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Title: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio ISBN: 0151005575 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2
Rating: 5
Summary: A window on emotions
Comment: Damasio has leapt almost to the top of the philosophical pyramid with his books on feelings and consciousness. Unbound by consensus thinking, he shows how the brain and body collaborate in forming what we call the "mind". In this book he reaches back in time to the works of Baruch Spinoza, perhaps the first philosopher with insights on emotions and will. Spinoza roundly refuted the separation of mind and body postulated by Descartes - a thesis with amazing tenacity. Damasio wants to revive the teachings of Spinoza in light of modern research's recent findings verifying and enlarging the Dutch philosopher's ideas. He possesses a unique style in supporting his campaign, with an ability to mix conversational and clinical presentations with fluid ease. This is his finest effort.
Damasio blithely overturns traditional philosophy by giving the body a primary role in developing emotions. What the mind feels, the body has already expressed. Because the body and brain are so deeply integrated in their functions, the combined signals are manifested as "emotion". Our feelings of joy, sorrow and the host of other classifications we use in defining ourselves are the expressions of the interactions. What we say about feelings may be applied to the entire realm of what we call "awareness". In short, the mind represents the body - we react to its actions. Spinoza, without realizing it, was far in advance of his contemporaries.
Damasio uses the wealth of research he and others have obtained over many years to support his contentions. In line with those in the forefront of "neurophilosophy", Damasio attributes evolutionary roots for his proposal. Other animals, he reminds us, react in similar ways to similar stimuli. They haven't the ability to express their reactions in language, but the body language says it sufficiently. Human evolution merely took these root causes a step further. Language, however, and the urge to detach us from the rest of the animal kingdom led us to also separate mind and body. Damasio, following both Spinoza and the finds of cognitive science, seeks to restore the integration.
With an intelligible prose style, enhanced by diagrams and line drawings, this book is a treasure of information. The questions he raises, while jarring to anyone steeped in traditional philosophy, need answering. He's never above noting where more work is required and posits topics to be investigated. The extensive bibliography is valuable in understanding what we know and what remains to be revealed. These revelations, Damasio reminds us, apply further afield than academic disputes over philosophical issues. The view of mind and body underlies most of our concepts of justice, government, public education and social behaviour generally. What gives this book its ultimate value is what basis we apply in addressing these issues. If traditional philosophy's foundation is a false bulwark, we must replace it with a more rational basis. Spinoza had not patience with arguments from ignorance, Damasio states. Nor should you. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Rating: 5
Summary: Damasio selects Spinoza...A great book!
Comment: Damasio's Looking for Spinoza is another great book with lots of great stuff to ponder; I highly recommend it. Here's one area (of many) I found interesting:
In confronting our suffering and our need for salvation, in addition to Spinoza's requirement that we live "a virtuous life assisted by a political system whose laws help the individual with the task of being fair and charitable to others," Damasio writes (pg 275):
"The Spinoza solution also asks the individual to attempt a break between the emotionally competent stimuli that trigger negative emotions--passions such as fear, anger, jealousy, sadness--and the very mechanisms that enact emotion. Instead, the individual should substitute emotionally competent stimuli capable of triggering positive, nourishing emotions. To facilitate this goal, Spinoza recommends the mental rehearsing of negative emotional stimuli as a way to build a tolerance for negative emotions and gradually acquire a knack for generating positive ones. [Wow!--Exposure/CBT, circa 1670, but without the cognitive distortions.] This is, in effect, Spinoza as mental immunologist developing a vaccine capable of creating antipassion antibodies."
Additionally, Damasio writes: "The individual must be aware of the fundamental separation between emotionally competent stimuli and the trigger mechanism [which, as current neuroscience now shows, includes amgdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, cinguate] of emotion so that he can substitute 'reasoned' emotionally competent stimuli capable of producing the most positive feeling states."
In an earlier part of the book (pg 58) Damasio discusses triggering and executing emotion and writes that after the presentation of an emotionally competent object, regardless of how fleeting the presentation:
"...signals related to the presence of that stimulus are made available to the emotion-triggering sites....You can conceive of those sites as locks that open only if appropriate keys fit. The emotionally competent stimuli are the keys, of course. Note that they select a preexisting lock, rather than instruct the brain on how to create one. The emotion-triggering sites subsequently activate a number of emotion-execution sites...[which are] the immediate cause of the emotional state that occurs in the body and the brain regions that [then] support the emotion-feeling process."
"...[he goes on to say that these] descriptions sound a lot like that of an antigen entering the blood stream and leading to an immune response....And well they should because the processes are formally similar. In the case of emotion, the 'antigen' is presented through the sensory system and the 'antibody' is the emotional response. The 'selection' is made at one of the several brain sites equipped to trigger an emotion. The conditions in which the process occurs are comparable, the contour of the process is the same, and the results are just as beneficial. Nature is not that inventive when it comes to successful solutions. Once it works, it tries it again and again." Fred Hussey, 8/8/2003
Rating: 2
Summary: Reductio ad absurdum
Comment: My biggest question at the end of this book was, "Why was this book so excruciatingly boring for me?" It's not just that I'm a neurologist and know a lot of the material already. I still find books about bizarre perceptual states produced by neurological dysfunction fascinating. Emotional states might make for equally fascinating reading.
Dr. Damasio focuses on some basic points instead. One basic point that he spends over 100 pages illustrating is the distinction he makes between "emotions" and "feelings". The former word he applies to objective emotional experience, such as facial expressions, body postures, measurements of autonomic function and behavior in humans and animals, even fruit flies. The latter applies to human subjective emotional experience. OK, I think most readers knew the difference between objective and subjective before page 1, so what is all this except to introduce the reader to the particular way Dr. Damasio uses a couple of words? Eventually he advances the thesis that "feelings" are secondary to "emotions" something like perceptions are to sensation. Really? Why not the other way around sometimes? Why not something more complex? Certainly perception influences both "emotions" and "feelings". Is it always "emotions" before "feelings"? If that's the case with Dr. Damasio's brain, I might enjoy playing poker with him.
He spends nine pages on an anecdote resulting from treating patients with Parkinsonism by placing electrodes into the midbrain. In one patient, a fluke placement of electrodes produced a profound sadness when stimulated, the emotion ending about 90 seconds after the current is turned off. The patient experienced it as artificial, connected at the time to sad images and desires, but not to any part of her life before or after. OK, sham emotions can be produced in animals with brainstem stimulation. We don't usually do that to humans, but it is interesting to hear someone's subjective experience along with the objective. What does it mean about emotions in general?
Putting great importance on that is like pretending to understand an NFL kicker from having patients wiggle their feet in a doctor's office. We can make someone's leg move from stimulating their spinal cord. I'd bet, though, that the mechanisms that determine who can kick a field goal and who can't are considerably upstream from there.
Dr. Damasio correctly describes the complexity of perception, how the brain is not a camera, not a passive receiver of information. It has our expectations within it, other aspects of attention, as well as the overwhelming complexity of being the organ of our consciousness, as mysterious as that still is. Consciousness remains as necessary a precondition for a subjective visual image as transparent corneas. Yet when it comes to "feelings", Damasio leaves so much out. Where is imagination, inspiration, even the possibility of spiritual influences in the process?
Another thesis Dr. Damasio advances is that the entire brain primarily serves the same purpose as the part of it that regulates body temperature. He describes the entire brain as a homeostatic organ as he goes off into discussing the implications of that for society. Funny, the influence of the one organ in our body that makes us the most human doesn't seem to have kept our society static throughout human history, just the opposite. What is it, the influence of aliens perturbing our natural homeostasis? Devils maybe? Sure our brains keep us alive, but not for everyday to be exactly the same. What with time spent on semantics, inadequate data, and this sort of overreaching, there just isn't that much science in this book.
Spinoza comes up in many ways. The biographical portions of the book are interesting, but pertain to neuroscience mostly as a negative example, I think. Among many quotes here are two. One from page 11:
"Love is nothing but a pleasurable state, joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause."
The book ends on page 289 with:
"Hope is nothing else but an inconstant joy, arising from the image of something future or past, whose outcome to some extent we doubt."
Is this anything but someone who values intellectual experience over emotional experience by quite a bit? What mechanisms make some love and others not, some loved and others not? What distinguishes that which turns out to be true hope from false hope? It's not all cognitive, I bet.
Damasio isn't as bold as Spinoza, but he doesn't chasten him either. I'm disappointed. I've heard Dr. Damasio give a good neuroscience lecture to a neurological audience. He knows how to do good science. This book is not that.
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Title: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio R. Damasio ISBN: 0156010755 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio R. Damasio ISBN: 0380726475 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph Ledoux ISBN: 0670030287 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 10 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Freedom Evolves by Daniel Clement Dennett ISBN: 0670031860 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 10 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker ISBN: 0670031518 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 26 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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