Re: Antonio Damacio

From: Wolf Kirchmeir (wwolfkir_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 10/23/04 

Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 20:02:45 -0400

James Landle wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is Antonio Damacio's theories well accepted in the neuroscience
> community. This is regards to his books "The Feeling of What Happens"
> and "Looking for Spinoza: Joy and Sorrow in the brain". The former
> focuses on how the brain produces consciousness, the latter on how
> feelings arise.
>
> James

I've read The Feeling of What Happens, and in it Damasio posits that
feelings are the root of consciousness -- that consciousness is in fact
a feeling - "a feeling of what happens." In order to make this case,
Damasio naturally discusses how feelings arise, but that's not the
actual point of the book, as I read it.

Does it make sense? As a Just So story, it makes more sense than a lot
of others, since he essentially posits that feelings are a feedback
system to enable the organism to monitor its internal states, its
phsyiology, its physical integrity, the attitude of its body, etc, and
so can adapt its behaviour to and and as a consequence of those states.
Thus far, his ideas seem reasonable to me - an organism must be able to
respond to injuries, its mechanical behaviours (such as walking) are
impossible without feedback systems, and so on. Damasio goes a step
further, and claims that consciousness appears to be a monitoring of the
monitoring, at which point I'm not convinced - not because this is a
crazy idea, but because the evidence to support it seems to me flimsy.
But maybe it's merely incomplete.

But without a deal more evidence, both at the level of gross behaviour
and at the level of neural functioning, Damasio's ideas remain at best a
plausible speculation. There will be those who think that "plausible" is
too strong a word. :-) In the meantime, Damasio's ideas do suggest
testable questions, eg, it implies that pain, for example, should appear
as a gamut ranging from the simple tropisms of single-cell creatures to
the attempts at self-regulation (ie, dampening of pain responses) in
more complex creatures, to expression of awareness of pain in creatures
such as ourselves and our nearer relatives. At all levels, simpler pain
responses are included. Up to a point, this seems to be the case, but
things such as learned responses ("Ouch!" is a learned repsonse) muddy
the issue. Humans and other creatures can learn to delay or supppress
the behaviour we take as signs of pain, for example. In such cases, can
one say that the subject "feels" pain? IOW, there are are unexamined
assumptions in Damasio's use of "feeling", not least being the one that
an external observer can be pretty sure that a subject is feeling something.

Damasio bases his speculations the cases he encountered in his career
as a neurologist, and to that extent they are grounded in fact. But many
speculations are possible when one encounters a case. I myself have
always been perturbed when in the comanpy of stroke victims who can no
longer speak. In one such case, I got the distinct impression that
comprehension was occurring, but that my friend could not respond
appropriately, which caused him rather more frustration than it caused
me -- and I found it almost unbearable. It's not at all pleasant to
contemplate what his subjective experience might have been.

His case is also IMO a major corrective to those who would dismiss
behaviour as being somehow no more than externals, and not in any way of
the essence of what we call a person. As you may guess, I disagree -- we
are our behaviour, at all levels and in all ways. Impair that hehaviour
through stroke, and the person is diminished. It's not "just his
behaviour" that is impaired.

BTW, it's the gamut in the expression of pain (which Damasio appears to
take for granted, and not just for pain) that causes a lot of obscure
and confused talk about pain. What's true of a tropism isn't true of an
expression of awareness, etc.

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