The Strange Order of Things

Strange Order Of Things

This is a hard review to write. In my opinion, Damasio is one of the greats when it comes to figuring out the secrets of "mind". I looked forward to this book. I reserved it from the library and when that was too slow, I bought the book.

Damasio's approach is original and profound Sadly this particular book is flawed in so many ways I doubt it will have the impact it deserves. 

The biggest problem is the "Fog Factor". Great stretches of this book would be virtually inaccessible to all but the most determined reader due to run-on sentences, big words and tiresome repetition. It's just abominably written.

The issue is compounded by the fact that Damasio seems to lose his thread of thought to ramble on in the final chapters about the sorry state of the world. Damasio is a brilliant brain scientist. As a commentator on world affairs, he has little of interest to offer. This is particularly disappointing since his general theory comes so close to shedding a powerful light on the very problems he laments. I will explain that once I tell you something about Damasio's unique perspective on life, mind, and consciousness. 

Damasio re-defines a couple of words or perhaps uses them in a way that may be misleading. In fact, I can't be 100% sure that I have grasped these ideas, but I will do my best to shed some light on them. These concepts are so central to the book that the reader may miss the places where Damasio explains them, buried in the fog of paragraph-long sentences.

Homeostasis is a behavior of a system that causes it to return to a "stable" state when perturbed.  The classic example is a thermostat, which cools the room when it is too warm and warms the room when it is too cold. Damasio points out that this example is misleading when applied to living things. Living things don't just maintain conditions suitable for survival. The maintain conditions suitable for thriving. They don't just break even. They grow. They reproduce. The invade new territory. They adapt to new conditions. It is important to see that this concept is more or less Damasio's definition of life itself. Non-living things don't behave this way. All living things do. Damasio makes the mistake of assuming the only systems we know of that behave like this are DNA-based organisms on planet Earth. There are others, as we will see.

Feeling. Damasio claims that consciousness, that feeling of being in the world,  is based on simpler feelings that go all the way back to the simplest of organisms. Well not quite. He distinguishes between simple interaction with the world and the inner state of the organism, due to a more or less chemical (metabolic) reaction, such as we see in bacteria. To count as a feeling, Damasio wants there to be a separate system (a nervous system) that responds to mere chemical and physical events and transmits this response to parts of the organism that can react to the situation. You might say that feelings are a result of an internal model of reality - not reality itself. So, for example, he would say that trees and flowers don't have feelings, but insects do. Certainly all mammals. 

Images. In "higher" animals with complex nervous systems, various sensations are combined to form a system state Damasio calls an "image". Physically, we would imagine this to correspond to a specific pattern of neurons firing in the brain. There is a steady stream of these images and, in humans at least, it is possible to react or reflect to the images themselves. This is what we have seen in Hofstader's "Strange Loop". Damasio insists that all such "images" include the emotional state of the organism, the felt state of the internal world of the organism and the image the organism has of itself and its place in the world. They are private - belonging uniquely to the organism that creates them. This flow of images is plausibly identified with consciousness itself. Damasio is at his best in explaining how the brain builds on these images to produce the rich phenomenon of consciousness. What is unique in his argument is that all these images have affect. They matter to the organism. 

Damasio's vision of the working brain is built on a foundation of feeling. The organism is not a neutral computer running some algorithm that computes whether what is going on is "good" or "bad" (the prevailing view of virtually all modern philosophers of mind). The "information" that the brain works with is already "painted" with affect. This puts Damasio in a position to describe the crucial phenomena that mistake the "computer" analogy - specifically motivations. You can program a computer to play championship chess but you can't program a computer to want to play chess.

Damasio's view of things is supported by other work, especially where the investigator is working with real brains and real people. It appears that the brain/computer analogy may give us some hints about how to perform cortex functions (associations, pattern recognition) but it will not help us build a robot that has experiences. To have experiences, you need to feel and to feel you need to have a nervous system and nervous systems are intimately woven into the fabric of a living human body with hard-wired determination to survive and thrive right down to the cellular level. 

So far, so good. The book is worth plowing through to make this point sink in. 

There is one problem I might mention in passing, which is the so-called "hard" problem of consciousness. Damasio, like many before him, feels so good about his own progress that he declares that he has solved the problem. He claims that he has told us what consciousness is, therefore "why" we feel present in the world. In my view, scientists and philosophers who claim this don't quite get the problem. This is worth an essay of its own so I won't get into why I don't think Damasio has cracked the problem. To make a long story short, I take the Zen attitude: that consciousness is a given - a brute fact. "Explanation" of brute facts reflects a misunderstanding of what it means to "explain" anything.

In my opinion, Damasio drops the ball when it comes to examining human organizations. It is a sad fact that countries, companies, armies and all organizations do not act in the best interests of their member human beings. We are cannon fodder. Nation-states act to thrive for their own sake. In fact, they are, by Damasio's definition, alive. It's mystifying to me that Damasio doesn't get into the nature of human organizations when he devotes so much attention to cooperative behavior. For example, he comes close to attributing a kind of mind to a beehive. But not, say, the United States of America. In most countries, corporations are legal persons. This is not just a figment of our imagination. The business of a corporation is to thrive. Or, to put it the way they do, to make a profit. You will not find a corporate prospectus that mentions the goal of assisting its employees to thrive.

To be sure, Damasio has his reasons for rejecting the group as "alive" or analogous to DNA-based organism. He points out that individuals may belong to numerous overlapping groups. DNA-based organisms don't divide their loyalties in this way. This argument is stuck in seeing the issue from the individual human perspective. It's not about the individual human "thriving", it's about the group thriving - if necessary over the dead body of one or more of its members. History is full of examples of countries being willing to sacrifice millions of their own citizen in an effort to make the nation thrive. It is very clear that any group large enough to be of interest has goals and behavior that cannot be seen merely as a sum of the goals and behaviors of the humans that make up the group.

But is it true that DNA-based organisms don't overlap? Going back to bacteria, where Damasio's story starts, bacteria are able to swap genes. They are so promiscuous about this that analysis of a sample's bacterial content is often done simply by detecting the presence or absence of certain genes in the sample with no attempt to identify "species" of bacteria (in fact, the idea of "species" may not apply to bacteria). This is analogous to human organizations that pass around cultural artifacts such as language and technology. Each culture is, in effect, the sum of the "ideas" that it has managed to accumulate. This is quite close to Dawkin's idea of the "meme" which would seem to be a good analogy to the way genes fight for survival in a bacterial world (the analogy breaks down in more complex organisms). In the same way, "ideas" fight for survival in a world of competing and overlapping cultures and organizations. This may be a rather fuzzy view of the situation, but failing to credit the group with all the characteristics of life, as defined by Damasio himself, seems to be a mistake. If we are stuck with seeing the world in terms of individual human "thriving", we will fail to understand the world that is right in front of us.