Re: Antonio Damacio

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Date: 27 Oct 2004 18:56:44 -0700

Wolf Kirchmeir <wwolfkir@sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<Ebhed.59666$JG5.1031039@news20.bellglobal.com>...
> 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.

I've tried to reread the book the past days to understand thouroughly
his
points as it is not exactly easy. Damasio seems to have clinical
evidence of the second order mapping and the biological anatomy
involved in them as well
as 1st order mapping. Damasio was attempting to explain how the brain
can have
a sense of self or ownership producing "I", "me", etc.. He leaves the
question of how neurons produce consciousness open as he doesn't know
it. In
the book Shadow of the Mind by Penrose, Microtubules inside cells
ungoing
quantum event are said to mediate consciousness as anesthesia can
render
unconsciousness. I wonder if there are other authors that have
alternative
explanations for Damasio stuff or how the brain can have a sense of
self or
how it produce it which he categorize as the second problem of the
mind, the
first problem being how the neurons produces consciousness (which
Penrose touches). Anyone? Thanks.

James

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