Jacques Derrida is the only post-modern philosopher we are considering this year.
The Modern period was "the long 19th century" which is from about 1789 (French Revolution) to 1914 (WWI). The modern focused on the "self" and the post-modern critiques this focus on the "self". The moderns felt we could know the true world, the world as it really is.
The 3rd matter that the moderns considered was the progress of the world. Post-moderns are cynical about the progression f the world. The 4th item that moderns considered was the transcendance of man and post-moderns tend to critique this as well.
Post-modernity transcends disciplines: music, architecture, art, literature, cinema etc.
The impressionists were early post-moderns.
Derrida mentions many post-modernists: Foucault, Lacan, Heidigger, Sartre, Levinas. They critique and deconstruct but they don't offer any alternatives to the moderns. That is not their "job."
RECOMMENDED READING
Marshall - All That is Solid Melts Into Air: the Experience of Modernity - internal critique of modernism, not a post-modernist critique.
Robert Salomon - Continental Philosophy since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (A History of Western Philosophy).
Deconstruction
We started with a brief deconstruction of the book itself. [Sadly, neither Lauren nor I had initially noticed that the cover image was of part of a cat's face with the eye looking at the gazer.]
Foreword - sets out the structure of the book - 2 sections from a 10-hour lecture over 2 days, then a section that he did at the end in response and without preparation. The 4th and last section he wrote several years later.
Starts by wanting to entrust himself with words that are naked, words from the heart. Reading this text, our last text, brought us back to Plato's Phaedrus and its critique of writing and of language.
Pg 3 - Derrida speaks about man being an "animal at unease with itself." What are we uneasy about? Death, purpose of life, consciousness of good and evil within each of us, our shame.
pg 8 - the issue of responding. Reacting is different than responding. Some people (aka Descartes) claim that animals only react and don't / can't respond. This seems patently untrue in just what we can observe ourselves with the animals around us - though Stephen says scientists will deny that animals can respond rather than just reacting. I disagree with this assessment. Even without anthropomorphizing animals, as someone who works and lives with animals daily, it would be hard to deny that animals respond. We don't have to call it by human names (which are just descriptors not absolutes) such as happiness or sadness or grief but it's not just reflex.
Laura asked about Peter Singer and why Derrida doesn't refer to him. He does mention rights of animals on page 88 but he doesn't support this idea. I too found it interesting that he doesn't mention him. I remember reading Singer in the early 1980s so Derrida should certainly have been aware of him in 1997. Singer's thoughts (which have modified since the 1980s) about how we define humans vs animals and what happens if we extend those definitions (and rationales for how we treat animals) to humans that don't meet our criteria (such as the very young, the mentally incapacitated).
Pg 13 - the notion of being "seen" - he speaks that scientists have not been "addressed" by animals. He also begins to make a gender differentiation and groups previous philosophers, all men, as philosophers and theoreticians who have "never been seen that addressed them."
Pg 14 - Derrida speaks about an immense disavowal, of centuries of philosophers ignoring "the seeing animal", the animal that is seen but is seeing, men who have "seen the animal without being seen by it."
pg 15 Derrida goes back to Genesis alot in his analysis of man and animal. In Genesis the animals came 1st and so man "follows" animals. Derrida in the original French is playing with the word "am" or in French "suis". The title is "The Animal That Therefore I am". In French "I am" is "Je suis" and suis has the double meaning of I am and I follow.
pg 19 Derrida is considering Heideggers's assessment of the difference between animal and man and their awareness of the world around them. Man is full of "world" whereas animals are poor in world. Heidegger spoke about being "as-such" which animals lack. pg 142
pg 20 Promethean and Adamic (Greek and Abrahamic) versions of our views of ourselves. Promethean stories are pre-Socratic. Existed at the same time and in 6th c. BC there was "The Great Transformation" - Karen Armstrong has written about this.
pg 25 & 29 - 2 hypotheses
#1 - around 200 years ago we moved from one way of treating animals to another which was a systematic war on animals, he calls it a genocide as it was an attempt to eradicate a gene pool. Bentham was mid 18th c.
#2 Limitrophy - limits are not lines - it's a living thing - things feed it, things sprout from it - we see this man/animal limit fray when we look at dolphins, Great Apes etc Also some people don't match up with many of the defining 'limit' of what it is to be human. The border is porous.
[I think we should consider the border to be a cell membrane rather than a solid wall/border etc - a cell membrane allows movement across it and change and it itself can change].
#39 - pharmakon - to be able to hold to hold to different ideas at the same time - good and bad at the same time - Socratic idea (may have been referred to in the Phaedrus)
Paradox - also to be able to hold 2 ideas that are different in your mind at the same time - for Socrates writing was like this as it was bad as it prevented the normal dialectical aspects of a discussion but it was good as it allowed something to be preserved.
Laura mentioned that Aristotle developed a numerical system to prioritize different values depending on circumstance
pg 54 - "problematize" - making something a problem - Derrida actually wants to re-problematize things - go back to things which the older philosophers (Kant, Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan) considered - and look at where we have come to and re-look and question it all and see what is 'true' - Pos-Moderns want us to question everything, take it all down to essentials and think about them, consider them.
Levinas asked whether animals have a face. He felt they didn't (obviously didn't pay any attention to science)
The 4th section is where Derrida considers Heidegger. "As-such"; difference between stone (no world), animals (poor in world) and humans (world-makers)
Recommended Reading - Frederich Schiller "Letters on an Aesthetic Education"
We had our last session in the GLS reading room and it was nice to have a relaxed and social discussion - admittedly about a very difficult text. I'm eager to continue reading books that have come up this year, connected to our readings - and some of the gaps we didn't get a chance to read like Aristotle and Augustine etc. Though we won't have the weekly deadlines, I think it is still going to be a busy summer of reading.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Derrida: The Animal That Therefore I am
Derrida, Jacques: The Animal That Therefore I am. trans David Wills New York: Fordham University Press, 2008
I had a really hard time with this book. I was looking forward to it as a great way to examine and discuss humankind and our place in the world. I was also looking forward to reading a more modern (or I guess I should say post-modern) philosopher and I've always had a soft spot for French intellectuals - but I was really foundering trying to understand this book and why it was set out (said or written) the way it was. I found it needlessly verbose, too many part sentences and doubling back or repetition or side journeys to something else that made it difficult for me to figure out - or even remember - where Derrida had started the sentence or paragraph or thought. I can't imagine trying to follow this in person - at the Cerisy conference itself.
I think for me to understand this book adequately I would have to sit down and take every paragraph and try to sum it up in my own words and then see where that takes me. Unfortunately I don't have anywhere close to the time to even try to start this.
Looking online to try and understand Derrida a bit more I see that he has been a controversial figure, with some philosophers even denying that he is a reputable philosopher. Some, such as Noam Chomsky, have called him an obscurantist, and right now I am having trouble arguing against that label. I do feel that I need to give him more effort though - I'm not quite ready to throw him out as not worth my time. I am looking forward to discussing him in class and I hope Stephen can provide some guidance on why he writes/speaks this way and what the basis for it is.
He starts out by speaking about being naked in front of his cat and having his cat look at him. Why was he embarrassed or ashamed? Derrida says that some think that "what in the last instance distinguishes [animals] from man, is their being naked without knowing it." pg 4-5 Derrida says this therefore without consciousness of good and evil. For me I have trouble with this last part. Why bring good and evil into it? Yes, humankind has quite often - though not universally - made nudity shameful for some bizarre reason but is consciousness of our nudity what leads to good and evil? I can't think so.
He mentions Montaigne and his cat and it reminds me that I do want to go back and reread Montaigne this summer (I'd like to reread almost all the texts we read this year but there is only so much time and so many other texts to read - it's sort of like travel - I want to go back to places I've enjoyed or which I didn't spend enough time in but there are so many other places to travel to...).
As a post-modernist, French continental philosopher, Derrida is big on exploring the words used. he spent quite some time discussing what we mean by "respond". He digresses into a section from Alice: Through the Looking Glass and I found that very interesting. It made me want to go and read Lewis Carroll as I hadn't realized he had so much in the book. This could be a good summer read.
Derrida says (pg 8) that you can't speak to animals and they don't really reply. It is a tough one - you can't hold a philosophical discussion with a dog or cat but for the more responsive animals (dogs, horses, primates etc) they are very attuned to our communications even if it is more to tone and body language than the words we use. They are responding to our communications though. It's not just reaction (reflex). On pg 11 Derrida speaks about the cat, coming before man biblically (and this discussion seems odd in that he spends quite a bit of time discussing how we can't just say "The Animal" referring to all of non-humankind. There are bigger differences between a trout and a giraffe than between a man and an orangutang. Speaking about the cat coming before man and speaking biblically seems to be putting alot of weight onto a basis that ignores evolution and when man evolved to "man" vs what was happening with various animal species at the same time). From this, the animal being before man in the biblical creation of the world, Derrida goes on to mention that the animal looks at man and has its own point of view (pg 10-11).
One area where Derrida reminded me very much of Montaigne is this habit of writing on a subject and trying to do so logically, with a discussion of what you are basing your assessment or opinion on, going through this somewhat scientifically and then having this "basis" be doubtful sources or at the very least in Derrida's case, sources that I would have imagined he would have spent much of his career deconstructing and discrediting. He seems (and maybe I'm just not getting it) to use the Bible and other such sources (Prometheus myth) as the basis for drawing conclusions to then hypothesize about (and God told Adam that he had dominion over all the animals - therefore the animals were 1st and then God made man 'in his own image' and then told Adam to name the animals and that they were under his dominion). This seems odd to me and even odder is that Derrida will spend pages on the wording of various versions of French translations of Genesis and how they differ and what we can take from the words and I just want to say "But these are translations of a ancient text that itself was cobbled together from millenia of oral story telling. All the wording of a translation is telling me is what the translator might have had in mind or operant when he wrote it." What am I missing here?
Derrida speaks of nudity as passivity, the involuntary exhibition of the self. Again, I have trouble with this. (pg 11) He then goes on to say we could call this denuded passivity "the passion of the animal." Even just rereading this text, to try and flesh out the brief notes I scribbled down while reading, makes me frustrated and irritated by his detours and connections. They just don't make sense to me. From nudity to passion of the animal to Cain and Abel to people following and the colour of someones eyes and then seers and the apocalypse - all this in 3 paragraphs on one page!!
On the same page, pg 12, he speaks about the cat's gaze [at him naked] and says:
One tactic Derrida does which frustrates me the most is begin to say something that seems like I can grab hold of it such as: "Other than the difference mentioned earlier between poem and philosopheme, there would be, at bottom, only 2 types of discourse, two positions of knowledge, two grands forms of theoretical or philosophical treatise regarding the animals." So, disregarding that I didn't pick up on him having mentioned a difference between poem and philospheme, and looking back I can't find what he is referring to; and disregarding that he can't just say "2 types of discourse" and leave it at that he has to elaborate on 2 positions of knowledge and 2 grand forms etc etc - all of this terribly distracting when I'm trying to track down the concrete nugget of what he is saying: 'There are only 2 of something to do with animals" but he doesn't say what those are right away. He starts with saying "What distinguishes them is obviously the place, the body of their signatories" - okay, I don't really know what he means here but maybe when I read the 2nd type of discourse, it will start to become clear, but Derrida doesn't go on to mention the second of his 2 types of discourse. He goes off on those who have seen but never "been seen" by animals, and addressing animals, and then Descartes and his epoch - but then he has to go off on a tangent about the word epoch but he can't say what his problem with the word is, he just has to digress and say it makes him uneasy, and veer back somewhat to his 1st category of signatories and then veer off again talking about "quasi-epochal configurations" and all the while I'm screaming inside saying "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE 2nd TYPE OF DISCOURSE??" and flipping back and forth to see if I missed it - and I"m still not really 100% sure about what the 1st type is, nor what the problem with 'epoch' is and what this "addressing of animals" or being addressed by an animal is. Eventually Derrida wanders back to his 2nd type and says "As for the other category of discourse, found among those signatories that are first and foremost poets and philosophers ..." and I'm thinking wait a minute, I thought the 1st type were signatories, now I have to go back and try and figure out what he means by signatory because I skimmed over that part at the beginning of the small section because I wanted to see what the 2nd type was. On this second type Derrida says that these poet/philosopher signatories are "those men and women who admit to taking upon themselves the address that an animal addresses to them, before even having the time or the power to take themselves off (s'y dérober), to take themselves off with clothes off or in a bathrobe, I as yet know of no statutory representative of it, that is to say, no subject who does so as theoretical, philosophical, or juridical man, or even as citizen. " pg 14.
I read that very small section over and over and I still have no idea what he means, what the point of it is, where is gets us in a discussion about humankind and non-humankind. The 1st kind seems to be the scientists and the second the poet/philosophers but I could have got that in under 20 words. I just don't understand what this confusing, long, complicated, obscure 300+ words added to the discussion. And that is just one page or so of this 160 page book.
Derrida spends a long time discussing, deconstructing 2 translations of Genesis (pg 15-18) and comes back to this repeatedly though the rest of his discourse. He then speaks about how animals have been thought to have sadness or melancholy because they can't speak. This seems very anthropomorphic and anthropocentric and (which I think is, ironically, humankind's biggest sin) to imagine that animals would mourn not speaking when they do communicate otherwise, to assume that our method of communication would be of value to them or coveted by them. Derrida dwells on god giving Adam the power to name animals and that being named gives power (which can be true) and causes us to be invaded by sadness. "Whoever receives a name feels mortal or dying" pg 20 - I don't see this consequence or reaction.
It's funny that Derrida speaks so much about the power God gave Adam when he allowed him to name all the animals but what about the word God, Elohim, Yahweh etc. Who gave that word to God? I guess some people would feel that God gave it to us but ...
On pg 22 Derrida asks "if the animal has time" and notes that Heidegger says that "remains a problem."
I think that I am going to have to come back to this text later, when I've read other texts and what other people have thought. I feel uncomfortable with how inaccessible this is. I understand the need for specialized terminology for things especially when you are dealing with things that aren't part of everyday life. I don't want to call a pair of Gelpi retractors "those reverse tweezer kind of things for spreading open the abdomen, you know the ones with the pointy ends" because that is inefficient and imprecise for my purposes but my difficulty reading Derrida doesn't seem to be so much a matter of terminology as a matter of verbosity, lack of focus and lack of forward motion. I read through the 1st section and through the last section but trying to write about these and to flesh out my scribbled notes is too frustrating because even to try and note down what has bothered me about Derrida takes hours and hours of flipping back and forth to try and tease out a complete thought to even consider, much less understand.
I had a really hard time with this book. I was looking forward to it as a great way to examine and discuss humankind and our place in the world. I was also looking forward to reading a more modern (or I guess I should say post-modern) philosopher and I've always had a soft spot for French intellectuals - but I was really foundering trying to understand this book and why it was set out (said or written) the way it was. I found it needlessly verbose, too many part sentences and doubling back or repetition or side journeys to something else that made it difficult for me to figure out - or even remember - where Derrida had started the sentence or paragraph or thought. I can't imagine trying to follow this in person - at the Cerisy conference itself.
I think for me to understand this book adequately I would have to sit down and take every paragraph and try to sum it up in my own words and then see where that takes me. Unfortunately I don't have anywhere close to the time to even try to start this.
Looking online to try and understand Derrida a bit more I see that he has been a controversial figure, with some philosophers even denying that he is a reputable philosopher. Some, such as Noam Chomsky, have called him an obscurantist, and right now I am having trouble arguing against that label. I do feel that I need to give him more effort though - I'm not quite ready to throw him out as not worth my time. I am looking forward to discussing him in class and I hope Stephen can provide some guidance on why he writes/speaks this way and what the basis for it is.
He starts out by speaking about being naked in front of his cat and having his cat look at him. Why was he embarrassed or ashamed? Derrida says that some think that "what in the last instance distinguishes [animals] from man, is their being naked without knowing it." pg 4-5 Derrida says this therefore without consciousness of good and evil. For me I have trouble with this last part. Why bring good and evil into it? Yes, humankind has quite often - though not universally - made nudity shameful for some bizarre reason but is consciousness of our nudity what leads to good and evil? I can't think so.
He mentions Montaigne and his cat and it reminds me that I do want to go back and reread Montaigne this summer (I'd like to reread almost all the texts we read this year but there is only so much time and so many other texts to read - it's sort of like travel - I want to go back to places I've enjoyed or which I didn't spend enough time in but there are so many other places to travel to...).
As a post-modernist, French continental philosopher, Derrida is big on exploring the words used. he spent quite some time discussing what we mean by "respond". He digresses into a section from Alice: Through the Looking Glass and I found that very interesting. It made me want to go and read Lewis Carroll as I hadn't realized he had so much in the book. This could be a good summer read.
Derrida says (pg 8) that you can't speak to animals and they don't really reply. It is a tough one - you can't hold a philosophical discussion with a dog or cat but for the more responsive animals (dogs, horses, primates etc) they are very attuned to our communications even if it is more to tone and body language than the words we use. They are responding to our communications though. It's not just reaction (reflex). On pg 11 Derrida speaks about the cat, coming before man biblically (and this discussion seems odd in that he spends quite a bit of time discussing how we can't just say "The Animal" referring to all of non-humankind. There are bigger differences between a trout and a giraffe than between a man and an orangutang. Speaking about the cat coming before man and speaking biblically seems to be putting alot of weight onto a basis that ignores evolution and when man evolved to "man" vs what was happening with various animal species at the same time). From this, the animal being before man in the biblical creation of the world, Derrida goes on to mention that the animal looks at man and has its own point of view (pg 10-11).
One area where Derrida reminded me very much of Montaigne is this habit of writing on a subject and trying to do so logically, with a discussion of what you are basing your assessment or opinion on, going through this somewhat scientifically and then having this "basis" be doubtful sources or at the very least in Derrida's case, sources that I would have imagined he would have spent much of his career deconstructing and discrediting. He seems (and maybe I'm just not getting it) to use the Bible and other such sources (Prometheus myth) as the basis for drawing conclusions to then hypothesize about (and God told Adam that he had dominion over all the animals - therefore the animals were 1st and then God made man 'in his own image' and then told Adam to name the animals and that they were under his dominion). This seems odd to me and even odder is that Derrida will spend pages on the wording of various versions of French translations of Genesis and how they differ and what we can take from the words and I just want to say "But these are translations of a ancient text that itself was cobbled together from millenia of oral story telling. All the wording of a translation is telling me is what the translator might have had in mind or operant when he wrote it." What am I missing here?
Derrida speaks of nudity as passivity, the involuntary exhibition of the self. Again, I have trouble with this. (pg 11) He then goes on to say we could call this denuded passivity "the passion of the animal." Even just rereading this text, to try and flesh out the brief notes I scribbled down while reading, makes me frustrated and irritated by his detours and connections. They just don't make sense to me. From nudity to passion of the animal to Cain and Abel to people following and the colour of someones eyes and then seers and the apocalypse - all this in 3 paragraphs on one page!!
On the same page, pg 12, he speaks about the cat's gaze [at him naked] and says:
"seeing oneself seen naked under a gaze behind which there remains a bottomlessness, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive and impassive, good and bad, uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret."Sigh. It's at times like this, when I'm reading something so impenetrable and when I feel that, despite being reasonably intelligent and educated and functional in the world, I need extensive training and background or conditioning just to understand someone's thinking - that I feel like someone in the crowd watching the Emperor parading down the avenue naked and I'm applauding his beautiful clothing and some little boy is going to call out "But the emperor isn't wearing any clothes' and I'll realize that I've been sucked in to going along with what the crowd says is true and worthy and that it is all a sham. I can't help feeling that Derrida is making this all too complex, too "significant", too obscure; that he is spending way too much energy trying to read whole universes into simple words. I don't deny or dispute for a moment that language is powerful, that we assign meaning to words and accept all the baggage that goes along with that, often without questioning it or even thinking about it - and I think it's good to do that, to stop and say 'wait a minute, who says that this means that and therefore automatically must imply this and lead to that' but what Derrida is doing seems way more tenuous than that. I'm only on page 12 and all I have is questions but it doesn't feel like questions to which there are any answers no questions which will help me to any greater understanding of anything.
One tactic Derrida does which frustrates me the most is begin to say something that seems like I can grab hold of it such as: "Other than the difference mentioned earlier between poem and philosopheme, there would be, at bottom, only 2 types of discourse, two positions of knowledge, two grands forms of theoretical or philosophical treatise regarding the animals." So, disregarding that I didn't pick up on him having mentioned a difference between poem and philospheme, and looking back I can't find what he is referring to; and disregarding that he can't just say "2 types of discourse" and leave it at that he has to elaborate on 2 positions of knowledge and 2 grand forms etc etc - all of this terribly distracting when I'm trying to track down the concrete nugget of what he is saying: 'There are only 2 of something to do with animals" but he doesn't say what those are right away. He starts with saying "What distinguishes them is obviously the place, the body of their signatories" - okay, I don't really know what he means here but maybe when I read the 2nd type of discourse, it will start to become clear, but Derrida doesn't go on to mention the second of his 2 types of discourse. He goes off on those who have seen but never "been seen" by animals, and addressing animals, and then Descartes and his epoch - but then he has to go off on a tangent about the word epoch but he can't say what his problem with the word is, he just has to digress and say it makes him uneasy, and veer back somewhat to his 1st category of signatories and then veer off again talking about "quasi-epochal configurations" and all the while I'm screaming inside saying "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE 2nd TYPE OF DISCOURSE??" and flipping back and forth to see if I missed it - and I"m still not really 100% sure about what the 1st type is, nor what the problem with 'epoch' is and what this "addressing of animals" or being addressed by an animal is. Eventually Derrida wanders back to his 2nd type and says "As for the other category of discourse, found among those signatories that are first and foremost poets and philosophers ..." and I'm thinking wait a minute, I thought the 1st type were signatories, now I have to go back and try and figure out what he means by signatory because I skimmed over that part at the beginning of the small section because I wanted to see what the 2nd type was. On this second type Derrida says that these poet/philosopher signatories are "those men and women who admit to taking upon themselves the address that an animal addresses to them, before even having the time or the power to take themselves off (s'y dérober), to take themselves off with clothes off or in a bathrobe, I as yet know of no statutory representative of it, that is to say, no subject who does so as theoretical, philosophical, or juridical man, or even as citizen. " pg 14.
I read that very small section over and over and I still have no idea what he means, what the point of it is, where is gets us in a discussion about humankind and non-humankind. The 1st kind seems to be the scientists and the second the poet/philosophers but I could have got that in under 20 words. I just don't understand what this confusing, long, complicated, obscure 300+ words added to the discussion. And that is just one page or so of this 160 page book.
Derrida spends a long time discussing, deconstructing 2 translations of Genesis (pg 15-18) and comes back to this repeatedly though the rest of his discourse. He then speaks about how animals have been thought to have sadness or melancholy because they can't speak. This seems very anthropomorphic and anthropocentric and (which I think is, ironically, humankind's biggest sin) to imagine that animals would mourn not speaking when they do communicate otherwise, to assume that our method of communication would be of value to them or coveted by them. Derrida dwells on god giving Adam the power to name animals and that being named gives power (which can be true) and causes us to be invaded by sadness. "Whoever receives a name feels mortal or dying" pg 20 - I don't see this consequence or reaction.
It's funny that Derrida speaks so much about the power God gave Adam when he allowed him to name all the animals but what about the word God, Elohim, Yahweh etc. Who gave that word to God? I guess some people would feel that God gave it to us but ...
On pg 22 Derrida asks "if the animal has time" and notes that Heidegger says that "remains a problem."
I think that I am going to have to come back to this text later, when I've read other texts and what other people have thought. I feel uncomfortable with how inaccessible this is. I understand the need for specialized terminology for things especially when you are dealing with things that aren't part of everyday life. I don't want to call a pair of Gelpi retractors "those reverse tweezer kind of things for spreading open the abdomen, you know the ones with the pointy ends" because that is inefficient and imprecise for my purposes but my difficulty reading Derrida doesn't seem to be so much a matter of terminology as a matter of verbosity, lack of focus and lack of forward motion. I read through the 1st section and through the last section but trying to write about these and to flesh out my scribbled notes is too frustrating because even to try and note down what has bothered me about Derrida takes hours and hours of flipping back and forth to try and tease out a complete thought to even consider, much less understand.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Discussion: Damasio and Scarry
DESCARTES' ERROR
We had a good discussion tonight about this text. I think most people enjoyed it and found it contained much to think about. The discussion ranged over many different - but interconnected - topics. We spent alot of time discussing the concept of free will and trying to define free will vs personal responsibility, how does upbringing, brain damage, substance or other abuse etc affect this. We had a good discussion on the value judgments made about brain issues vs other issues. If you have cancer or diabetes or a broken leg there is usually no blame to the person, no negative judgments of their character, no blame whereas with many mental illnesses, we are uncomfortable with this, we may blame them for their illness, for their lack of "willpower". A few people in the class deal with people with mental illnesses through their work, two through social services and one through the prison system and it was good to hear their perspective on these issues.
We also discussed sick cultures and what Damasio might have been referring to in the 1990s when it spoke about sick sectors of American culture. One aspect might have been violence, video games, issues with sexuality etc. Damasio didn't really elaborate on what he had in mind when he included the comment in his book.
We spoke a little about the effects of civilization on humankind and whether we are progressing (continuing to evolve) or whether we are just cycling through variations in human nature.
I didn't take alot of notes as I was guiding the discussion but I thought there was so much scope in this book, especially coming as it does after we've worked our way through the centuries of thinkers who have been wondering about the various roles of passion and reason, our place in the world.
ON BEAUTY AND BEING JUST - by Elaine Scarry
Roberta was scheduled to lead the discussion and had sent out a detailed list of questions she wanted us to consider and how she wanted us to consider them. Unfortunately she didn't make it to the class and so Stephen led the discussion on the areas of the book he wanted to explore. This is the 1st year that the book has been included in the GLS curriculum and everyone found it challenging. It's a deceptively thin book, looks very pretty with its smooth cover, thick coloured end papers and textured paper. I think that most people, especially after having read the very scientific Descartes' Error, were looking forward to a book discussing beauty and its role in human existence. This book didn't really do this adequately for most of us. It was interesting but since none of us have a background in aesthetics or have done any reading in it (except maybe Stephen?) we had trouble with the conceptual level Scarry was writing from.
PART II
Scarry says Beauty was banished from academic world for 2 decades. Political critique was based on:
We had a good discussion tonight about this text. I think most people enjoyed it and found it contained much to think about. The discussion ranged over many different - but interconnected - topics. We spent alot of time discussing the concept of free will and trying to define free will vs personal responsibility, how does upbringing, brain damage, substance or other abuse etc affect this. We had a good discussion on the value judgments made about brain issues vs other issues. If you have cancer or diabetes or a broken leg there is usually no blame to the person, no negative judgments of their character, no blame whereas with many mental illnesses, we are uncomfortable with this, we may blame them for their illness, for their lack of "willpower". A few people in the class deal with people with mental illnesses through their work, two through social services and one through the prison system and it was good to hear their perspective on these issues.
We also discussed sick cultures and what Damasio might have been referring to in the 1990s when it spoke about sick sectors of American culture. One aspect might have been violence, video games, issues with sexuality etc. Damasio didn't really elaborate on what he had in mind when he included the comment in his book.
We spoke a little about the effects of civilization on humankind and whether we are progressing (continuing to evolve) or whether we are just cycling through variations in human nature.
I didn't take alot of notes as I was guiding the discussion but I thought there was so much scope in this book, especially coming as it does after we've worked our way through the centuries of thinkers who have been wondering about the various roles of passion and reason, our place in the world.
ON BEAUTY AND BEING JUST - by Elaine Scarry
Roberta was scheduled to lead the discussion and had sent out a detailed list of questions she wanted us to consider and how she wanted us to consider them. Unfortunately she didn't make it to the class and so Stephen led the discussion on the areas of the book he wanted to explore. This is the 1st year that the book has been included in the GLS curriculum and everyone found it challenging. It's a deceptively thin book, looks very pretty with its smooth cover, thick coloured end papers and textured paper. I think that most people, especially after having read the very scientific Descartes' Error, were looking forward to a book discussing beauty and its role in human existence. This book didn't really do this adequately for most of us. It was interesting but since none of us have a background in aesthetics or have done any reading in it (except maybe Stephen?) we had trouble with the conceptual level Scarry was writing from.
PART II
Scarry says Beauty was banished from academic world for 2 decades. Political critique was based on:
- distracts us from important stuff like suffering, "wrong social arrangements"
- when we make beauty an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object
It's not that beauty wasn't appreciated but rather that it wasn't considered a good enough reason by itself to value something academically. The class didn't agree with a) Scarry's statement or b) that her reasons for this valid. The 3 in the class who had just finished an undergraduate degree did say that they found that universities or faculties tended to become very entrenched on a specific way to do things and all the other ways are denigrated each time a new "fad" comes along - which is not to say that new fads are adopted frequently or easily but rather that academic thinking tends to be quite prescriptive and proscriptive in how their field of study should be studied, discussed and written about.
Our view of beauty may be changing based on changes in the world such as ability to reproduce much beauty much more easily. When you can find images of great works of art on the Internet or buy a decent quality reproduction of art you've seen in any museum shop, it's not as rare as it used to be.
Steve brought up the Pidgin Restaurant in Vancouver's Eastside and the protests against it, protesting against gentrification. He said this fits in with what Scarry said: that the wealthy diners will be gazing out at the suffering poor and this could be harmful to them (destructive); and the beauty of the restaurant and the food may distract society from the 'wrong social arrangements'. The whole argument seems a stretch to me but again, I probably have to think about it a bit more.
"No detailed argument or description is ever brought forward to justify this generalization, yet the generalization has worked to silence conversations about beauty. If this critique or the other critiques against beauty were crisply formulated as edicts or treatises with sustained arguments and examples, the incoherence would be more starkly visible and the influence correspondingly diminished. They exist instead as semi-articulate but deeply held convictions that - like snow in a winter sky that keeps materializing in the air yet never falls or accumulates on the ground - make their daily way into otherwise essays, articles, exams, conversations. Suddenly out of the blue, someone begins to speak about the way a poet is reifying the hillside or painting or flower she seems to be so carefully regarding.
Stephen said that the Heisenberg principle, interpreted to mean that the gaze of a viewer affects the observed object, was adopted by the humanities to say that people's gazes whether this is the male gaze harming a female or whatever, have an effect on what they are observing and that this effect likely is not benign or is actually harmful - at the very least there is an effect.
Elaine Scarry would have spent much time in university environments that constrained value judgments of what is beautiful by wanting to apply notions of patriarchy, prejudice etc
We then moved on to discussions of 'lateral disregard' and how Scarry proposed that when we put our notice to something beautiful, we bring less attention to other related objects. This can lead to problems with over-specialization or fixations about things we admire, find beautiful. This concept carried more weight that some of Scarry's other arguments or propositions.
It was interesting to consider Scarry's references to Simone Weil who was "always deeply somatic: what happens, happens to our body." pg 111 Damasio would, I think, agree with this.
The essentialist who believes beauty remains constant over the centuries and the historicist or social constructionist who believes that even the deepest structures of the soul are susceptible to cultural shaping have no need, when confronting the present puzzle, to quarrel with one another. For either our responses to beauty endure unaltered over centuries, or our responses to beauty are alterable, culturally shaped. And if they are subject to our willful alteration, then we are at liberty to make of beauty what we wish. pg 74
Kant is an essentialist and Hume is a historicist, Hume felt that rights and wrongs change over time, according to conditions, externals. I don't think there is an intrinsic beauty or rather, I think that beauty is very much affected by the viewer (their background, culture, experience, education, mood etc). I think there are some qualities that humans tend to find beautiful such as symmetry etc but the range of things we find beautiful is so wide and varied and the effect beautiful things have on us is also so varied that I can't conceive of beauty being constant.
The discussion made me consider about beauty from the perspective of non-humans. It seems a very human concept and while animals can be interested in many things in all my observations of them I can't think of any time I've thought they noticed or had a any notion of beauty. This thought seems to lead me straight to next week's text which is "The Animal that Therefore I am" which I'm looking forward to reading.
The discussion made me consider about beauty from the perspective of non-humans. It seems a very human concept and while animals can be interested in many things in all my observations of them I can't think of any time I've thought they noticed or had a any notion of beauty. This thought seems to lead me straight to next week's text which is "The Animal that Therefore I am" which I'm looking forward to reading.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Damasio: Descartes' Error
Damasio, Antonio: Descartes' Error; Penguin Books, London, 2005
I'm leading this discussion for the class and I'm also very interested in this book so this blog entry is going to be pretty long. I've been looking forward to this book for several reasons. One reason is the science aspect and including something in our exploration from a modern scientific perspective. The second reason is based on where in our reading list this book is placed - towards the end where we are trying to synthesize what we have been reading and thinking about. It's a big jump from Freud in the early 20th century to Damasio at the end of the century and to Phillips in this millennium but it's great to read works by thinkers who are considering what has come before them and where we are now.
I hadn't heard of this book, nor Antonio Damasio before. The book was written in the mid-1990s and Damasio is a neuroscientist. Born in Lisbon in 1944 but living and working in the USA most of his career. His wife, Hanna Damasio, is also a neuroscientist, and they have frequently collaborated together in their work.
Damasio's premise for this book is that the brain, and more particularly the mind, is not an organ or entity separate from the body but rather intimately connected to and dependent on the body for its integrity. Where some previous thinkers, most notably Rene "cogito ergo sum" Descartes, have felt that the self belongs outside the body proper (either to the mind or to the spirit), Damasio argues that the self is very much a product of brain and body; that the integrity and persistence of the self rely on the integrity of both brain and body and the ongoing communications between the two; and that "mental activity, from its simplest aspect to its most sublime, requires both brain and body proper."[pg xxi)
Damasio's premise for this book is that the brain, and more particularly the mind, is not an organ or entity separate from the body but rather intimately connected to and dependent on the body for its integrity. Where some previous thinkers, most notably Rene "cogito ergo sum" Descartes, have felt that the self belongs outside the body proper (either to the mind or to the spirit), Damasio argues that the self is very much a product of brain and body; that the integrity and persistence of the self rely on the integrity of both brain and body and the ongoing communications between the two; and that "mental activity, from its simplest aspect to its most sublime, requires both brain and body proper."[pg xxi)
In his introduction, Damasio states that both “high-level” and “low-level” brain regions, from
the pre-frontal cortices to the hypothalamus and brain stem, cooperate in the
making of reason. But where we have long thought that reason is separate from passion and feelings (though affected by them, usually adversely), feelings are an important component and tool in rational decision-making.
[I couldn't help but think of Donald Rumsfeld's infamous quote on the topic of 'what we know we know', when he spoke at NATO; not that different from Damasio's but which seemed to confirm a reputation for cloudy political double-speak: "There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know."]
I liked Damasio's view on the limits of science:
Damasio begins his text by recounting the story of Phineas Gage, a railway foreman in 1848 who suffers a severe linear brain injury (from a long narrow metal rod driven through his head from under his left cheekbone and up and out through the top of his skull, travelling dorso-medially and anteriorly). He survived his injury and once he had recovered from the hemorrhage and infection he seemed miraculously intact: could walk, speak, function etc. It was only after his physical recovery that severe and debilitating changes in his personality, his reasoning, his self became apparent and not only apparent but a severe problem for his functioning in society. It appeared that an area of his brain had been damaged that was responsible for very specific functions to do with reasoning and "in particular to the personal and social dimensions of reasoning." (pg 10). Damasio uses this case, and Hanna Damasio's computer reconstruction of which brain areas might have been damaged, as well as modern day cases of patients with similar symptoms to hypothesize what might be going on in several specific sectors of the brain and what this implies for concepts of reason, self, ethics etc
Damasio makes mention of phrenology, which topic has come up occasionally amongst our 19th century authors. I didn't know much about it other than it involved bumps on the head but Damasio explains more in an aside on page 14. He describes it as "a curious mix of early psychology, early neuroscience, and practical philosophy" and was especially influential on the humanities in the 19th c. It's founder, Franz Joseph Gall, had an amazing conception that there were areas of specialization in the brain and he went against the established dualist thinking that separated mind and body. What phrenology has become more known for is the erroneous assertion that there are specific single brain centres for each function and that the power of the function was related to the size of the centre (and which could be assessed via telltale bumps on the skull). A phrenologist travelling through Massachussett in later years wrote about Phineas Gage's accident and concluded in 1882 that the iron rod had passed "in the neighbourhood of Benevolence and Veneration. [...] His organ of Veneration seemed to have been injured..." Much more evocative than ventromedial prefrontal area or cytoarchitectonic areas 3, 1, 2 and Area S2.
While individual areas are important for the various functions of the mind, these functions cannot usually be localized to one single specific site. Most (if not all) brain functions are a result of the interaction of multiple specific areas and systems of the brain. "The mind results from the operation of each of the separate components, and from the concerted operation of the multiple systems constituted by these separate components." pg 15
One characteristic of the patients that Damasio describes is that their brain injury has impaired their ability to make good decisions (which is evident in themselves but even more striking when compared to their personalities, decision-making and rationality before their brain damage). Interestingly, Damasio comments about one patient that these changes seen were not "consequent to a former weakness of character, and they certainly were not controlled willfully by the patient." pg 37 He does not discuss much about other brain diseases or types of injury (other than direct trauma due to direct force or due to stroke) other than glancing references to injury from drugs/alcohol as well as genetic and social influences on the brain but thoughts of fetal alcohol syndrome and child abuse did come to mind. For Damasio's patients, after their brain injury "the machinery for [their] decision making was so flawed that [they] could no longer be an effective social being." He describes patients that are now unable to learn from their mistakes. "It is appropriate to say that his free will had been compromised." pg 38 Later on Damasio refers to the work of Francis Crick and his thoughts about a 'neural substrate for free will' in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. [pg 73] Interestingly these patients, though completely unable to function in society, can have normal IQ tests and function normally on many cognitive tests.
Damasio speaks about diseases of the brain (epilepsy, brain tumour, stroke) vs diseases of the mind (manic-depression or schizophrenia) and the value judgements our culture places on them, where
Emotion has long thought to affect reasoning, usually in a negative way, interfering in 'good' decision making. "As a result, we usually conceive of emotion as a supernumerary mental faculty, an unsolicited, nature-ordained accompaniment to our rational thinking. If emotion is pleasurable, we enjoy it as a luxury; if it is painful, we suffer it as an unwelcome intrusion." [pg 52] This is not to say that emotions can't cause biases that can lead to irrational decisions - where would advertising be if this were not the case?
Damasio discusses the complexity of the human organism (and of the mammalian class as a whole) and how this would have required a more complex brain than one based on simple sensory organs and simple reflexes. What gives us a 'mind' is the ability 'to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought." [pg 89] Images are not only visual but could be olfactory, auditory or tactile.
One odd little item that Damasio brought up again and again was a visual concept for the brain's functional regions of a homunculus or human figure distorted based on the relative "richness" of the area (ie: area connected to lip sensation would be bigger than mid-leg). He ascribes this concept to Canadian Wilder Penfield [pg 72] and brings it up again and again - obviously an early 'provisional approximation' of how the brain works that really bugs Damasio. However he seems to get this quite confused with a concept of a homunculus as a "little person inside our brain perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms" [pg 99] a concept which has nothing to do with Wilder's surgical neuro-mapping. Damasio quite rightly notes that for this intra-brain homunculus to be true, we would have to conceive of an endless nest of Russian Dolls with each brain containing a little human whose brain contains an even smaller human whose brain contains an even smaller ...
Damasio makes a strong case for the importance of the sensory aspects of each organism in their mental functioning and this holds true in humans for their cognitive ability and consciousness. He emphasizes that the innate drives and neural circuits in the brain "intervene not just in bodily regulation but also in the development and adult activity of the evolutionarily modern structures of the brain." pg 110 He is speaking of the experience-driven sections of the brain which are evolutionarily more modern than the "reptile brain" (limbic system and brainstem). We are born with innate sectors of our nervous system responsible for basic life processes necessary for homeostatic regulation such as breathing, thermoregulation, immune system, endocrine system etc. Though these areas are genetically provided to us that doesn't mean they are not influenced by outside factors: environment, nutrition, experiences etc. More than that, these innate drives have important effects on the experiential parts of our brain. This influence is carried out by modulator neurons in the brainstem and basal forebrain over cerebral cortex and subcortical areas. For Damasio it looks a bit like this (pg 111):
REASONING
The purpose of reasoning is deciding and the essence of deciding is selecting a response option. Phillip Johnson Laird put it [pg 165] :
"In order to decide what to do, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide."
Some decisions are instinctual such as jumping out of harm's way, ducking your head from an incoming baseball. Others are exceeding complex involving challenging assessment, moral evaluations and competing interests, judgements of short term and longterm gains as well as probabilities. Descartes separated them into 2 camps: "one outside the body, as a hallmark of the human spirit, while the other remained inside, the hallmark of animal spirits, so separate that one stands for clarity of thought, deductive competence, algorithmicity, while the other connotes murkiness and the less disciplined life of the passions." pg 168 Damasio came up with a somatic marker theory to explain how humans reason out these complex decisions. He suggests that the brain can create stored connections that connect an instinctual response (good and bad) to scenarios or situations. The neural system involved in these markers is "the pre-frontal cortices, which is also coextensive with the system critical for secondary emotions." [pg 180] These somatic markers help us winnow down on possible response options when faced with complex decisions but quickly eliminating several "bad" options from the possible responses, actions or decisions. pg 173. It would also apply to:
Another area Damasio touched on but did not explore to any great extent was the effect of "sick cultures" on normal adult systems of reasoning. He uses the examples of Nazi Germany, Russia (one assumes during the purges) and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia but then makes a vague mention of "sizable sectors of Western society are gradually becoming other tragic counterexamples." pg 179
Damasio discusses some of the neuroanatomy underpinning his hypotheses.
Damasio also evaluated decision-making from an evolutionary perspective pg 191.
Cognitive reasoning processes working at both the subconscious and the conscious level are both necessary for reasoning.
Damasio brings passion and reason together in Chapter 11 towards the end of his book. Feelings depend on a multi-component system dependent on biological regulation. Reason depends on specific brain systems some of which process feelings as well. This seems to connect reason, feelings and the body.
Descartes error was in thinking that the brain was the repository of self, exclusive of the body, in separating the body from the brain. I think therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum. Damasio rephrases this as
Damasio adds a postscriptum with some comments on Ethics and survival. The evolution of ethics would have required several things [pg 261]:
Feelings, along with the emotions they come from, are not a luxury. [...] Feelings are neither intangible nor elusive. Contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts. They are the result of a most curious physiological arrangement that has turned the brain into the body's captive audience.
[...] Were it not for the possibility of sensing body states that are inherently ordained to be painful or pleasurable, there would be no suffering or bliss, no longing or mercy, no tragedy or glory in the human condition. (pg xvii)Damasio goes on to state that "Feelings are the base for what humans have described for millennia as the human soul or spirit." pg xx He asks the series of questions that have engaged mankind (I use 'mankind' deliberately here) for millennia:
How is it that we are conscious of the world around us,
that we know what we know,
and that we know that we know? pg xxi
[I couldn't help but think of Donald Rumsfeld's infamous quote on the topic of 'what we know we know', when he spoke at NATO; not that different from Damasio's but which seemed to confirm a reputation for cloudy political double-speak: "There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know."]
I liked Damasio's view on the limits of science:
I am sceptical of science's presumption of objectivity and definitiveness. I have a difficult time seeing scientific results, especially in neurobiology, as anything but provisional approximations, to be enjoyed for a while and discarded as soon as better accounts become available. pg xxiiI agree with this but what I really agree with is that his follow up statement that this doesn't mean that science is not useful, that where we are now in the state of our knowledge is not of value even though where we [ideally] end up will be somewhere else. As Damasio put it, this scepticism doesn't mean he is not enthusiastic about attempts to improve these provisional approximations.
Damasio begins his text by recounting the story of Phineas Gage, a railway foreman in 1848 who suffers a severe linear brain injury (from a long narrow metal rod driven through his head from under his left cheekbone and up and out through the top of his skull, travelling dorso-medially and anteriorly). He survived his injury and once he had recovered from the hemorrhage and infection he seemed miraculously intact: could walk, speak, function etc. It was only after his physical recovery that severe and debilitating changes in his personality, his reasoning, his self became apparent and not only apparent but a severe problem for his functioning in society. It appeared that an area of his brain had been damaged that was responsible for very specific functions to do with reasoning and "in particular to the personal and social dimensions of reasoning." (pg 10). Damasio uses this case, and Hanna Damasio's computer reconstruction of which brain areas might have been damaged, as well as modern day cases of patients with similar symptoms to hypothesize what might be going on in several specific sectors of the brain and what this implies for concepts of reason, self, ethics etc
Gage's example indicated that something in the brain was concerned specifically with unique human properties. pg 10Among these unique human properties, Damasio lists: "the ability to anticipate the future and plan accordingly within a complex social environment; the sense of responsibility toward the self and others; and the ability to orchestrate one's survival deliberately, at the command of one's free will. " The case Damasio makes for the information we can derive from Gage's situation is compelling, though I gather not non-controversial. I found an article online by Malcolm Macmillan in The Psychologist - UK [Article on Phineas Gage and Descartes' Error - The Psychologist ] which emphatically did not agree with Damasio's assumptions about Gage's injury. If we disregard this aspect, Damasio does go on to discuss patients he has seen and other medical reports from more modern times regarding patients with similar areas of damage or similar symptoms and I do consider he makes a good case - or provisional assumption - about certain areas and functions of the brain.
Damasio makes mention of phrenology, which topic has come up occasionally amongst our 19th century authors. I didn't know much about it other than it involved bumps on the head but Damasio explains more in an aside on page 14. He describes it as "a curious mix of early psychology, early neuroscience, and practical philosophy" and was especially influential on the humanities in the 19th c. It's founder, Franz Joseph Gall, had an amazing conception that there were areas of specialization in the brain and he went against the established dualist thinking that separated mind and body. What phrenology has become more known for is the erroneous assertion that there are specific single brain centres for each function and that the power of the function was related to the size of the centre (and which could be assessed via telltale bumps on the skull). A phrenologist travelling through Massachussett in later years wrote about Phineas Gage's accident and concluded in 1882 that the iron rod had passed "in the neighbourhood of Benevolence and Veneration. [...] His organ of Veneration seemed to have been injured..." Much more evocative than ventromedial prefrontal area or cytoarchitectonic areas 3, 1, 2 and Area S2.
While individual areas are important for the various functions of the mind, these functions cannot usually be localized to one single specific site. Most (if not all) brain functions are a result of the interaction of multiple specific areas and systems of the brain. "The mind results from the operation of each of the separate components, and from the concerted operation of the multiple systems constituted by these separate components." pg 15
One characteristic of the patients that Damasio describes is that their brain injury has impaired their ability to make good decisions (which is evident in themselves but even more striking when compared to their personalities, decision-making and rationality before their brain damage). Interestingly, Damasio comments about one patient that these changes seen were not "consequent to a former weakness of character, and they certainly were not controlled willfully by the patient." pg 37 He does not discuss much about other brain diseases or types of injury (other than direct trauma due to direct force or due to stroke) other than glancing references to injury from drugs/alcohol as well as genetic and social influences on the brain but thoughts of fetal alcohol syndrome and child abuse did come to mind. For Damasio's patients, after their brain injury "the machinery for [their] decision making was so flawed that [they] could no longer be an effective social being." He describes patients that are now unable to learn from their mistakes. "It is appropriate to say that his free will had been compromised." pg 38 Later on Damasio refers to the work of Francis Crick and his thoughts about a 'neural substrate for free will' in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. [pg 73] Interestingly these patients, though completely unable to function in society, can have normal IQ tests and function normally on many cognitive tests.
Damasio speaks about diseases of the brain (epilepsy, brain tumour, stroke) vs diseases of the mind (manic-depression or schizophrenia) and the value judgements our culture places on them, where
diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem. pg 40
Emotion has long thought to affect reasoning, usually in a negative way, interfering in 'good' decision making. "As a result, we usually conceive of emotion as a supernumerary mental faculty, an unsolicited, nature-ordained accompaniment to our rational thinking. If emotion is pleasurable, we enjoy it as a luxury; if it is painful, we suffer it as an unwelcome intrusion." [pg 52] This is not to say that emotions can't cause biases that can lead to irrational decisions - where would advertising be if this were not the case?
Damasio discusses the complexity of the human organism (and of the mammalian class as a whole) and how this would have required a more complex brain than one based on simple sensory organs and simple reflexes. What gives us a 'mind' is the ability 'to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought." [pg 89] Images are not only visual but could be olfactory, auditory or tactile.
My view then is that having a mind means that an organism forms neural representations which can become images, be manipulated in a process called thought, and eventually influence behaviour by helping predict the future, plan accordingly, and choose the next action. pg pg 90This is where Damasio starts to part company from Descartes.
The overall function of the brain is to be well informed about what goes on in the rest of the body, the body proper; about what goes on in itself; and about the environment surrounding the organism, so that suitable, survivable accommodations can be achieved between organism and environment. from an evolutionary perspective, it is not the other way around. If there had been no body, there would have been no brain. pg 90Damasio gives us just a hint of the complexity of the mammalian nervous system and asks "what does all that complexity buy us?" [pg 93] It allows us to acquire strategies for reasoning and thus for decision making. One concept that Damasio relies on is the concept of "dispositional representations". These are the repositories of "facts and strategies" in each our brains of both innate and acquired knowledge about ourselves and our environment. [pg 94]
One odd little item that Damasio brought up again and again was a visual concept for the brain's functional regions of a homunculus or human figure distorted based on the relative "richness" of the area (ie: area connected to lip sensation would be bigger than mid-leg). He ascribes this concept to Canadian Wilder Penfield [pg 72] and brings it up again and again - obviously an early 'provisional approximation' of how the brain works that really bugs Damasio. However he seems to get this quite confused with a concept of a homunculus as a "little person inside our brain perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms" [pg 99] a concept which has nothing to do with Wilder's surgical neuro-mapping. Damasio quite rightly notes that for this intra-brain homunculus to be true, we would have to conceive of an endless nest of Russian Dolls with each brain containing a little human whose brain contains an even smaller human whose brain contains an even smaller ...
Damasio makes a strong case for the importance of the sensory aspects of each organism in their mental functioning and this holds true in humans for their cognitive ability and consciousness. He emphasizes that the innate drives and neural circuits in the brain "intervene not just in bodily regulation but also in the development and adult activity of the evolutionarily modern structures of the brain." pg 110 He is speaking of the experience-driven sections of the brain which are evolutionarily more modern than the "reptile brain" (limbic system and brainstem). We are born with innate sectors of our nervous system responsible for basic life processes necessary for homeostatic regulation such as breathing, thermoregulation, immune system, endocrine system etc. Though these areas are genetically provided to us that doesn't mean they are not influenced by outside factors: environment, nutrition, experiences etc. More than that, these innate drives have important effects on the experiential parts of our brain. This influence is carried out by modulator neurons in the brainstem and basal forebrain over cerebral cortex and subcortical areas. For Damasio it looks a bit like this (pg 111):
- the innate regulatory circuits are involved in the business of organism survival and because of that they are privy to what is happening in the more modern sectors of the brain;
- the goodness and badness of situations is regularly signalled to them; and
- they express their inherent reaction to goodness and badness by influencing how the rest of the brain is shaped, so that it can assist survival in the most efficacious way.
Damasio is firmly against the tabula rasa (blank slate) theory of the brain, that the brain begins with no innate preferences or abilities and that all develops based on environment and learning (nurture vs nature). He supports the idea that we are born with a set of drives and instincts (the least controversial of these being appetite, procreation, care of kin, shelter seeking etc). He also considers that emotions and feelings are central to rationality and are a powerful manifestation of drives and instincts. pg 115
Many of these basic drives are covert and we are not even aware of them but Damasio considers that instincts which "are slightly more complex regulatory mechanisms, involving overt behaviours, let you know about their existence indirectly, when they drive you to perform (or not) in a particular way. pg 116 This could be via a body state (hunger or thirst) or emotion (fear or anger). As our environments become more complex, our survival strategies also had to evolve (and have to evolve) to become more complex. These 'suprainstinctual' survival strategies, the control of "animal inclination by thought, reason, and the will was what made us human, according to Descartes Passion of the Soul." pg 124 For Freud it was the superego (which would "accommodate instincts to social dictates").
For most ethical rules and social conventions, regardless of how elevated their goal, I believe one can envision a meaningful link to simpler goals and to drives and instincts. Why should this be so? Because the consequences of achieving or not achieving a rarefied social goal contribute (or are perceived as contributing), albeit indirectly, to survival and to the quality of that survival. pg 125For those who feel that this debases altruism, love, compassion, free will, by trying to reduce them to neurobiological regulation, Damasio replies that "the partial explanation of complexity by something less complex does not signify debasement."[pg 126] He is postulating
an organism that comes to life with automatic survival mechanisms, and to which education and acculturation add a set of socially permissible and desirable decision-making strategies that, in turn, enhance survival, remarkably improve the quality of survival, and save as the basis for constructing a person. [...] The neural mechanisms that support the supra instinctual repertoire may be similar in their overall formal design to those governing biological drives, and may be constrained by them. Yet they require the intervention of society to become whatever they become, and thus are related as much to a given culture as to general neurobiology. Moreover out of that dual constraint, supra instinctual survival strategies generate something probably unique to humans: a moral point of view that, on occasion, can transcend the interests of the immediate group and even the species. pg 126Damasio also departs from some mainstream thinking in his differentiation between emotions and feelings. For Damasio emotions are the body's responses, changes in "body state" connected to particular mental images that have activated a particular body system (viscera, skin, cardiovascular system, respiratory system, endocrine). Feelings are the continuous monitoring of body changes and "the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle. The substrate of a feeling is completed by the changes in cognitive processes that are simultaneously induced by neurochemical substances. pg 146 It is the juxtaposition of "the ongoing representation of the body with the neural representations constituting the self." pg 146 Damasio writes about the three different types of feelings:
- those based on basic universal emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) and which cause our attention to be allocated to body signals
- those based on emotions that are subtle variations of the basic universal ones: euphoria and ecstasy (variations on happiness), melancholy and wistfulness (sadness), panic and shyness (fear), remorse, guilt, embarrassment, vindication etc. These are tuned by experience
- Background feelings - the body state prevailing between emotions, related somewhat to mood.
A composite, ongoing representation of current body states is distributed over a large number of brain structures (pg 151). There are "on-line, dynamic body maps as well as more stable "off-line maps of general body structure that are dispositional. The background body state monitoring is usually not a focus of attention or even perceived but it contributes to our sense of how we feel and it can move to the forefront of our attention when needed (i.e.: asthmatic attack, visceral pain etc). The right hemisphere is more significant or involved in this monitoring than the left side though regions from both sides of the brain are involved. Studies of patients with injuries involving the sectors of the brain concerned with this continuous monitoring show cognitive defects that suggest that "what does not come naturally and automatically through the primacy of feeling cannot be maintained in the mind."[pg 154] This is another interesting comment of Damasio's, that feelings and sensory inputs are not only necessary for the body state information they provide which is used for rational decision-making but that this afferent information and processing is also important for maintaining this focus and knowledge. Our sense of self is dependent on continuous feedback mechanisms about our pre-existing and current body states. For Damasio, "feelings are just as cognitive as any other perceptual image, and just as dependent on cerebral cortex processing as any other image."
I see feelings as having a truly privileged status.[...] Because of their inextricable ties to the body, they come first in development and retain a primacy that subtly pervades our mental life. pg 159He also touches on superstition. It's a necessary thing for us to make causal links between people and events and certain feelings but sometimes we make the wrong links. "Superstition is based on this sort of spurious causal association" pg 162 This is a really significant weakness in human rationality, our propensity to assign cause to things - to NEED to assign a cause to things - without critical thought. I see this all the time with testimonial-based claims (vs evidence based medicine), with people wanting to blame illness on the water, on something that happened years ago, on rare diseases that do not commonly occur locally.
REASONING
Que chacun examine ses pensées, il les trouvera toutes occupées au passé et à l'avenir. Nous ne pensons point au présent ; et, nous y pensons, ce n'est que pour en prendre la lumière pour disposer de l'avenir.Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670 (fragment 172)
The purpose of reasoning is deciding and the essence of deciding is selecting a response option. Phillip Johnson Laird put it [pg 165] :
"In order to decide what to do, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide."
Some decisions are instinctual such as jumping out of harm's way, ducking your head from an incoming baseball. Others are exceeding complex involving challenging assessment, moral evaluations and competing interests, judgements of short term and longterm gains as well as probabilities. Descartes separated them into 2 camps: "one outside the body, as a hallmark of the human spirit, while the other remained inside, the hallmark of animal spirits, so separate that one stands for clarity of thought, deductive competence, algorithmicity, while the other connotes murkiness and the less disciplined life of the passions." pg 168 Damasio came up with a somatic marker theory to explain how humans reason out these complex decisions. He suggests that the brain can create stored connections that connect an instinctual response (good and bad) to scenarios or situations. The neural system involved in these markers is "the pre-frontal cortices, which is also coextensive with the system critical for secondary emotions." [pg 180] These somatic markers help us winnow down on possible response options when faced with complex decisions but quickly eliminating several "bad" options from the possible responses, actions or decisions. pg 173. It would also apply to:
the choice of actions whose immediate consequences are negative, but which generate positive future outcomes. [...] Willpower draws on the evaluation of a prospect, and that evaluation may not take place if attention is not properly driven to both the immediate trouble and the future payoff, to both the suffering now and the future gratification. [...] Willpower is just another name for the idea of choosing according to long-term outcomes rather than short-term ones." pg 175This discussion extended into a discussion of altruism which could be explained by benefits such as self-esteem, social validation, exaltation and avoidance of guilt and shame. pg 176
Some sublime human achievements come from rejecting what biology or culture propels individuals to do. Such achievements are the affirmation of a new level of being in which one can invent new artifacts and forge more just ways of existing. Under certain circumstances, however, freedom from biological and cultural constraints can also be a hallmark of madness and can nourish the ideas and acts of the insane. pg 177He also discusses intuition, which is merely a covert preselection winnowing down possible options through a biological mechanism, for decisions primarily in the personal and social domains. pg 187-189
Another area Damasio touched on but did not explore to any great extent was the effect of "sick cultures" on normal adult systems of reasoning. He uses the examples of Nazi Germany, Russia (one assumes during the purges) and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia but then makes a vague mention of "sizable sectors of Western society are gradually becoming other tragic counterexamples." pg 179
Damasio discusses some of the neuroanatomy underpinning his hypotheses.
The prefrontal sectors are indeed in a privileged position among other brain systems. Their cortices receive signals about existing and incoming factual knowledge related to the external world; about innate biological regulatory preferences; and about previous and current body state as continuously modified by that knowledge and those preferences. pg 181Categorization is important to humans in their efforts to organize and prioritize information (experiential). The dispositional representations we create are stored in convergence zones in the prefrontal cortices. These contingencies are what make up our individual experience. Bioregulatory and social knowledge tends to be stored in the ventromedial sector while knowledge of the external world (objects, people, space-time, language, mathematics) tends to be located in the dorsolateral regions. pg 182-183 This somatic marker system develops as we age and experience and comes to include symbols of somatic states and what Damasio calls "as-if" loops, circuits that occur solely in the brain (through image generation, representations) rather than a body-brain loop. pg 184
Damasio also evaluated decision-making from an evolutionary perspective pg 191.
- oldest decision-making device pertains to basic biological regulation
- the next oldest decision-making device pertains to the personal and social realm;
- the most recent decision-making process pertains to a collection of abstract-symbolic operations under which we can find artistic and scientific reasoning, utilitatian-engineering reasoning, and the developments of language and mathematics.
It's a great system but it doesn't work perfectly. We don't always make rational decisions, in fact we probably often make irrational decisions. We are easily manipulated by our emotions and our desire to assign a cause to events.
But even if our reasoning strategies were perfectly tuned, it appears, they would not cope well with the uncertainty and complexity of personal and social problems. pg 191Damasio blames some of this irrationality on the influence of biological drives such as obedience, conformity, the desire to preserve self-esteem. Decision-making also requires working memory and attention. He posits that the somatic markers also act as "a booster for continued working memory and attention," [pg 198] saying that the proceedings are energized by signs the process is actually being evaluated, or is progressing. I certainly find this. If I am working on something and I feel like progress is either being made or at least possible, then I'm motivated to keep working. However f I am working at something and feel there is no hope of succeeding, then I lose interest, focus and energy. "Somatic markers which arise out of activating a particular contingency boost attention and working memory throughout the cognitive system. " pg 198
Cognitive reasoning processes working at both the subconscious and the conscious level are both necessary for reasoning.
It seems to take both types of processing for the well-tempered decision-making brain to operate. pg 214The mind derives from the entire organism as an ensemble. pg 225 It depends on mind-body interactions. The body contributes information that is part of the workings of the normal mind. pg 226 Some of this information is what Damasio terms "primordial representations" (bioregulatory information, visceral, skin and musculoskeletal information including proprioception and place in space,. This is the information about the body proper. pg 229 Though these are important (especially evolutionarily), what now dominates are the non-body images. Some of the patients that Damasio discusses suffer from anosognomia, where they are paralyzed but due to the areas of the brain affected, they do not have awareness or cognition of what is going on with their bodies. He postulates that this is because they are relying on old information about their bodies (since the source of new, continuous ongoing information about their body states have been cut off.) pg 237 For Damasio, the self is rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. pg 238 Our sense of self comes from autobiographical information, ongoing information about our body states, categorized facts about ourselves, our preferences, dispositional memories of recent events, plans ("a memory of a possible future"). The self consists of 2 sets of representations: Dispositional
The endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizeable part of the state of self... pg 239as well as the primordial representations (what the body has been like lately - the background body state and the emotional state).
At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up. It is an evanescent reference state. pg 240I got bogged down in his descriptions of the metaself pg 241-243 but when he says that " the neural basis of consciousness, namely the acknowledgement of a biological self imbued with value" pg 244 makes sense to me.
Damasio brings passion and reason together in Chapter 11 towards the end of his book. Feelings depend on a multi-component system dependent on biological regulation. Reason depends on specific brain systems some of which process feelings as well. This seems to connect reason, feelings and the body.
It is as if we are possessed for a passion for reason, a drive that originates in the brain core, permeates other levels of the nervous system, and emerges as either feelings or nonconscious biases to guide decision making. pg 245He then refers to the Faustian contract that has brought progress to humanity. pg 246 One of Damasio's concerns in figuring out the neurobiological basis for feelings is our current "culture of complaint" which pervades the social discourse and also leads to attempts to correct personal and social problems with medical and non-medical drugs. Again he briefly touches on issues of education and children's overexposure and desensitization to violence and its consequences and how it downgrades the value of emotions, but he doesn't go any further on these topics. pg 246
Descartes error was in thinking that the brain was the repository of self, exclusive of the body, in separating the body from the brain. I think therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum. Damasio rephrases this as
We are, and then we think, and we think only inasmuch as we are. pg 248He brings this back to western medicine in its study and treatment of disease; with its divisions or lack of awareness and acknowledgement of the min-body connection. He posits that this is likely a main driver behind the push toward alternative medicines. pg 251
Damasio adds a postscriptum with some comments on Ethics and survival. The evolution of ethics would have required several things [pg 261]:
- A large capacity to memorize categories of objects and events.
- A large capacity to manipulate the components of those memorized representations and fashioning new creations by novel combinations.
- A large capacity to memorize those new creations (anticipated outcomes, plans, the "memories of the future")
Pain and pleasure are the basic drives, the innate drives but they can be modified by education (experience, learning). Pain + annoyance = suffering. The evolutionary advantage of suffering is a a heightened attention and focus on action to avoid negative consequences.
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