The following also has a close relationship with the article I wrote about in 146. The reasons for our our economic systems, in which I attempted to show that basic urges by themselves get us nowhere (except for their obvious immediate satisfactions) and that it is the subsequent embellishing effect of the frontal lobes that lead to enhanced pleasures and pursuits which can then enrich us for life (and also give rise to the arts, science and trade).
Keith Hudson
<<<< VIRTUE IN MIND
New Scientist: Your first major book had you tangling with Descartes, now you've taken on Spinoza. Is this an odd thing for a neuroscientistto do?
I regard philosophy as very important, both in the past but also in the present. Philosophy incorporated all of the sciences, and as new sciences develop they sort of peel off from philosophy. But that doesn't mean philosophy lost its reasons to exist: first, because the continuity of ideas is very important to preserve; second, because the heart of philosophy today is an attempt to reach conceptual clarity, and that remains a needed commodity in science. Of course, one could say that conceptual clarity is exactly what a scientist should achieve anyway, and so there is no need to bring philosophy into the process. However, I think that a dialogue with colleagues whose business it is to find defects in arguments and scrutinise the interpretations and conclusions of scientists is a good thing to have. The collaboration is needed and could be fruitful, but it requires a certain humility on both sides, and open minds. I also believe that a collaboration between neurobiology and other human sciences is most desirable.
So this dialogue could really enrich the world of ideas?
If the dialogue between science and philosophy really gets rich, it has a hope of producing something like the effect Spinoza had on the Enlightenment. It also has a hope of being relevant to how people think of themselves and how they live their lives. People will pay more attention to philosophical issues if philosophy has something to offer to the way you think and conduct yourself as a human being.
Why Baruch Spinoza in particular?
When you think of Spinoza or Aristotle, you see individuals who were thoroughly committed to the problems of the day. Spinoza, for example, throws light on how your mind works and on the conception of nature. But he is also thoroughly involved with issues to do with social and political organisation. One of the most important aspects of Spinoza's philosophy is that it imposes certain ways of thinking about the human being, about freedom, and about how individuals can organise society. You cannot think through Spinoza's philosophy and not demand of yourself that you're going to respect the "other", and that you refuse not being allowed to speak your mind.
So how did you end up going on this pilgrimage to track him down?
It began by coincidence. I had long kept a quote from Spinoza and when I went to check it a few years ago, I started reading around it and could not stop. I found remarkable consonance with what I think today about the neurobiology of emotion, and a beautiful view of the impact of emotion in the world of social behaviour and ethics. Although Spinoza never mentions the brain because so little was known at that time, he was thinking like a biologist and anticipating people like the psychologist William James. So I read everything I could and ended up tracking down the places he had lived in Holland to try to complete the picture of this man.
One of those points of consonance for you lies in Spinoza's idea that "the human mind is the very idea or knowledge of the human body". How does it relate to your ideas?
I too believe that continuous signals from the body to the brain provide a continuous backdrop for the mind. In fact, I doubt we could be conscious in the usual sense of the term if we did not have a backdrop. Body signalling is also the essential substrate for feelings. When we have an emotion we alter the state of the body in a variety of ways, and then we register the resulting changes in the brain's body maps and feel the emotions. Emotions come first, feelings second.
It's a shocking thought for many people that emotion precedes feeling....
My view is that the substance of feelings, the heart of feelings, is really a perception of what has changed in our organism, in our bodies during an emotion. Emotions are unlearned responses to certain classes of stimuli. We are equipped to have emotions, thanks to evolution. When we emote we alter the state of the organism in a rather profound manner -- the internal milieu, the viscera, the musculature -- and we behave in a particular way. The collection of these changes is the emotion, a rather public affair which helps us deal with a threat (think of fear) or with an opportunity (eat or drink or mate). Feelings are the perception of these changes together with the perception of the object or situation that gave rise to the emotion in the first place. In essence, this is James's idea, although Spinoza envisioned something similar. James was attacked for this proposal.
So how does your view differ?
My view is that we do not need to have huge changes in the body itself, at least not all the time. Rather, we can have direct changes in the maps of the body within the brain. Those maps are constantly looking at the whole organism, surveying what is going on in the viscera, in the internal milieu chemically, in the musculoskeletal system, in the vestibular system and so on. However, we can bypass the whole body altogether and have, say, the pre-frontal cortex or the amygdala change the state of the body maps directly. In those circumstances, a very rapid alteration of the mapping of the organism can be achieved, which may, to a certain extent, falsify what is really going on the organism. I proposed this mechanism of feeling in the early 1990s -- the as-if-body-mechanism. Now we have plenty of evidence for this mechanism: for example, the discovery of "mirror neurons" shows that we can construct a very complex model of the body inside our brain, an internal model of our organism actually, and that we manipulate that model for a variety of purposes.
It's all very well basing feeling and emotion in maps of the body. But suppose I have some pretty upset feelings about what the boss is going to do to my budget. Are you suggesting I would be feeling this through my body rather than just cognitively wanting to hit him?
Yes. If there were no change in your body maps, I doubt whether you would feel anything. The word "feeling" would not apply. In reality, we don't separate emotion from cognition like layers in a cake. Emotion is in the loop of reason all the time. We have inherited an incredibly complex emotional apparatus which, in evolution, was tied to certain classes of objects and situations that were fairly narrow -- things that were threatening, that could cause anger or trigger compassion, shame or embarrassment. But now we have added to that repertoire of emotional triggers many other objects and situations we have learned in our lives, so we do have the possibility of responding emotively to all sorts of situations, like your budget deficit.
So how does that work?
As you imagine good and bad situations, whatever you imagine is actually creating an emotional state and feeling states that accompany it, like a choir singing on the side and singing underneath the score. We cannot have much in the way of ideas that are purely "cognitive" without having accompanying emotions and feelings. They are just there all the time.
Is this where neuroscience supports Spinoza's ideas that the human mind consists of images and mental representations of the body?
Yes, and our studies enable some of these processes to be teased apart.
Which are the most important patient groups in your studies?
One important group is patients with bilateral damage to the amygdala, who as a result have an inability to experience fear. Because they do not have the emotion of fear, they do not feel fear. They also cannot recognise fear in the facial expression of others.
What did you learn from other patients?
There are other patients who show damage in the very maps of the brain where we are postulating feelings must arise from, and lo and behold, you can get the strange situation of having patients who emote and yet do not have the proper feeling related to their emotion, which suggests that in fact there is a breakdown in body mapping. Patients with damage to the ventromedial frontal lobe have problems with another class of emotion, the social emotions: shame, embarrassment, guilt, compassion, a sense of moral indignation. Damage to this region of the brain can interfere with decision making.
In what way?
Those patients treat the world in a very unemotionally marked way. So even if they have to make a decision that is rather simple -- do we go out for lunch or do we stay in -- they cannot decide rapidly and reasonably but will argue the pros and cons, especially if they are intelligent. They will say: "Ah, going out is a nice idea because actually the weather is very nice. However, many people must be out today so the restaurants must be full because the weather is so good, so maybe we should stay in. But if we stay in we do not have the food, so we would probably have to order in, then there would be a lot of delay anyway, so maybe we should go out. Or should we?"
How long would this go on for?
The answer is probably between never and a long time. The patients lose the reasonableness of deciding, they lose common sense, and are totally immersed in this fruitless analysis. And this points to what I think emotion contributes to decision making, covertly or overtly, which is to make some options immediately endorsable or immediately rejectable. Which, of course, means that in our decision making we use the facts that come from general knowledge and our prior emotional experience of similar situations, namely, the reward or punishment associated with similar situations in the past.
What happens then?
You have all these nice biasing mechanisms that are helping your navigation and speeding things up for you. They are really the baggage of your experience of a variety of situations, good, bad, indifferent, valuable and trivial. This is not separable from emotion because all of your experiences occur in an emotion-full world. The point is, we do not live in a neutral world. Our experiences are always emotionally loaded and we make use of that experience. And if we lose our ventromedial frontal lobe, we are suddenly deprived of the baggage of our emotional experience and we are in trouble. And this points to something interesting: since we are a little bit at the mercy of our emotions, it also means that the way we cultivate the connection of emotions to different contents is quite critical.
That's very interesting....
It's an interesting idea because that is where the environment comes in so powerfully, some people say: "Oh, so you're saying that our decisions are at the mercy of emotions and of course emotions came to use via evolution and genes, and so we are over-determined." The reasoning is absurd, because even if it is true that emotions are planted in us by evolution, the way we have cultivated our relations with the world depends entirely on how we were educated or our family ideals or the social environment, and of course we can end up being Mother Theresa or some bad guy.
How did Spinoza live out the virtuous life? Hadn't he turned away from God?
He had the most amazing life, packed into only 44 years. He clashed with everyone. His free thinking led him to be excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. An attempt was made to kill him; only his thick cloak saved him from the knife thrust. And his books were banned long after he died. Spinoza did have a God but not one conceived in the image of humans. For him, God is nature. You cannot pray to Spinoza's God and you need not fear Him because He will not punish you. What you should fear is your own behaviour. When you fail to be less than kind to others, you punish yourself, there and then, and deny yourself the opportunity to achieve inner peace and happiness, there and then.
How does this connect to neurobiology?
Spinoza's salvation is about repeated occasions of the kind of happiness that cumulatively, make for a healthy mental condition. The Spinoza solution also asks the individual to attempt a break between the stimuli that can trigger negative emotions -- passions such as fear, anger, jealousy -- and the very mechanisms that enact emotion. The individual should substitute those emotionally competent stimuli that are capable of triggering positive, nourishing emotions. Spinoza's solution hinges on the mind's power over the emotional process.
Was Spinoza truly content? Could you live that way?
Despite all the difficulties he faced, Spinoza survived in a quiet, noble way. I admire that tremendously because I don't think that I could live that way. I believe that in a way he lived a contented life. I have always thought you can draw tremendous pleasure from intellectual pursuits, and that is probably how he achieved contentment.
>>>>
New Scientist -- 8 November 2003
Antonio Damasio was born in Portugal, completed his medical degree and doctorate at the University of Lisbon, and moved to the US in 1976 to pursue his work in cognitive neuroscience. He is now Van Allen Distinguished Professor and head of the neurology Department at the University of Iowa Colelge of medecine, and adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. His everyday work as a neuroscientist working with people with damaged brains and his humanist perspective are equally crucial to the ideas he explores in Descartes' Error, The Feeling of What Happens and Looking for Spinoza.
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
