨릭의 <호모 사피엔스, 그 성공의 비밀>(뿌리와이파리)이다. 유발 하라리의 <사피엔스>(김영사)를 읽은 독자라면 그 각론으로 손에 들 수 있겠다. 그리고 리처드 프럼의 <아름다움의 진화>(동아시아)는 성의 진화에 대한 최신의 서술로 눈길을 끈다. 적어도 이 정도는 읽어주면서 여름을 맞도록 해야겠다...

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===

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

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The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

António R. Damásio

3.75 · Rating details · 1,542 ratings · 187 reviews

From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture.

The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. In The Strange Order of Things, Damasio gives us a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it.

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Hardcover, 336 pages

Published February 6th 2018 by Pantheon Books

Original Title

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

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0307908755 (ISBN13: 9780307908759)

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Sejin, start your review of The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

Mar 14, 2018Charlene rated it it was amazing

Shelves: chaos-complexity-emergence, ecology, evolution, decision-making, mindgasms, networks, origins-of-life, philosophy, general-science, neuroscience

This is a hugely important book and one worth reading. Why? Because Damasio has joined the ranks of scientists such as Nick Lane (mentioned in the book) and Jeremy England (not mentioned) who are giving the "modern" synthesis of evolution a much needed update. This update replaces the gene centered theory with a theory centered on thermodynamics. As Damasio outlined in this book, there are 2 approaches scientists are taking when trying to understand the origins of life:

1. Genes first, championed by Dawkins and the like, which suggests genes came first and replicated.

2. Metabolism first, which suggests metabolism predated genes and in fact gave rise to genes. This dethrones the selfish gene (finally!) and paints a more accurate picture of the evolution of every species as yet another way for an organism to capture and circulate energy. Unlike genes first, metabolism first can account for the energy needed to create the molecules of life. Deep hydrothermal vents, which of course do not have genes, provide an acidic environment in which all that H+ acted like a battery, allowing bonds to be broken and made, thus making the molecules of life. RNA world and other gene centered theories simply cannot account for the energy needed to put these molecules and cells together so that evolution of living organisms can get a foothold. Damasio thanks Martin and Lane (and Russell) for their work on this front, as do I because it was paradigm shifting.

Damasio makes his arguments for metabolism first by focusing on the evolution of emotions. I cannot say I was a fan of the second half of the book, which offered a lot of philosophical musings I had heard many, many times before. But the first half of the book was truly exceptional. Damasio argued that feelings have shaped our culture and those feelings have arisen from homeostatic processes that can be traced back to single cells. If anyone can make this argument, it's Damasio's, whose research dominated my neuroscience textbooks. I cannot recall one professor at Penn who was not in awe of his excellent work over the many decades he has been studying the brain. Damasio argued that emotions themselves were a product of the very first hoeostatic processes at work *while* assembling genes at the hydrothermal vents, pre-dating genes. Thus, the evolution of emotions arises from those processes and not from genes. Genes themselves arise from homeostatic processes and not the other way around because homeostatic processes developed before the creation of genes. Homeostatic processes have been passed down through every generation. Genes were merely a way to help these processes occur inside organisms. At the end of the day, homeostatic processes arise because of the second law of thermodynamics. They are a thermodynamic process. Genes were created to aid this process. This process was not created to aid the passing down of genes. The passing down of genes certainly continues to help this process occur in each species, but the gene is a helper, not the star of the show.

As organisms continued to gain complexity, their homeostatic processes in turn became more complex as well. For example, when organisms evolved nerves, their homeostatic processes were regulated via these nerves. As the nerves (brains) became more and more complex, so too did the homeostatic processes that govern those nerve networks. As a result, we all have internal drives. (I cannot think of another scientists who has done more to study internal drives. See Damasio's work on impulse, galvanic skin response, etc to learn more about internal drives and associated brain regions). The internal drives common to population of humans served as the drivers for the very development of civilization. Consider bacteria and criminal justice. Bacteria do not even have nerves; and yet, they engage in punishing non cooperators. It's easy to imagine how this developed into a criminal justice system (flawed or not) in organisms with more complex bodies (namely brains). Other examples are provided about the evolution of punishment, creation, and other aspects of human existence that have helped build all of the civilizations from the beginning of recorded history.

Damasio suggested we take the "static" part out of homeostatic processes because they are anything but static. Rather, they are homeodynamic because these internal states are always active, striving to help the organism maintain the optimal state. Being in that state requires constant internal work that requires a lot of cooperation between cells, organs, hormones, etc -- a very dynamic process. His discussion on this type of cooperation inside organisms was very pointed at the Dawkins minded scientists who still subscribe to the conflict only, selfish gene paradigm. In the end, it is homeostasis and not genes that drive organisms to survive, thrive, and live on throughout the generations. It is this drive that has led to the cultural practices that appear to help global progress that has resulted in longer lives, on average, and will continue to focus on better sustaining the life process.

Damasio could not refrain from talking about the transhumanists who believe they can make an AI that preserves the brains of humans. He suggested they forgot about the fact that the brain had to work with the many microbes (and their homeostatic processes) and other cells inside the body. He, imo, is short sighted in this regard. I can imagine that eventually transhumanists will simply come to understand what role microbes and other cells, and their homeostatic processes, play in governing the brain and body and they will simply incorporate that into their AI. Seems shortsighted to be so confident in ruling that out. Instead, it would have been better to simply list the challenges to current models of AI. For example, being clear that they will need to take the role of microbes into account. That is something missing from Kurzweil's arguments. So it adds to the discussion. Ruling out the possibility that they can incorporate microbes seems far less helpful.

If for no other reason, you should read this book to understand, in great and fantastic detail, the evolution of our senses. Just brilliant.

One last note: Damasio mentioned the work of John Torday, whose work I love. He called him a kindred spirit but barely gave the reader an idea of what Torday's work entails. I highly recommend reading his academic articles on evolution and homeostasis. (less)

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Diane Wallace Awesome review, Charlene!
Mar 15, 2018 05:13AM · flag

Gary Beauregard Bottomley Fantastic review! I bought book based on what you said. I probably would not have discovered it with out having read you review. I'm looking forward to reading it. (less)
Mar 15, 2018 06:22AM · flag

Charlene Thanks!
Mar 15, 2018 09:38AM · flag

Graeme Roberts Thanks, Charlene. I look forward to it. I liked David Deutsch's suggestion, in The Beginning of Infinity, that we should announce each newly accepted ...more
Mar 16, 2018 09:56AM · flag

Charlene Graeme wrote: "Thanks, Charlene. I look forward to it. I liked David Deutsch's suggestion, in The Beginning of Infinity, that we should announce each newly accepted theory as a truck stop on the road to greater k..."

I loved Dawkins Selfish Gene in the 80s, before we understood more about energy requirements for the creation and maintenance of cells. I still think Dawkins Selfish Gene can have some value in helping to explain the continual and transgenerational process of modifying and passing down traits over evolutionary time. It's just that when new evidence filters in from fields like epigenetics or thermodynamics, if that evidence is robust enough, I incorporate that new evidence to broaden my understanding -- because I am not a creationist who continues to hold outdated beliefs in the face of an astounding amount of evidence that suggests I should adopt a new paradigm. Dawkins, just like the creationists against whom he fights, continues to hold tight to his theory as it existed in the 1970s. In fact, for the 30th anniversary addition of his book, he refused to update or incorporate new evidence. It is shocking how much he has in common with the creationists he fights each day. Because he chooses to refuse to broaden his understanding, and more importantly because he bullies anyone who attempts to incorporate new evidence that would broaden their understanding, he has become far more harmful to scientific progress than he is helpful. He is a fossil and should be viewed as such so that he no longer anchors our understanding of evolution. (less)
Mar 16, 2018 01:03PM · flag

Charlene Graeme wrote: "Thanks, Charlene. I look forward to it. I liked David Deutsch's suggestion, in The Beginning of Infinity, that we should announce each newly accepted theory as a truck stop on the road to greater k..."
I love Deutsche's suggestion as well. It is just like when Einstein came on the scene. His new understanding of gravity didn't disprove Newton's theory of gravity. He simply incorporated all the knew knowledge, gained because of the advancement in scientific tools, and came up with a theory that helped our understanding of gravity progress further than what Newton gave us. Einstein's theory itself has limitations and challenges, just as Newton's did. One day we will understand why gravity is so weak, compared to the other 3 forces. It's a process of continual updating. Darwin loved that about science. In fact, when professors refused to update the old theories by incorporating new evidence, Darwin refused to attend their lectures. It drove him nuts. That is why it is so frustrating when Dawkins and others, who purport to speak for Darwin (they most certainly do not), keep anchoring Darwin's theory of evolution. (less)
Mar 16, 2018 01:13PM · flag

Seha Ozgur Great review. Thanks.
Apr 01, 2018 12:29PM · flag

Vinod Soni Great review thanks
Oct 27, 2018 10:43PM · flag

Fassina2 > This dethrones the selfish gene (finally!)

Hardly, the gene doesn't suddenly become irrelevant just because it might not have existed first. The selfish gene is mostly about how genes are much more important than most people think, and how they can influence and explain things that we couldn't previously.

I agree with most of what you said, but the author explaining a theory that's not his and then spending the rest of the book talking about philosophy and far fetched hypothesis he has make this book a 3 stars at most. (less)
Nov 05, 2018 01:06PM · flag

Robert Good review, but how can evolution start without a replicator? More then metabolism first I would say chemistry first, but for the origin of life you need a replicator, maybe not DNA, it could have been RNA or something else but you do need a replicator. (less)
Apr 04, 2019 03:16AM · flag

Øivind Great review Charlene! Looking forward to reading this book.
Aug 05, 2019 07:09AM · flag

Maynard Handley Everything you say may be true BUT: completely unlike Nick Lane, Damasio is just unreadable. He's one of those authors that can make even the most fas ...more
Nov 21, 2019 05:00PM · flag

Elizabeth Theiss Thanks for a thoughtful review. This one goes on my to-read list. As a non scientist, I find that Demasio takes time to read but is so rewarding.
Jan 27, 2021 07:30AM · flag

Mar 23, 2018Erik rated it it was ok

Shelves: nf-biology, read-in-2018

The Strange Order of Things is my first book by Damásio, but it was a bit of a disappointment. It tries to synthesize the entire evolutionary history from RNA-based precursors of modern life over bacterial cultures through human cultures and into the prospects of artificial intelligence through the prism of homeostasis. The word homeostasis appears 200 times in the book, and in the end it seems like a crutch, a sort of modern "soul" that is supposed to explain everything about any living substance. In the end, Damásio argues that artificial intelligence isn't possible because a digital consciousness doesn't have a homeostatic imperative. But what is the fundamental function of homeostasic feelings then? Basically to tell us whether the body is doing well or not:

"Valence translates the condition of life directly in mental terms, moment to moment. It inevitably reveals the condition as good, bad, or somewhere in between. When we experience a condition that is conducive to the continuation of life, we describe it in positive terms and call it pleasant, for example; when the condition is not conducive, we describe the experience in negative terms and talk of unpleasantness. Valence is the defining element of feeling and, by extension, of affect."

Is a binary characteristic that tells the consciousness whether the body is doing good or bad really impossible to emulate in an artificial consciousness?

Over all, then, the argument of the book didn't really convince me. That doesn't mean there isn't a lot of factual information that's valuable, and one thing I especially appreciated was that Damásio has a lot of non-English language sources, which is a breath of fresh air when most of the anglophone world is so insular.

I'd prefer to give 2½ stars, but I lean more towards "It was okay" than "I liked it". (less)

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Mar 22, 2018Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it it was amazing

This book provides an incredibly good way to think about order, origins of life and life. Anytime one can look at a problem coherently from a different perspective one can develop a deeper insight and understand the nature of reality just a little bit better than they did before. For example, I love ‘information theory’ and how it can be used to explain the universe as a paradigm for fundamental understanding of the quantum nature of the universe even to the degree that one of the most famous physicist in recent times, John Archibald Wheeler, would say that ‘it from bit’ explains our universe, that ‘existence comes from information’ (this is not germane to my point, but someday when you have time look up Rule 110 on wiki you’ll be able to understand how a universal computing machine that is Turing complete can come from an incredibly simple algorithm thus leading to a complex universe as ours appears to be) , and that Claude Shannon would show that the second law of thermodynamics (Entropy) can be restated inversely in terms of information theory. (Shannon actually seemed to be a hero of the author of this book).

This book deals with biology more than physics but the author has an alternative way of thinking about biological life arising from chemical processes leading to humans rather than appealing to the standard paradigmatic archetype most of us are already familiar with. He’s going to show how order arises from chaos through homeostasis and metabolism (stealing useful energy from outside of oneself) explains the origin of life and intelligent life.

Spinoza will say and the author will paraphrase him as such ‘everything (both mental and physical) strives (Latin: conatus) to preserve in its being’. In order to do that, the thing in question must steal useful energy (or order) from somewhere outside of itself and it must preserve its nature or it will lose its nature. This is the paradigm the author describes, the homeostasis, the striving (the clinging, the endeavor, the will (that’s what Schopenhauer speaks about, by all means read his Volume I of ‘Will and Representation’, the ‘will to power’ (Nietzsche takes Spinoza’s conatus and Schopenhauer’s’ ‘will’ to come up with this same idea that the author gives except they can’t use those words because they haven’t been codified in their time period)) and the stealing of useful energy from outside of itself thus leading to an increase of entropy in the system as a whole but a decrease in entropy in the thing (the entity).

I’m easily irritated with willfully ignorant people. One of my pet peeves is someone who says that since we weren’t there we can’t possibly know what happened therefore ‘god did it’ (Rush Limbaugh did exactly that the day after Stephen Hawking died and dismissed the ‘big bang’ in his ravings). This book gives a beautiful retort to such stupidity in abiogenesis. Before there were bacteria there were chemical processes. The processes that stayed around and evolved are the ones that reached a steady state with a modicum of homeostasis and metabolic systems at play (and it probably happened in undersea vents. One of the few places on Earth where the energy doesn’t come from the sun. It comes from the radiation left over from the accretion of the earth during its formation).

The author in the first two thirds of the book never just states things. He builds his argument across time and across space. The body develops before the central nervous system in its evolutionary development. Our emotive, temperament and mood happened before our feelings. Our feelings come before our reason both evolutionary and developmentally. A really smart biologist can prove evolution by analyzing the taxonomy of the current living organisms of the now. The fossil record is not necessary for them to prove evolution and its development over time, but the biologist also has the fossil record to make their story even more complete. A neuroscientist, as the author is, also has brain development and processes to add to the equation. This author uses every fact at his disposal in his telling for the development of the self awareness that humans possess.

Logic only preserves truth. It cannot create truth. The feelings we have from our emotive, temperament and mood give us the narrative and the intuition that we need in giving us our self awareness (consciousness) and the story that we end up telling ourselves. Our subjective selves come from our feelings not from our logic based rational selves. (I think all of this is in his book in one way another). He believes our mental states come from our experiences. He even ended one chapter by saying something along the lines that ‘Proust explains it in ‘Swann’s Way’’). It’s too bad he ended that chapter like that because I think Proust had it better than this book does, and also I think ‘How Emotions are Made’ by Lisa Barrett follows Proust more closely and they both wisely stay away from absolute mental states.

I thought the last third of this book never should have been written. He was really out of his depth. He speaks about AI, trans-humanism, camp fires, religion, Adorno, Pinker, Freud and his death wish as expressed in ‘Civilizations and its Discontents’ and many other topics. Matter of fact, I’m currently reading ‘Feminine Law’ and the name and idea dropping between the that book and the last third of this book surprised me in their overlap, but for ‘Feminine Law’ she’s a specialist in the field of psychoanalysis and this author does not seem to be. I can say two nice things about the end of the book, he’s trying to connect his thesis with reality, and secondly he actually predicts the ‘Cambridge Analytics’ and Facebook scandal with incredible prescience.

In spite of the train wreck of the last third of the book, the first two thirds make this book a special find and I would definitely recommend it. (less)

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Mar 26, 2018Mehrsa rated it really liked it

Such a cool and thought-provoking book, but a bit sloppy and unclear. The book explores the role of feelings guiding us through evolution and what the implications are for cultural evolution. I have read a lot of books in this genre so I had to do a ton of gap filling in several sections of the book, but I am not a scientist so I could have used some more guidance when he made some of the leaps he did. The payoff for me was in the end when he challenges Harari and a few other transhumanist ideas about the end of humanity and the inevitability of algorithms taking over. He disagrees, which was comforting. (less)

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May 05, 2018Miles rated it liked it

Antonio Damasio’s impact on my intellectual development would be difficult to overstate. I first encountered his work when I was assigned The Feeling of What Happens for a philosophy of mind course in college. That book fundamentally transformed how I understood myself as a thinking, feeling being, and when I read Self Comes to Mind a few years later, my perspective was embellished further by Damasio’s complex yet accessible presentation of his groundbreaking research on how the body-mind constructs consciousness and identity.

The Strange Order of Things, Damasio’s newest offering, strikes me as less impressive but also more ambitious than those that came before. It feels like a rehashing of Damasio’s older work applied to a new subject, human culture, with varying degrees of success. But it’s still an engaging read full of intriguing ideas, useful information, and fun speculation.

The central tenets of Damsio’s Strange Order are thus: (1) biological homeostasis is the foundation for human flourishing, (2) feelings, when combined with homeostatic imperatives and imbued with valence, provide the basis for the development of human cultures, and (3) cooperation between organisms, which is intrinsic to flourishing and cultural expression, is rooted in nonconscious and ancient biological phenomena. I’ll explain these in turn.

Anyone who has read Damasio previously or is familiar with his research will note his preoccupation with the concept of homeostasis. I’m in no position to judge whether the scientific community has failed to grant homeostasis the attention it deserves (Damasio’s contention), or whether Damasio is merely puffing up his academic hobby horse to make it seem all-encompassing, but either way his ideas on the matter appear valuable. Here’s how he defines the term:

"Homeostasis refers to the fundamental set of operations at the core of life, from the earliest and long-vanished point of its beginning in early biochemistry to the present. Homeostasis is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative, whose discharge implies, for every living organism, small or large, nothing less than enduring and prevailing. The part of the homeostatic imperative that concerns 'enduring' is transparent: it produces survival and is taken for granted without any specific reference or reverence whenever the evolution of any organism or species is considered. The part of homeostasis that concerns 'prevailing' is more subtle and rarely acknowledged. It ensures that life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to a projection of life into the future of an organism or a species." (25, emphasis his)

Damasio later expands on this definition by adding: “One might say that organisms want their health and then some” (45). It is this “then some” that creates Damasio’s Strange Order. Without homeostatic flourishing, the argument goes, the biological sensing and mapping functions that undergird future projection and complex memory might never have come into existence, thereby obviating the development of consciousness, identity, sociality, and the plethora of cultural practices that derive from those qualities.

In order to complete (or at least extend) this picture, we need to also consider the role of feelings and valence in the production of cultures. For Damasio, feelings provide the foundation for mental experience and subjectivity, and, “as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures” (26, emphasis his). These homeostatic “deputies” are charged with three main duties: the generation of motives for intellectual creation, the monitoring of cultural practices and instruments for success or failure, and the negotiation of cultural adaptation over time (15). One of the great strengths of Damasio’s outlook is his insistence that feelings matter because they represent the deep evolutionary wisdom that resides within and emanates from human bodies. This doesn’t mean feelings should always have the final say or that they shouldn’t be subject to critique or revision, but it does encourage readers to realize that our feelings always have something valuable to tell us, even when we choose to ignore or override them. It is the ongoing dance between unbidden feelings that arise in the body and other, more intellectual modes of cognition that produces cultures in all their glory and horror.

Also important is the assertion that feelings are never neutral, but rather imbued with an intrinsic, value-laden property that Damasio calls “valence”:

"Valence translates the condition of life directly in mental terms, moment to moment. It inevitably reveals the condition as good, bad, or somewhere in between. When we experience a condition that is conducive to the continuation of life, we describe it in positive terms and call it pleasant, for example; when the condition is not conducive, we describe the experience in negative terms and talk of unpleasantness. Valence is the defining element of feeling and, by extension, of affect." (102)

The undeniable presence of valence in our palette of feelings reveals that the human mind occupies a “weighted” space––a complex web of value judgments that is essential to and inseparable from our every interaction with objects, ideas, and other organisms. Valence, therefore, is a not only a critical source of cultural expression but also a mediator for cultural critique and augmentation.

Cooperation is another critical component in the creation of cultures. Evolutionary biology has traditionally focused on competition as the primary driver of natural selection, and it has been challenging for cooperation to gain legitimacy as an equally important player in the evolutionary epic. But, in concert with other thinkers in recent years who’ve sought to understand the profound impact of cooperative evolutionary strategies, Damasio puts the lie to the idea that evolutionary success is all about competition:

"The principle is always the same: organisms give up something in exchange for something that other organisms can offer them; in the long run, this will make their lives more efficient and survival more likely. What bacteria, or nucleated cells, or tissues, or organs give up, in general, is independence; what they get in return is access to the 'commons,' the goods that come from a cooperative arrangement in terms of indispensable nutrients or favorable general conditions, such as access to oxygen or advantages of climate…The homeostatic imperative stands behind the processes of cooperation and also looms large behind the emergence of 'general' systems, ubiquitously present throughout multicellular organisms. Without such 'whole-body systems,' the complex structures and functions of multicellular organisms would not be viable." (55)

According to this view, the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation are the groundwork for the complex biological systems responsible for all multicellular activity, including human life and cultures; without the substantial benefits conferred by successful cooperation, the biological complexity necessary for cultural development would be an evolutionary dead end. Further, Damasio claims convincingly that “the emergence of subjective mental states” is a “prime example of cooperation” sprung from the collaborative interactions between different types of cells, tissues and organs (67).

Damasio is careful to avoid anthropocentrism by emphasizing that cooperation took place in evolution long before “minded” creatures were around to conceptualize what was going on. The best example of this is his description of “the convenient treaty celebrated between two bacteria: a pushy, upstart bacterium that wanted to take over a bigger and more established one”:

"The pushy bacterium operates as if concluding that 'when we cannot win over them, we might as well join them.' The established bacterium, on the other side, operates as if thinking, 'I may as well accept this invader provided it offers something to me.' But neither bacterium thought anything, of course. No mental reflection was involved, no overt consideration of prior knowledge, no cunning, guile, kindness, fair play, or diplomatic conciliation. The equation of the problem was resolved blindly and from within the process, bottom up, as an option that, in retrospect, worked for both sides. The successful option was shaped by the imperative requirements of homeostasis, and that was not magic, except in a poetic sense. It consisted of concrete physical and chemical constraints applied to the life process, within the cells, in the context of their physiochemical relations with the environment…The genetic machinery of the successful organisms made sure the strategy would remain in the repertoire of future generations." (235, emphasis his).

This empirically-supportable tale drives home the important lesson that cooperation is just as native to all organisms as competition. Once internalized, this lesson shows us that, at least at the intersubjective level of human consciousness and sociality, we can prioritize cooperative, positive-sum strategies over competitive, zero-sum strategies without feeling that we are somehow balking our evolutionary heritage by positing “unnatural” or “unrealistic” solutions to serious problems.

I doubt that many scientists or science-savvy readers would reject Damasio’s general outline of the biological basis for culture, but what of his comments on culture itself? The third and final part of Strange Order analyzes “The Cultural Mind at Work,” and is simultaneously the most entertaining and disappointing portion of the book. Damasio rushes through a robust list of cultural topics, spending mere paragraphs on subjects that demand their own book-length treatments. Here’s a in-exhaustive list from my notes:

––Creativity
––Religion
––The universal appeal of music and dance
––The algorithmic account of humanity
––The future and limitations of artificial intelligence
––Drug addiction and pain management
––The psychological effects of widespread rapid communication technology
––The dangers and benefits of population diversity
––Education
––Questioning the assertion that we are living through “the best time” in human history
––Ancient Greek Tragedies and Shakespeare
––Altruism
––Profit and greed
––Neuroscience’s tendency to over-favor the cerebral cortex
––The suggestion that modern computational sciences are enacting an odd reincarnation of Cartesian dualism
––Biological systems and neural networks as the original gatherers of “Big Data”
––The next steps for the humanist project

Damasio addresses all these topics and more in less than one hundred pages of text. It’s a pleasurable ride and written with a lot of artistry and passion, but my reaction was mixed due to the lack of detail devoted to each individual topic. I’m not convinced that other readers will necessary have the same problem, and will also admit that I’ve enjoyed this style more in other books (most notably the works of Yuval Noah Harari). Though I disagreed with some of Damasio’s speculations, I never felt like he stumbled into intellectually insupportable territory.

Overall, Damasio manages to put forth a level-headed picture, proving himself neither an optimist nor pessimist about the current state of human civilization. He ends on a responsible and honest note, pointing out that his ideas will need to be revised as new evidence comes to light, and also marveling at how little we truly understand about ourselves and the vast universe in which we are embedded. The Strange Order of Things demonstrates the clear value of combining a scientific mindset with cultural analysis, but also demonstrates the inherent weaknesses of that approach, reminding us of the need for additional perspectives.

This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt. (less)

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Apr 28, 2018Kunal Sen rated it it was ok

I am terribly conflicted about this book. I found the first half interesting, as it provided another piece of the puzzle towards our understanding of how our mind evolved and works. The extra insight it brings in is the idea that feelings, the ability of all living things to have a constant perception of our internal state, plays a very important role in development of our mind, including our consciousness. The author extends this idea not just to humans, where the mechanism has reached a new height, but to all living things, including the most ancient bacteria. Even there, the organism had a sense of its wellbeing through a complex array of chemicals and modified its behavior based on these chemical signals. The author tries to explain that life's most fundamental code of conduct is based on the homeostatic principle, which tries to regulate the system to keep certain wellness parameters within a certain range. In order to do this well, the system uses the "feelings" as the main feedback mechanism.

However, things went south for me as the book entered its later half. I could agree with the argument why we should not subscribe to the view that the mind is controlling a simple mechanistic body, but rather it is the mind+body as a single interconnected entity that is responsible for our behavior and our conscious self-awareness. This view can find support from many observations that we are discovering about the two-way interactions between mind and body. However, then the author claims that since the substrate on which the mind works is so important, there is no substrate-independence, as is believed by many researchers, and therefore it is impossible in principle to construct a "real" mind outside of life processes. That is, artificial intelligence will always be a mimicry of real life, and no matter how convincing the mimicry, it will still not be real.

This is strange leap to take. If the substrate of life is an important factor then why not incorporate that into the concept of the mind? That is, why not define the system as a combination of the brain+body? It is still a system that has to obey the laws of physics and chemistry, and therefore, in principle, be "understandable". He makes another implicit claim that even if we can simulate a process, the simulation is always different from the real thing. I have difficulty accepting this position. To me, ultimately everything in the universe is about information flow, and if a simulation cannot capture all the nuances of the physical system, then it can be improved by making the simulation deeper, going one more level granular. At some level of observation, a simulation becomes indistinguishable from the system it is simulating. The simulation of the human mind can very well require incorporation of the body and feelings, and at some point if we cannot perceive any difference between the simulation and the "real" thing then shouldn't we call it "real"? Not doing so is not a scientific view, but pure prejudice.

I am surprised by Damasio's shallow understanding of the concept of algorithm. He explicitly assumes that algorithms are predictable, and therefore cannot model something as life, which is inherently unpredictable. In this argument he is restricting himself to the most mundane types of algorithms, and ignoring the emergent properties of another class of algorithms whose net output is as unpredictable as any biological system. Here again, he falls into the trap that life is something magical, beyond our full understanding, and therefore simulation.

The author also makes an absurd claim that since it took nature millions of years to evolve the "feelings" system, how dare we think we can do the same in a mere thousands of years. Here he completely missed the point that while evolution is a blind process, depending on chance and relatively long lifespans of the creatures, intentional design does not depend on either, and therefore can go incredibly faster. Moreover, since something is difficult does not make it impossible. The author constantly confuses between difficulty and complexity with impossibility.

At the end of the book he goes into a discussion of what is wrong with the present day society. While I agree with some of his concerns, I don't think he could make a strong case of how that is connected with the topic of this book. It seemed like he is pained by the state of things, and he was a desperate to somehow force that into the book, with very little justification. I am also significantly more optimistic about the future, but that is a matter of taste. (less)

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May 31, 2018Julius rated it it was ok · review of another edition

It pains me to give this book a 2-star rating because I have a great deal of respect for Damasio, and a 2-star rating may be a little harsh. But I can’t help but give it a poor rating relative to two of his other books, in particular: Descartes’ Error and The Feeling of What Happens, both of which I would give 5-stars. The problem with The Strange Order of Things is that it feels like Damasio has very little new to add to what he has already written about extensively in his other books. In addition, the voice of the author of Descartes’ Error was charming, literate, personal and engaging, whereas the author’s voice in The Strange Order of Things is more pedantic and, at times, hectoring. None of this is to say that the book is actually bad, just that there isn’t enough new material in the book to justify a whole new book, in my opinion. Some of the ideas, for example about the sociality of bacteria and of the complexity (and sophistication) of our enteric nervous system, are interesting and definitely worth thinking about. On the other hand, his speculations about the (in)ability of AI to achieve AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) because they aren’t organic, chemical processes, are weak and poorly argued. He may be right, ultimately, but not for the reasons that he used to buttress his argument.

In short: if you haven’t read anything else by Damasio, read Descartes’ Error. If you *have* read some or all of his other books, there’s no harm in reading this, but I’d recommend being ready to speed through vast sections as you go. (less)

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Mar 10, 2019Ben Zimmerman rated it it was ok

I picked up this book because I had read another one of Damasio’s books, Descartes’ Error, which I loved. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed by this work, which seemed underdeveloped, and took a more philosophical tone than the personal and engaging tone of Descartes’ Error.

My favorite part was an interesting section on the role of the brainstem, cranial nerves (particularly the vagal nerve) and enteric nervous system in creating feelings. As a researcher in neuroscience, I can attest that these areas are often overlooked in studies, especially in typical neuroimaging, fMRI experiments. I found Damasio’s speculations about the lack of myelination in the vagal nerve to be fascinating, although I also found it to be a bit underdeveloped. He speculates that this would allow the neurons to communicate at more locations along the body of the neuron and so integrate more complex information, but he didn’t really specify how this would work.

In general, I was often finding myself not being convinced or satisfied with Damasio’s arguments. One of the biggest issues was that “homeostasis” as a concept seemed to be used too haphazardly. He expands the concept away from the idea of just maintaining set points to an idea of an organism striving to thrive. Whereas the first and simpler definition of homeostasis makes it easy to understand machine-like biological mechanisms and feedback loops that could exert drives towards homeostasis, expanding the definition to include a strive to thrive muddles the mechanism, and Damasio never explicitly lays out how it works mechanistically. Secondly, Damasio discusses his view that a subjective perspective, which leads to feelings, is synonymous with experience and consciousness. He assumes that certain types of animals have feelings, which didn’t seem justified to me based on any prior arguments, and I would have liked to see the discussion go into more depth. Later in the book, speculations about the inability of AI to achieve artificial general intelligence seemed weak to me. I couldn’t really grasp the argument, which seemed to rely on the lack of homeostatic imperatives. None of the pieces of the argument to me seemed like impossible hurdles for engineering intelligent systems.
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Jun 11, 2019R Nair rated it did not like it

The first half of the book is fascinating and brings about a unique approach towards scientifically exlpaining the origins of consciousness. The second half of the book drowns the reader in excessively convoluted sentence construction and sweeping statements based on a superfluous, all-encompassing definition of a single biological process.

Homeostasis is the state of unconsciously regulated physical and chemical conditions maintained by living systems, a good example of which is body temperature.
This book attempts to use this concept of homeostasis throughout to identify in a scientific manner how feelings and hence consciousness could have arisen all the way from the homeostatically driven prokaryotic origins of life. This makes the first half of the book truly worth reading. Here are the key points that I could dig out as a basic summary of the first (read: relevant) half of the book.

'…Feelings arose from a series of gradual, body related processes, bottom up, from simpler chemical and action phenomenon accumulated and maintained over evolution.'

...Feelings are the result of operations necessary for homeostasis in organisms such as ours. They are integrally present, made from the same cloth as other aspects of mind. The homeostatic imperative that pervaded the organisation of early organisms led to the selection of programs of chemical pathways and specific actions that ensured the maintenance of organisms integrity. Once there were organisms with nervous systems and image-making ability, brain and body cooperated to image those complex multistep programs of integrity maintenance in a multidimensional manner, and that gave rise to feelings.

...feelings let the mind know about the current state of homeostatis and thus added another layer of valuable regulatory options. Feelings were a decisive advantage that nature would not have failed to select and use as consistent accompaniment to mental processes.

…mental states naturally feel like something because it is advantageous for organisms to have mental states qualified by feelings. Only then can mental states assist the organisms in producing the most homeostatically compatible behaviours. In fact, complex organisms such as ours would not survive in the absence of feelings.' (less)

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Oct 07, 2018Jonathan Hockey rated it it was amazing

For the last few chapters I give this a 5 star rather than an anticipated 3 or 4 star rating, because I think what he has to say here provides potentially a very useful framework for how we can find a reasonable connection between biology and culture in our future speculations on humanity and its place and purpose in the world.

The main arguments surround a few key points:

1) The homeostatic imperative
2) The importance of feelings to monitoring and regulating this homeostatic state
3) The importance of feelings to giving us a sense of value and purpose to our subjective assessments of things.
4) The interaction between the monitoring of feeling states in our own internal organism and our cognitive models of our external surroundings through reasoning to form intelligent cultural responses to our condition.

Here is a good summarising quote from the book:

"This approach would regard the notion that reason should task charge as pure folly, a mere leftover from the the worst excesses of rationalism, but it would also reject the idea that we should simply endorse the recommendations of emotions - be kind, compassionate, angry or disgusted - without filtering them through knowledge and reason. It would foster a productive partnership of feelings and reason, emphasizing nourishing emotions and suppressing negative ones. Last, it would reject the notion of human minds as a equivalent to artificial intelligence creations."

And for the future culture:

"would require upholding human dignity and reverence for human life as nonnegotiable, sacred values; it would also require a set of goals capable of transcending immediate homeostatic needs and both inspiring and elevating the mind as projected into the future."

This whole approach of affective neurobiology is a welcome and refreshing change from the limitations of functionalist accounts, behavioral accounts and those accounts that start from some notion of inherent selfish or self directedness in organisms and expect to contrive a purely procedural or computational strategic solution to moral and cultural human problems from there. This latter is simply not going to work, other than to feed dystopian imaginings. It will not create a viable and healthy long term culture for humanity. Because it ignores the felt subjective experience of human beings and how critical this is to our whole biological and cultural evolution as a species.

Culture is an ongoing negotiation with our own feelings, with others, and with our environments. It is a negotiation with self, other and the world, not merely an exploitation or instrumental manipulation of them. The choice is not the polarised selfish exploiter or the selfless altruist. Both these options in the west ignore your own personal feelings. The choice is a reasonable negotiation between your feelings and the surrounding world that you must be striving to always be aware of. When we can regulate our own feelings in modern cultures much better we will rely less on the instrumental manipulations and technological machinations of a predatory elite group of people, and we can maybe make some steps towards a democracy, not just in name, but in our real lived culture.
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Mar 20, 2019Payel Kundu rated it did not like it

This book is like being cornered at a party by your philosophy department’s biggest blowhard. I was a big fan of Descartes’ Error, which inspired me to read more about Damasio’s work. I’ve always thought of him as a particularly clear eyed, rational thinker and writer. His somatic marker hypothesis inspired so many interesting experiments in neuroscience. Where is that man now? This book was just absolutely the opposite of the impression I had of Damasio before. This book not only taught me nothing, I found it seriously boring. He has completely switched from the conversational but academic tone of Descartes Error to the cumbersome, inexact, self-congratulatory tone of the worst brand of Victorian philosopher. This is the kind of prose we’re dealing with:

“And yet, a remarkable yet, there is a parallel mental world that accompanies all those images, often so subtle that it does not demand any attention for itself but occasionally so significant that it alters the course of the dominant part of the mind, sometimes arrestingly so.”

Translation: There are mental processes you’re not aware of that significantly affect your conscious processes.
The book sounded to me like he confidently began speaking with no structured plan, and continued well after he had lost his train of thought. First, it’s about the startling and novel idea that homeostasis was a major driving force of human cultural evolution. But wait, first we have to totally redefine homeostasis to mean not only maintaining a steady state in physiological systems, but also the things that make an organism flourish. Basically, he argues in this book that homeostasis is the driver of life, from unicellular organisms, to modern humans. Homeostatic urges are expressed via feelings. Thus, feelings are an integral part of our cognition. Thus it is also an integral part of the rise of human culture, as well as our sense of who we are. So homeostasis led to basically everything about humans, and it’s the same drive that drives bacteria to search for food and humans to invent complicated technologies, it links us all together. Upon finishing the book, I just felt a resounding “so what”? It’s not clear to me how this idea of life has useful predictive power.
I guess the biggest problem for me with this book was the sweeping definition of homeostasis Damasio uses (read made up). The last straw for me was the “homeostasis” driven process of “genetic machinery that standardized the regulation of life inside cells and permitted the transmission of life to new generations.” Homeostasis sounds really important and critical for everything that’s ever happened to humans, as long as you extend its definition to include processes as far back as the division of the very first cells on earth.
The clip linked below illustrates well how I feel about this sweeping definition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYyd3...
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Jul 18, 2018Vladimir rated it did not like it

This book is a poorly written, sloppy, pretentious soup. This is the first of Damasio's books that I've had a bad reaction to, most others I've enjoyed, but boy was it a bad reaction! There are some interesting new ideas (as another reviewer pointed out, his approach to evolution, for example), some interesting recycled ones (his view of cognition) and a ton of information that form a piece of a highly intellectually pretentious puzzle that never really fits together.

It puzzles me at all, to be honest, why any one person thinks they can encompass everything from cellular metabolism to human emotional life and culture in one book. Or in their thoughts at all. There is a kind of tremendous arrogance in that. (less)

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Jun 20, 2018Nicole rated it it was ok

The ideas in the book itself are quite valuable thinking points, but I am giving this book a lower rating than expected because 1) the writing style was pedantic and difficult to simplify, and 2) many very important topics at the end of the book were rushed (culture, Christianity, the use of media, education) and Damasio leaves a lot of insurmountable questions to be answered: "Can societies succeed at introducing... an intelligent and well rewarded form of altruism such that it would replace the self-absorption that now reigns?"

The book itself seemed to almost overuse the key word 'homeostasis' - as if the grand idea ties everything together very neatly and thematically. (less)

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May 25, 2018Farha Crystal rated it liked it

Shelves: antónio-r-damásio

It's a story about the evolution of mind and culture through the prism of Homeostasis ( An organism's internal attempt to balance and regulate itself optimally to ensure survival). Homeostasis is common among the simplest creatures. But, when an organism becomes more complex( i.e. nerve cells ), it's homeostasis process turns out to be more complicated. So, a lot of internal cooperation is required to maintain the optimal state. As a result, awareness develops in the process of maintaining cooperation. However, the differences in the form of animal awareness and subjectivity emerge with increasing anatomical complexity. Antoni Damasio assumes no particular neural coordinate for consciousness except that consciousness is a dance among the brain and other bodily systems.

This is my first book by Damásio. I appreciate his argument that feelings are the precursors to subjective consciousness and homeostasis is the process to develop feelings. I also appreciate his understanding of the concept of Algorithms and it's limitations. But, I don't feel satisfied with the last and final part of the book due to the lack of details on miscellaneous cultural topics. Maybe, I should read more of his works. :)
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Dec 20, 2018Michael Huang added it

Shelves: blinkisted

The book started with homeostasis:the body’s need/desire to maintain equilibrium or in stable conditions. It goes on to explain how nervous system help in this process: passing on feelings from different parts of body to the brain. The feeling of the outside world and inside our body go hand in hand. Feelings also drive human innovation (for example to keep temperatures comfortable).

In quite a bit of stretch IMO, the author claims that feelings also explain a lot social problems: we are primarily concern with the individual’s homeostasis. We can’t be expected to suddenly be receptive of other people’s homeostatic needs.

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Jan 27, 2021Bob Nichols rated it liked it

The good parts of Demasio - all his books - are that he is about the biological roots of behavior and resurrecting the world of affect in the Age of Reason.

Demasio argues strongly against the common perspective that there’s a sharp break between biological maintenance functions (food for hunger, water for thirst, shelter for protection, mates for sex) and culture that is the product of the distinctive-exceptional human mind. Demasio says that most of what culture does can be traced back to the basic biological need for homeostasis, a state of the body’s well-being, binarily measured by positive and negative values. Positive is pleasure and negative is pain, along with the intensity gradations between these two poles. Culture inventions and practices are extensions of the need for homeostasis. Thus, for example, agriculture grows food, grocery stores sell it, and we drive there to buy it; research, hospitals and doctors provide medical benefits; water supply systems give us water, and waste management systems dispose our waste. There are also these other parts of culture that are less obviously connected to homeostasis. Religion helps with fear of death and well-being in this life; philosophy and storytelling helps to make sense of a vast, complex world that would otherwise overwhelm. Art, music and dance calm or inspire. These too help us deal with pain, provide us with pleasure, and contribute to homeostatic balance.

While in our need for homeostasis we are one with all of life, only with the emergence of nervous systems does the life of mind begin according to Demasio. Life moves from a non-mental stimulus-response being to, in time, a conscious being where humans can represent the world as idea, place it in memory and draw lessons from the past and project the self into the future. For Demasio, cognition and affect are inherently connected. Whatever the intellect thinks, it is always accompanied by a +/- valence, which is the state of the body’s well-being. This is feeling. Feeling is a consciousness of one’s subjective, homeostatic state. Feeling is lifted out of the body to become a +/-value standard by which the self evaluates what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen. Feeling for Demasio also motivates behavior and provides the direction toward that which provides pleasure or gives pain.

Demasio makes a point that life from its very initiation was a homeostatic structure that brought energy into itself from the outside and that, in turn, this had the advantage of countering entropic forces. And homeostatic structure also had a protective membrane boundary to separate itself from the outside world. This perspective in his view counters a dominant argument that life’s origins lay in replicating molecules. Once DNA was seen as “the molecule of life,” he writes, it by extension became “the molecule of its beginning.” But how, Demasio asks, “could a molecule so complex put itself together spontaneously in the primordial soup?” Demasio is skeptical regarding that possibility, stating that “the likelihood of such complex molecules assembling themselves spontaneously as the last step in the construction of life was low to nil.”

Thus, Demasio believes we are forced into two competing views: “replication first” and “metabolism first.” It’s not that one excludes the other, but rather, the debate is over which came first and was followed by the other. Demasio favors the metabolism option because “in the beginning, it was plain chemistry” that allowed for ceaseless proto-metabolic operations and “internal self-regulation.” For Demasio, all of life, from cells without a nucleus to multicellular organisms such as ourselves, can be defined by two traits: “the ability to regulate its life by maintaining internal structures and operations (for as long as possible), and the possibility of reproducing itself and taking a stab at perpetuating.” It’s as if, he writes, that all of life “were part of one single, gigantic, supertentacular organism….that began 3.8 billion years ago and still keeps going.” This “homeostatic imperative” was followed by the genetic material that increasingly told life how to organize itself and to generate progeny “which is an attempt at guaranteeing perpetuity. That would be the ultimate consequence of homeostasis.” In other words, the biochemical purpose for self-assembly and maintenance at any point in time is now extended to include through time (the perpetuity argument).

While the origins of life question is for the experts, the Demasio argument does raise some questions regarding just how feasible the metabolism-first argument is. For that to work, the first chemicals would have to have formed a membrane, sought energy from the outside, utilized that energy for self-assembly and maintenance, expelled waste, and prevented (via the membrane boundary) hostile energy from destroying the cell. There are, in other words, a lot of tasks to perform in coordination with each other. * In addition, Demasio, in an off-hand fashion, says that the subsequent replication process would be life’s “stab” at “guaranteeing perpetuity.” That raises another question: If homeostasis is life, what does replication have to do with that? Why can't a homeostatic structure just go on and on like the Energizer Bunny. We have a homeostatic being that lives via ingoing and outgoing processes, but where in that statement is there a necessity for replication?

In contrast, the replication-first argument boils the tasks down to one: chemicals replicate themselves, one generation after another in a mechanical fashion, which then became the role of unicellular bacteria. With replication, evolution’s central task is present from the beginning, and then the construction of structures such as cells with their homeostatic functions are added over time to enhance the viability of replication, with mutation and natural selection taking it from there to build other unicellular and multicellular life. In time, this leads to humans as replication vehicles and, in Dawkins’ term, the extended phenotype. While Demasio’s homeostasis engages in seeking and defending activity, there’s no explanation as to why the cell should perform these function. In contrast, with replication, a life force cares only that it becomes itself again and again. It’s one task that over time builds on itself to ensure greater replication success. This becomes the importation of energy via the active seeking and defending that characterizes Demasio’s homeostatic process and life itself. At the very transition then between non-life and life, randomness and chance (somehow) morphs into teleological, purposeful, seeking and defending being that promotes replication success. In addition, the flip side of the “replication imperative” is the need to survive, which in general form, is as good of a definition of life as there is, for lack of survival means there is no replication. And then, of course, with human consciousness, an awareness of death - the death of survival - now necessitates how one can live beyond death. While religion offers an answer, genetic replication offers the scientific answer. This might be a more viable way to look at Demasio’s argument about “guaranteeing perpetuity.”

Well, the technical stuff is for the experts to sort through, but I sense that there could be an undercurrent to Demasio’s account. Replication and survival have been tainted with the “selfish gene” terminology that unfortunately makes life into nothing but self-interested behavior at the expense of others if that is necessary, in contrast to Demasio’s homeostasis model that is filled with cooperative behavior, which is his vision for humanity. But there’s nothing about the Dawkins’ selfish gene theory that excludes cooperative behavior. Somehow, biologists and philosophers put us into this altruism versus self-interest trap that has framed the debate for years, whereas cooperation exists because it’s in the interest of the self to cooperate. There’s no difference between this self and Demasio’s cell and its internal operations. Demasio’s cooperative homeostatic process at the unicellular and multicellular level is, though different in scale, also no different than business people signing a contract for mutual benefit and countries negotiating a pact for mutual cooperation. And, above and beyond these “contractual” transactions, there are the Darwinian social instincts that merge us into the group and make us good tribal members. It’s not for the good of the tribe per se. It is, rather, that being a member of a group was how the self survived.

Beyond “feelings,” Demasio’s treatment of the motivation issue is more or less a stream of consciousness, with a strong bent to see all of life as responsive to stimuli. Thus, it’s the good object and bad object that motivates, but this just begs the larger question which is why do these objects motivate in these ways. Demasio does say that “internal” stimuli involve homeostatic balance but the triggering events are really external, which are then registered as an object that gives pleasure or pain relative to homeostasis. Clearly the cell or the self that defends itself is responding to an outside trigger, but it is responding to an inside need to maintain homeostasis and, thus, survive. Similarly, needs for food, for nurture, for the group, for a mate start from within. Rather than responding, these needs prompt (motivate) seeking behavior. So, clearly, more is going on than what’s implied by reading Demasio’s theory of motivation.

Move back from the object just one step, and get inside of the biological being’s need for homeostatic balance. Now the self and its need for homeostasis lies at the center, with need prompting outward seeking behavior toward objects that can satisfy needs, and outward defending behavior against objects that threaten or harm. Homeostatic need, in other words, is the motive force that pushes the self into the world to bring good objects back into itself and the motive force to keep bad objects outside of the boundary between self and other. Demasio’s pain and pleasure then become something different than his object focus. Pain and pleasure now move from outside objects to internal affect states. Need is Schopenhauer’s pain. Pain is both what the self needs and what it doesn’t need. Need is what moves the self into the world to seek what is good for itself. And, need for homeostasis prompts defensive behavior as well. Any pain state activates energy and moves it outward in seeking and defending behavior. When the self is successful in seeking or defending, there is pleasure. Seeking-defending energy, as motive force, becomes quiescent until homeostatic need arises again, which is pretty much always, save for sleep, rest or death.

Conceptualized this way, Demasio’s overwhelmingly complex world of affect gets reduced to Spinoza’s three “passions”: “Desire” emanates from Demasio’s homeostatic need state: it is a need for, and it is a need not dynamic vis-a-vis outside objects. When there’s satisfaction or success Spinoza’s “joy” becomes Demasio’s pleasure. When there’s no satisfaction or success, Spinoza’s” sadness becomes Demasio’s pain. All other “emotions” for Spinoza are variations of these three, depending on the objects involved or, especially, on the intensity of the feeling involved. But, drawing from Schopenhauer, Spinoza’s three basic emotions can be reduced to just pain and pleasure. Need is pain. Satisfaction of need and successful defense is pleasure. If there is no satisfaction or success, then pain-need remains and the self either re-engages seeking-defending activity, or must endure pain, including irrevocable loss (grief).

This review ends with where Demasio ends up. He sees culture as a reflection of homeostatic balance. This is a great takeaway from this book. But then he goes down an errant path. Because the world as we know it so often is at odds with our homeostatic needs, he says that we must leap beyond ourselves and promote cooperation with others. This is the homeostatic essence. It is the mind over matter thing. Mind takes control and the body follows, but how does this work if the body is not motivated to look out for others? This is, for example, the problem with tribalism and Demasio’s natural cooperative tendencies apply to one’s tribe and one’s allies, but typically stops there because there’s no motivation to go beyond. Demasio assumes that we all can rise up and do the right thing by his standards, but that presumes that everyone sees the world as he does. How do pleas, urgings, etc. to cooperate if one doesn’t care to do so? Is homeostatic need the same for everyone? Well, yes, in the sense that we all look out for our self interest. But that can be achieved just as well by acting at another’s expense as well as cooperating with others. Either approach - "might is right" or "all for one/one for all" - works as a survival strategy. That variability is the stuff of human nature, not uniformity. Pleasure for many is to serve the self and its group only. Pain for many is not to do so.

It’s a war out there between these two approaches to survival. Demasio opts for Pinker and Singer’s ever-expanding circle of care and the lessening of violence toward others. For them, the arc of justice moves ever upward. Progress moves ever forward. It’s Reason. It’s Enlightenment. But an evolutionary approach to ethical being brings with it a certain realism about that arc of justice notion. It’s a circle that goes downward as well as upward, alternating between the good of the whole and the good of oneself/group. It’s the cyclical lesson of history, and each generation has to fight the same battle. The essence remains the same. The only thing that changes is the scale.

*Demasio's counterpoint is that a host is needed before replication, and a host has metabolism. Software (information) without hardware is a parasite (a virus needs a host to replicate; a bacteria does not). (less)

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Dec 28, 2018Martin Henson rated it did not like it

This is not a good book. It starts badly and goes downhill from there. The writing is pompous and some sentences - especially at the beginning of the book - verge on unintelligible (it would seem he wrote it in English - which is not his native language - and this may explain). The best bits of the book cover material which is dead centre in his area of expertise: neuroscience. But overall it meanders across a broad range of deep topics like a hovercraft: barely touching the surface. The central and organising principle of the book is homeostasis - which looked really interesting at the outset, with the strange parallels between ancient colonies of bacteria and human societies. However, the definition is loose and the use of the term - repetitively - throughout the book is almost incontinent. Being loose, it doesn't provide a great deal of conceptual purchase on the material - in other words when it is called upon to do something, it doesn't add anything significant. Perhaps one easy signal of its lack of leverage on the material is to see what happens if you replace it with another concept. For example, on page 195 he discusses the ups and downs of our fight against disease using antibiotics - and the way that the bacteria have fought back. He ends with "Homeostasis knows how to play games of cat and mouse" - but just replace Homeostasis with Evolution - which works just as well, if not better. His liberal use of words in novel contexts is annoying - he came in for criticism some while ago in a book by PMS Hacker on the philosophical foundations of neuroscience - and you can see here why. Sometimes there are scare quotes but often not. He warns against a homunculus model of consciousness - and then promptly speaks in exactly this way. Similarly, when he later gets into rather haphazard ramblings about culture, medicine, AI, algorithms, etc., he finds even his loose definition of homeostasis wanting and introduces a generalised idea for collectives - which he seems first to reject - and then to make use of. The chapters from the one on Culture onwards becoming increasingly annoying as they skate across a broad territory rapidly and with little other than superficial analysis and comment. It is just odd. Among many gems is this "conclusion": "The only reasonable and hopefully viable solution for the problem consists of major civilizational efforts through which, by means of education, societies manage to cooperate around fundamental requirements of governance, in spite of differences, large or small". Forgive me, but this is idle - and would get a laugh during a dinner party conversation (and it is actually not so different from a similar quote I included in a review of Harari's 21 lessons book). (less)

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Aug 02, 2019Tom rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, medical-behavioral-psychology, science

Damasio continues to develop the framework he began in Descartes Error: Emotions, Reason and the Human Brain and continued through three more books (The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain). With Descartes and the changes in thinking associated with the Enlightenment, rational thinking became pre-eminent. Strict logic, when combined with increasing capabilities in mathematics, and now computational power and algorithms is held in highest regard and emotions and feelings were considered to interfere with clear, rational thought and must be controlled. By the mid 20th century work by Tversky and Kahneman made clear that people don’t make decisions this way- even people that are highly educated in the methods of logic. In economics, the so-called rational ‘man’ was shown to be a myth and this has been replicated in other areas such as medical decision making. We are greatly influenced by our feelings (whether acknowledged or not) and context (especially social context). Damasio, drawing on discoveries in neuroscience shows why this might be so and calls for greater recognition and understanding of the importance of affect, emotions and feelings to how we think and the development of cultures.
In this book he begins with an evolutionary approach to how the mind, and culture developed from simpler organisms.
• Early cells had no nuclei (prokaryotes), consisting of a cell membrane, containing chemical elements that maintained the integrity of the structure.
• Later, cells developed nuclei (eukaryotes) and then became multicellular (though he doesn’t mention this, the importance of the cell membrane, with receptors that allowed communication with neighboring cells and the local environment in general is central to this). Multicellular organisms then developed differential functions such as circulatory systems, endocrine functions, digestive functions, respiratory functions etc.
• All of this development was to support the ‘homeostatic imperative’, to maintain the functioning and flourishing of the organism.
• With sufficient complexity, there was development of nervous systems that enabled increased perception and co-ordination of functions. Importantly, according to Damasio, nervous systems were developed to support the organs and systems that maintained homeostatic balance. In both evolutionary and functional terms the nervous system is subservient to these functions rather than the reverse which is the more common way of conceiving of the relationship between the brain and the body.
• Nervous systems of sufficient complexity became able to develop neural maps, both of the internal world and the external world. Neural maps are essential to minds. “We need to note that a partnership of nervous systems and bodies was required to generate human minds and that minds occurred not in isolated organs, but to organisms that were part of a social setting.”p71 When maps are integrated, images become possible. In evolutionary terms, there were three steps to consciousness: 1. Images from the oldest components of the interior-the metabolic processes that maintain homeostasis and eventually fashion feelings; 2. Images from the less ancient components of the interior-the skeletal frame and associated muscles providing information of the encasement of the body, the points where the body meets the external world. It was the combination of the two sets of images that made possible consciousness; 3. The same image making devices made possible symbols to stand for something else e.g. language.
• The physiological functions that maintain the homeostatic imperative, are known to the nervous system as affect. When affect becomes conscious, in Damasio’s framework, it is known as feeling.
• “the immediate causes of feelings include: a) the background flow of life processes in our organisms, which are experienced as spontaneous or homeostatic feelings; b) the emotive responses triggered by processing myriad sensory stimuli such as tastes, smells, tactile,, auditory, and visual stimuli, the experience of which is one of the sources of qualia; c) the emotive responses resulting from engaging drives (such as hunger and thirst) or motivations (such as lust and play) or emotions in the more conventional sense of the term, which are action programs activated by confrontation with numerous and sometimes complex situations…the emotive responses described under (b) and (c) generate provoked feelings rather than the spontaneous variety that arises from the primary homeostatic flow.”p99-100 (italics in original)
• “The circumstances, actual or recalled from memory, that can cause feelings are infinite. By contrast, the list of elementary contents of feelings is restricted, confined to only one class of object: the living organism of their owner, by which I mean components of the body itself in their current state.” P103.
• Feelings can be layered and nuanced.
• Emphasis is made on the fact that the enteric nervous system…the gut… is highly complex, and in evolutionary terms, preceded the central nervous system. It actually consists of 100-600 million neurons, about the same as the spinal cord and it produces 95% of the body’s serotonin. The function of the enteric nervous system is largely under its own control and, although it is constantly exchanging information with the central nervous system, most of this information flow is from gut to brain.
• From these elements, especially the homeostatic imperative and the essentially social influence on it, Damasio, argues that elements of culture arise. “Feelings focused intelligence on certain goals, increased the reach of intelligence, and refined it in such a way that it resulted in a human cultural mind.” P191 “The values that our cultures have been celebrating in the form of arts, religious beliefs, justice, and fair governance have been forged on the basis of feelings.” P203

Like his other books, I found this a challenging one in its details. Though he is a neuroscientist he doesn’t overemphasize the regions of the brain, but focuses on functions and interrelationships.
His framework very nicely puts to rest the error of considering the brain and the body as separate entities. This unfortunate divide continues to dominate in much of our society and in medicine.
I am interested in what other neuroscientists make of Damasio’s model. What does it add or clarify in our understanding of pathology? One small example: if our feelings are influenced in great part by the enteric nervous system which also produces most of the serotonin in the body, what are the implications for mood disorders? Do the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class of antidepressants exert their effect on mood (as far as they do) through the gut? The centrality of the body to thinking ties in with the ideas around embodied cognition and, more distantly, Gregory Bateson’s concept of an ecology of mind, taking into account context. All of these ideas and formulations challenge the concept of the mind as being solely in the brain. For those who are focused on the singularity (the project to store themselves in some future computer database in a quest for immortality), it raises serious questions. If our ‘connectome’ (all of the connections in the CNS) is stored in a computer, our ‘body’ then is replaced by a device. The experience of whatever such an entity is called, would be so different that it wouldn’t be recognizable. How would feelings arise and, if they don’t, is intelligence with judgement possible? (some of these themes are explored in Fall: Dodge in Hell, by Neil Stephenson).

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Feb 28, 2018P Michael N rated it it was amazing

António Damásio presents an astonishing and counter-intuitive yet immediately logical/obvious perspective on how human cultures and civilization as we know it have come about. He argues that homeostasis, manifesting as feelings in multi-cellular organisms like ourselves, is the the catalysts for the responses that started human cultures. The shocking thing is, for all our progress and advancements and separation from the natural order of things etc., underneath it all, we are still at the mercy of processes and systems that date back to the very first lifeforms from billions of years ago.
Damásio does a good job of explaining this surprising conclusion starting from early life, the development of nervous systems and the role they play, all the way to consciousness.
According to the book, consciousness is composed of integrated experiences and subjectivity. The role of feelings in consciousness is in subjectivity - it accompanies the images of the mind - it provides qualia - explains the hard problem of consciousness. This is huge.
Homeostasis is said to provide motives, monitors and negotiators of cultural endeavors and these are the reason for art, religion, moral rules, politics and systems of governance, justice, philosophical inquiry, technology and science etc. - he explains how.
I loved Damásio's take on AI. He doesn't believe that AI can ever be the same as humanity as far as feelings go. His main qualm is that the substrate matters in the case of feelings. There are no algorithms within cells that make up organisms/brains - just proteins, lipids and sugars - not your typical algorithm. That's really something to ponder.
This is a brilliant and eye-opening read. (less)

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Mar 13, 2018Dan Graser rated it liked it

While I applaud Damásio's efforts to make abundantly clear the connections between human culture and consciousness with single and multi-cellular early lifeforms by way of homeostasis, there is very little that is actually new here. He is a very committed author and no doubt an important figure in the psychological and neuroscience fields, however I must say I thought there would be so much more that is new here than there actually was. I agree with the majority of his premises especially as pertains to dated notions of the mind and consciousness, that these functions had precursors in simpler lifeforms, and that they do not reside in one area of the brain functioning independently of the rest of the human body; it just so happens you likely could have heard about these ideas elsewhere. (less)

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Aug 15, 2018VII rated it really liked it

Damasio tries to establish a different narrative for the evolution of humans and their culture basing it on feelings and homeostasis.

If we tried to create a chronology of life's evolution based on this story, we would start from the second law of thermodynamics. Systems tend to achieve stable compositions. When energy flows into a system, we know that things happen. Molecules get organized into more and more complex unions and these complex unions also try to get stability within. I think we can presume that in earth, billion years ago, some configurations achieved this stability and others didn't. Only the first survived. Then some of those who survived tended to stay stable but others tended to try and "flourish", that is, try to consume more energy to get more nutrients and generally get "better" at what they do, maybe even with the help of genes. The latter ones dominated. Then some of them managed to produce offspring in one way or another. Again those dominated.

The above story describes the creation of life. In this narrative there isn't any decisive moment or some big leap that resulted in its creation. How we define life is not a binary choice but a spectrum (all the above is how I understand the creation of life from thermodynamics and I am sure I 'll cringe when I read it again, in a few months or years that I 'll know more about it). But (now coming to Damasio) the above story also describes the establishment of homeostasis, a process than appears to us as a force, similar to Spinoza's conatus. A tendency to try to "flourish". As Damasio says: "The process by which the tendency of matter to drift into disorder is countered so as to maintain order but at a new level, the one allowed by the most efficient steady state". You can imagine it as the compass that guides every living thing. Genes were enlisted for its sake and not vice versa.

But how does it guide them? In simple organisms with chemicals. We can see bacteria that cooperate with each other only when resources are scarce, that "punish" and shun other bacteria even from their own species when they don't contribute to a common cause and that cooperate with different species for a common cause and are ready to abandon their autonomy if they stumble upon a symbiotic relationship. We know that ants build cities, sacrifice themselves for the queen and attribute resources to different tasks as needed. These activities reminds us of ethics, morals and culture in general.

But it's not that, of course. Neither the culture of humans can be solely explained by these instincts that are a result of homeostasis. Humans eventually achieved language and rationality that play a huge role in culture but before that, they developed feelings. For Damasio, feelings are the motives of intellectual creation, the monitors of the success or failure of cultural instruments and participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time. Intellect needs motives and justification and these are provided by them.

So in this narrative there was homeostasis and then with the creation of nervous systems and the ability to map the world with images -both of the self and the environment- feelings appeared as deputies of homeostasis. Then thanks to language and intellect came the minds which are subject to cultural selection also and this completes the picture of the formation of cultures. It's important to stress that even though the nervous system allowed the manifestation of feelings it is wrong to say that the brain is the only thing responsible for them. There is endless simultaneous communication between the brain and parts of the body and all of them are responsible for the feelings.

More specifically about the emergence of feelings and consciousness, his story goes like this: He thinks that after the appearance of nervous systems, the organisms that had them developed the capacity to map the world with images. Up until then, they could sense some property of their environment and react but in a more limited way. With images the organism (or the nervous system) mapped both the external and the internal environment. Then the internal images of the oldest components of the organism, like the circulatory system and the rest of the simple, purely chemical, visceral processes (everything is chemical but this term makes sense for me) resulted in the emergence of feelings. Then the representation of the muscles and the skeleton showed the limits or the house of the organisms and these two processes opened the way for consciousness. Lastly language came to the picture.

Does this story explains the emergence of feelings and consciousness? Are feelings the way that the organism found in order to express its inner workings and is consciousness the way to demarcate what's its based on the images of the muscles and the skeletal frame? It's a question that needs a lot of thought but for now I' ll say it is at least an intriguing hypothesis that is not unreasonable. It accounts both for the private aspect of our sensations and the fact that we can easily be confused about the parts of our body that are ours. We need specific ideas like these instead of lumping everything under generic ones.

So overall an extremely interesting book. Unfortunately it also had another -generic, I want to predict the future- chapter that wasn't worth reading or commenting and that keeps me from rating it with a 5. (less)

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Aug 04, 2021Tom Walsh rated it it was amazing

An amazing work of scholarship. More thought is required, so a more complete review will be written. Here it goes.

A number of years ago I wrote my Baccalaureate Thesis on what I named The Affective Insight.I had been trained in the Aristotelian and Thomistic Schools of Philosophy in the Roman Catholic Seminary. Human Nature was bifurcated into the separate operations of the Body and the Mind. Never the twain would meet.

Being trained for the celibate Catholic Priesthood, all things related to the body were most likely sinful or at least situated on a very low branch of the hierarchy of things to be desired or cultivated. The Seven Deadly Sins lurked behind every tree. But this was the late Sixties, a time of blossoming of the Arts and Bodies of Thought that worshipped the Sensory World and the Joys of the Physical Body and Soul, Sex, Drugs, and Rock-N-Roll. Needless to say, Music, Literature, Movies and Theatre were exploding everywhere. Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury were dragging the Vietnam War-fighting, Grey Flannel Commuting, 1950’s, Protestant work-ethic-driven Middle America into a New Galaxy filled with dancing, flowers, perfume, color and sound. My cassock-clad body was not going to be remain in the Fourteen Century for long.

My Thesis was my Manifesto, my Ninety-Five Theses, my first step in my Rebellion against all that was being force-fed into my Soul and my Understanding of who and what Humans were supposed to be.

We were not just a Mind-Controlled sack of Animal Matter, killing Time before Time killed us, shuffling off this Mortal Coil to bask in the Beatific Magnificence of some Supernatural Being, who would either smile on us or thrust us into Hell, to suffer the Eternal Fires of Damnation. We were a Mind, fortunately capable of Reason and Free Will and, even more fortunately, a Body, full of Sense Organs that made us capable of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting the Beauties of this and any other Worlds we might discover. Music, Poetry, Sex, Herbs, and the other Glories of the Flesh lay before us, begging us to indulge and satisfy what Damasio calls the Homeostatic Imperative.

Here it was, The Affective Insight! The belief that we were not alive only in our heads, but rather in every molecule, neuron, and synapse that made us Human. Every experience, every memory, every moment of our lives, stored throughout our Selves, made us who we were. The consequences would be earthshaking.

No more would we be subject to silly fairytales of our origins or futures. No more would robed magi condemn behavior offensive to gods, no more would goatherd stone tablets define our thoughts and actions. We would be allowed to inhabit one hundred percent of our Personhood, since no particle of our Being would be considered subservient to any other. Every component of Humanity was open to cooperation with every other, a paradigm that we could apply to every aspect of Life. The Ultimate Integration!

I could go on and on, but this is what this book is all about. It shows us that all our thoughts, talents and choices are rooted in the “rationale” used by the oldest, smallest, most seemingly insignificant, microbe in our bodies. The choices it makes, without a Brain, Nervous System or Spinal Cord, that will enhance its chances for continued existence and satisfaction, will be the options it adopts. Not the choices god wants it to make, the choices that work. The most successful choices survive and evolve.

Over the millions of years of Humanity’s existence these choices allowed it to evolve Nervous Systems and Brains, leading to Cultures, Tribes, Campfires, Societies and Politics and the Arts. But the roots are the same as the driving forces that determined the single-celled organism to thrive.

Damasio provides all kinds of biological documentation for this Theory, far more than my intuition or knowledge ever attempted, but his underlying point is similar to what my adolescent gut told me. We are a Whole Being, totally integrating Mind and Senses, evolved to make choices that have the best chance to continue to live and enjoy the World we encounter every day.

I will be reading this book over and over again. Five Stars. ***** (less)

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Feb 07, 2019Christopher Moore rated it really liked it

Antonio Damasio is a materialist. There is no mystical or magical thinking when it comes to the brain. We are in the dark about much of the brain’s operating systems within the human body. There are two choices to deal with the dark. Use what little light you have to inch ahead, careful not to overstate what you’ve found or what it means. The main principle followed by Damasio and other materialists is to caution against turning to some cosmic orb to display the answer, which will invariably be some variation on Douglas Adam’s 42.

In Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things, he guides us through the chemistry and biology of the human species. In Rovelli’s world we are a complex event closer in duration to a kiss than to a mountain. In Damasio’s world, the body and brain are one, unified entity. While our lungs, liver, heart, kidneys have local and specialized functions, and appear to be separate things, in fact they are part of one combined inseparable event in a certain homeostasis state.

I examine the book in this essay: http://culturmag.de/crimemag/christop... (less)

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Feb 08, 2021Jorge Borbinha rated it really liked it

I've seen mixed comments about this book, but I have to say I really enjoyed it.
I didn't find it particular easy to read, and some definitions of concepts are not straight away explained, you have extrapolate what they mean.

However, perhaps as a biologist, this book got me hooked.
How António Damásio considers homeostasis as a driving force of evolution, instead of something leading to a dull uneventful end, is really smart. His views on what are feelings (besides the chemistry/molecules version), how they influence perspective and are readouts of homeostasis states, how they evolved from a simple state to a more mature one with the evolution of living organisms, are very well put.
He ends by looking at how feelings influenced culture, and how culture is again an outcome of evolved homeostasis. He explains, from his point of view, why we try to do good things, why we keep doing bad, and we turned to religion and arts and science.

It's a fairly short book, but it's and intense reading. (less)

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May 15, 2018Timo rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2018-read, 2018-best

First the problems: I had to start and restart this book several times. The author writes very dryly, and I struggled early to be engaged by the topic. I tried reading, then switched to the audiobook in hopes that the narrator would add life to the text. Alas, the narrator was perfectly matched to the monotonous tone of the writing itself.

Still, I persisted.

And I'm glad I did, and hope others will too. The subject matter is extremely timely and relevant to where we are at in our understanding of life and intelligence. The complex interaction between body and mind has been severed for too long, and Mr. Demasio brings us a direct challenge to this idea. Given our head first dive into Artificial Intelligence, Demasio makes a strong case that human intelligence is heavily reliant on substrate; and by extension, all "intelligence" will also be reliant on each particular substrate.

But more than with AI, it's important for us to understand who "Me" is in such a context. We are not just thinking things. We are feeling things too.

I'm glad I made it through. (less)

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Sep 29, 2018chienyu rated it it was amazing

What is life, what is its origin, what are emotions vs feelings, how/why does subjectivity arise, what about the hard problem of consciousness? These are some of the questions that Damásio covers in this book. The understated way in which his hypothesis is being presented here belies its import.

The prime mover of life itself, he argues, lies in the process of homeostasis. This shifts the focus away from the genetic (replicator first) to a more fundamental thermodynamic (metabolism first) theory. Stepping over the issue of where genes came from in the first place (not likely to be extraterrestrial, it turns out).

The explanatory scope of homeostasis, in Damásio’s view, covers life from its molecular beginnings, to the emergence of systems that create art, culture, religion, science, and eventually, artificial intelligence.

Informative and ambitious. The full impact of the book will perhaps be revealed in the future. (less)

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Dec 20, 2018Felipe CZ rated it it was amazing

Extremely interesting book from a portuguese neuroscientist, which shows that we undersestimate the role of feelings in human development. It is not only intelligence what has pushed us so far, but feelings, which can even be found in social behavior. But that can be seen even in simple organisms like bacteria, which will join forces and group together in order to build up a defense against threats or to gain access to resources. So feelings are at the heart of social interactions, they are part of basic life functions and create qualitative experiences, while inspire human culture in all its expressions. And since mutually bemeficial strategies didn't require a human mind, they are rooted in homeostasis, which is the guiding principle behind all life and formed the emergence of feelings, which, when applied to creative intelligence, gave rise to the development of human culture. (less)

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May 15, 2019Jason rated it it was amazing

Homeostasis is the real unsung hero for fostering all terrestrial life and its evolution. Smell, taste, touch, hearing, and vision or feelings and human emotion begot: minds and consciousness, which begot: art, philosophy, religion, morals, justice, organized politics, technology, and science.
Some remarkable new insights into life on earth; especially if you have a background in biology. Really compelling stuff.

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Sep 13, 2021N rated it really liked it

Not the first, and won't be the last, very important book that I read with criminally poor attention.

Clippings
We often end up learning that an emotion is happening not as the triggering situation unfolds but because the processing of the situation causes feelings; that is, it causes conscious mental experiences of the emotional event.

A predictable consequence of processing many images that flow in our minds is an emotive response followed by its respective feeling. Thus provoked, emotional feelings are not quite about listening to the background music of life. Emotional feelings are about hearing occasional songs and sometimes full-regalia opera arias. The pieces are still executed by the same ensembles, in the same hall—the body—and against the same background: life. But given the triggers, the mind is now largely tuned to the world of our ongoing thoughts—rather than the world of the body—as we react to those thoughts and feel the reaction.

The emotive responses to images even apply to the images called feelings themselves. The state of being in pain, of feeling pain, for example, can become enriched by a new layer of processing—a secondary feeling, as it were—prompted by varied thoughts with which we react to the basic situation. The depth of this layered feeling state is probably a hallmark of human minds. It is the sort of process likely to undergird what we call suffering.

The many signs of local disruption and reconfiguration of the state of the flesh are made locally available to the nervous system and gradually mapped, thus contributing their part to the multilayered substrate of the feeling of pain. But simultaneously, the local release and uptake of the opioid molecule helps numb the pain and reduces inflammation. Thanks to this neuro-immune cooperation, homeostasis is hard at work attempting to protect us from infection and trying to minimize the inconvenience, too.

I suspect that life-forms without nervous systems or minds had and have elaborate emotive processes, defensive and adaptive action programs, but not feelings. Once nervous systems entered the scene, the path for feelings was open.

peripheral conveyances related to the feeling process are not of the sort we find transmitting signals from retina to brain in the optic nerve, or bringing signals about fine touch from the skin to the brain using modern and sophisticated neural fibers. For one thing, part of the process is not even neural; that is, it does not involve regular nervous firing along chains of neurons. The process is humoral: chemical signals traveling in the blood capillaries bathe certain regions of the nervous system that are devoid of blood-brain barrier and can thus inform those brain regions directly about aspects of the ongoing homeostatic state.

Myelin is an important conquest of evolution. It insulates axons and allows them to conduct signals at fast speed because there is no leakage of electrical current along the axon. Our perception of the world external to our bodies—what we see, hear, and touch—is now in the well-insulated, fast, and secure hands of myelinated axons. So are the skilled and rapid movements we make out in the world, by the way, and so are the high-altitude flights of our thinking, reasoning, and creativity.

homeostasis, the indispensable apparatus of our survival, along with feelings, the precious regulatory interface on which so much of homeostasis depends, is in the hands of the electrically leaky, slow, and ancient unmyelinated fibers.

Modern myelinated fibers can only be acted on by a molecule at a few points along the axon, known as nodes of Ranvier. That is where there is a gap in the myelin insulation. But unmyelinated fibers are a different story. They are like strings that can be played anywhere along their length. This would certainly favor the functional blending of body and nervous system.

unmyelinated fibers that are aligned side by side—as they are, of necessity, when they constitute a nerve—are allowed to transmit electrical impulses in a process known as ephapsis. The impulses are conducted laterally, in a direction orthogonal to the length of the fiber.

the fibers in the vagus nerve, the main conduit of neural signaling from the entire thorax and abdomen to the brain, are almost all unmyelinated. Ephapsis may well play a role in its highly significant operations. Non-synaptic

Enteric brain should be considered central, not peripheral because 1) has 100-600M neurons, more than spinal cord and 2) ratio of intrinsic (indigenous to this area and works within this structure) to extrinsic (projects elsewhere) is 2000:1, like brain. Works largely independently, and communication with brain is only uni-directional through vagus nerve.

Vaguely localized feeling in gut is because unmyelinated axons promote ephapsis (orthogonal transmission that recruits more neurons, signal amplification).

Close connection between digestion and mood: gut produces 95% of serotonin.

You cut finger, signal travels to brain. 1) not just an alarm light, included is emotive response of pain but 2) pain is felt not in brain but at finger, ie pain-regions are co-active with sensorimotor region that contains map of neurons across body

nonconscious and nonsubjective pain-related and pleasure-related mechanisms, clearly assisted early life regulation in an automatic and undeliberated way. But in the absence of subjectivity, the organism in which such mechanisms occurred would not have been able to consider either the mechanism or the results. The respective body states would not have been examinable.

If you change the substrate of feelings, you change what gets to be interactively imaged and so you change the feelings as well. In brief, substrates do count because the mental process to which we are referring is a mental account of those substrates. Phenomenology counts. (less)

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Feb 24, 2018Jim rated it it was ok

I won this book on Goodreads. I waffled back and forth about how to rate this book, but ultimately decided that the struggles I had with this book outweighed the interesting parts. There are some complex thoughts here and some that really made me think but some ideas and concepts in this book are difficult to comprehend. I like the parts about the human condition, the differences between humans and animals, medicine and artificial intelligence. The chapters about bacteria was fascinating but overall some parts failed to hold my interest. (less)

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2021/10/04

안토니오 다마지오 느낌의 진화 The Strange Order of Things 2017

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

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