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Title: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio R. Damasio ISBN: 0-15-601075-5 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.6 (40 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Analysis of Levels of Consciousness.
Comment: Like the Roman aqueduct of Segovia, Spain, Dr. Damasio has built a monument, block by block. At the clinical level this book is a must for neuropsychiatrists when searching for rational guidance in their therapeutic approaches. At the scientific level, Dr. Damasio has accomplished,singlehandedly, what Watson and Crick did in piecing together portions of multifaceted data to give birth their DNA mosaic; but it had to wait for Nirenberg's genetic code to achieve a solid scientific status. As we move forward to the philosophical level, we find Damasio's projections somewhat illusive. To start with, he seems to have a confusion between 'awareness' and 'consciousness'; the latter lacking the purpose element that underlies the former. Awareness brings together the object and the body for an effective adaptive goal (which may not even require being conscious,see "Thinking About my Thoughts", submitted in Dec.'99 for March 2000 publication in Telicom* by the undersigned). Consciousness is just 'experiencing' or "feeling the feelings". We may agree up to the "feeling" but being able to feel the self is a qualitative jump. At the end of the book Dr. Damasio substitutes the "object" being imaged by the brain for an 'emotion' and then reasons that if you can image an object (ideal or natural), you can also image the subject of the emotion. The problem being that the an object (natural or ideal) has essence and existence, is substantive whereas an 'emotion' is a predicate, devoid of an independant existence, devoid of the "self" he is claiming to have felt. Perhaps just as serious is his scalpel excision of language from his conceptual model. "Language" is any system of signs useful to man to communicate his thoughts"** By limiting the definition of language to its most sophisticated stage of evolution, the spoken word, it is understandable that it can't be accomodated in his conceptual model. Interoceptive (body), exteroceptive (object) and language domains are interactive and form a "feeling" but 'feeling the self' is incorporating interactively the non-materiality of 'self'into the materiality of the brain, a pipe dream!.
*Telicom is a publication of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE) **Biopsychosociology, Limusa Ed, Mexico 1987, by the undersigned.
Rating: 4
Summary: An eye-opener!
Comment: The great value of Damasio's book is that it is written by an expert, but with a general audience very much in view. Damasio is both an experienced practicing psychiatrist and a neurological researcher of considerable standing. I am myself a linguist, and have tried my hand at reaching the general public in a book (in Swedish) on Language and the Brain. That has at least made me realize how difficult it is to make intelligible the biological base of such abstract structures as human language and human thought. On this score I think Damasio succeeds excellently. He may not have the philosophical breadth of Daniel Dennett, or the research brilliance of Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman -- both of them referred to by Damasio. But he achieves a rare balance between clinical experience and sound scientific argument. Whereas most philosophers, since Plato and Aristotle, have laid stress on the connection between consciousness and the very highest functions of the mind -- foresight, logical thinking, creative imagination -- Damasio highlights its humble roots in the body, its connection with feelings and emotions which we share with other animals, as Darwin showed in his treatise on The Expression of Emotions in Men and Animals. This basic "core consciousness", as Damasio terms it, arises from the brain's ability to connect and relate its representations of aspects of the outer world -- objects -- with its continuous representations of the inner world of the organism. This is the foundation of the concept of self, which eventually will incorporate all of the organism's experiences throughout its life: the "autobiographical self". Throughout, Damasio explains how such representations can be identified in the brain. Typically each representation is distributed over many brain structures, not, as the 19th century phrenologist thought, one place for each. In the same way, the second or third order representation of the self is not to be found in one single spot (the pineal gland, as Descartes thought). There is no "homunculus" in the brain, no central representation of a little man, a "ghost in the machine", to use the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle's term back in the 1940s. Damasio does not shun the anatomical and physiological details. He sometimes goes into great detail, which the ordinary reader will find quite demanding. However, the main point about the biological base of consciousness, is never left out of sight, and will whet the appetite for a second or third reading of a rich and rewarding book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent Attempt by Damasio to Explain Us to Ourselves
Comment: Damasio breaks down into minute, qualitative descriptive detail how the boby/brain functions in humans, and ergo, de facto, many mammals. This book's strength is that Damasio backs up his claims regarding neural anatomy, physiology, and function with specific examples from comparative neuropathology. The book's weakness is that he goes on at length with qualitative descriptions for non-intuitive notions like how the body and brain function as a singular unit, and how emotions and feelings are integral along with body/brain physiology. I say this is the book's weakness because Damasio often bogs down and even tries to describe phenomena that are possibly ineffable, but these attempts at qualitative description are also one of the strengths of this book. This may seem contradictory, but possibly the book would have read differently if the author had stuck to purely quantitative case studies. However he did not, so we get through Damasio's several qualitative, alternate descriptions of singular phenomena an attempt to flesh out and make organic the dry clinical data. On the one hand the book could have been more concise without the extended descriptive sections, on the other hand the book possibly becomes richer and more meaningful because of them; this is up to the reader to decide.
Having said this, the book itself endeavors to demonstrate how consciousness emerges from gross neuroanatomy and physiology. In this Damasio is successful in using neuropathology to define terms such as: homeostasis, consciousness, language, mental images, neuronal maps, cathexis, and hedonic tone (although he does not use these two latter terms explicitly). In all honesty Damasio is very strict about defining his terms. Even though the author writes to a popular audience some knowledge of neuroanatomy and physiology is helpful in reading this book for maximum effect; although this book would be a good beginning for those interested in neurology. In General, the appendix, 'Notes on Mind and Brain,' should probably be read prior to reading the main body of text, especially if the reader is weak in basic neurology. In any event, Damasio is big on forming neologisms although he spends adequate time defining and explaining them. As a neurologist, he always couches his arguments in materialist, Darwinistic terms.
A good way to describe the structure of this often rambling, inchoate book, is to briefly compare it to Dr. Paul McLean's triune brain model. The triune brain posits the reptilian brain (brain stem) as primary, the mammal brain (thalamus, limbic, etc.) as secondary, and the primate brain (cortex) emerging evolutionarily later as tertiary. Damasio uses a similar foundation in positing the proto-self, the core self, and the autobiographical self (I told you there were a lot of neologisms), but he does so in a way that has them all hang together as a synchronous, functioning unit. The proto-self is rather the sense of homeostatic organism state, where the core self is the 'transcient but conscious reference to the individual organism in which events are happening' (to get a taste of Damasio's descriptive effluence), and the autobiographical self is the more cortical, temporal sense of self derived from transcendental yet highly efficacious ideas about past and future. It can all get pretty incoherent, but a complete reading of the book supplies numerous neural correlates which shore up the author's assertions.
In the end it is hard not to recommend this book because, in the reading of it, the author lights upon accurate though transitory descriptions of what it means to have a brain and be conscious. He places emotions and feelings (better see his definitions of these two terms) in their proper place in neural events. Indeed Damasio does well in defining a neural basis for epistemology [p. 130, 137, 138, 296, 305, 316] and idealism [p. 320, 322]. In closing Damasio admits that 'we cannot characterize yet all the biological phenomena that take place between (a) our current description of a neural pattern, at varied neural levels, and (b) our experience of the image that originated in the activity within the neural maps.' Indeed we may never be able accomplish such a correlation absolutely, but in the reading of a book such as this one, and say, Edelman's "A Universe of Consciousness," we see we are not very far off either.
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Title: Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio R. Damasio ISBN: 0380726475 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 November, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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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 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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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: The EMOTIONAL BRAIN: THE MYSTERIOUS UNDERPINNINGS OF EMOTIONAL LIFE by Joseph Ledoux ISBN: 0684836599 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 27 March, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter ISBN: 0520224612 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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