Re: Hacking v. Damasio

On Apr 8, 3:46 pm, "Paul" <pgr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Minding the Brain by Ian Hackinghttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/17217hacking

Damasio's model: A human being is body, brain, and mind, all of which
are flesh. The brain, monitors the whole body, keeps it in
equilibrium. The mind monitors the brain and the way it monitors the
body. The brain is in the body. The mind is part of that part of the
body that is the brain. Complex part of the brain - Damasio calls
mind.

A continuing thesis of Damasio's is that emotions are biologically
necessary for making reasonable decisions: if a part of the brain
needed for emotions is missing, decisions will not be reasonable.

He has experimental and observational evidence to support this claim.


Damasio's "is a false theory about emotions-that is the view of Colin
McGinn... you cannot have emotions without cognitive input, e.g.,
knowledge of my uncle being in a coma-that is perhaps the majority
opinion of neurologists."


McGinn seems to be sayng that emotions and "cognition" are quite
different things. The evidence suggests that emotions may involve
"appraisals" or a kind of thinking but not the thinking that goes
through the standard "cognitive areas" of the brain. So flash a rude
word on a screen too fast for a person to "read" it and say aloud what
the word was, but you can still show that person behaves as though
embarrassed. Knowing the significance of the word is surely something
traditionally called cognitive. But emotional processing seems to
extract that meaning and produce a response without going through the
areas of the brain that involve traditional semantic analysis. So
emotions do involve cognition and the analysis of intentionality, but
intentionality is not a unitary thing. Meaning is not analysed in one
place or in one way. The brain has several routes of getting meaning,
and intentionality, and does several different things with that
meaning and with that intentionality. neuropsychologists are not clear
- how could they be, it is all so surprising - exactly how to address
such a strange set of findings, and their talk can be confused. But
the old fashioned idea of a unitary mind dealing with the real world
in direct way doesn't seem right in the light of such evidence.
Nevertheless the route by which emotions get meaning and signal that
meaning to the rest of the brain (which is what Damasio is calling
feeling) does seem quite crucial in arriving at good decisions.

What is a living being? A self-regulating organism? Damasio thinks of
mind, brain, and body as involved part this self-regulation. Emotions,
mind, and even the self are ingredients of a homeostatic system, and
there is feedback into the body to further increase the tendency of
the creature to keep on living.

This is commonly called a systems approach.


damasio leads us to his view of the evolution of emotions by inviting
us to imagine what we feel when pleasantly sitting at the beach. We
monitor our body, we sense it at rest, which induces a harmonious
feeling, which tends to leave the body alone, in a stable state,
homeostatic, until a new cool breeze or the memory of an obligation
disturbs the state. Equilibrium is always the goal. Joy, according to
Damasio, is the name for the sense of harmony when we are in a state
of equilibrium.

Systems approaches can of course offer a variety of equilibria and a
variety of ways of getting to the equililrium points. It is quite
possible to talk of bi-stability for example where there is more than
one stable point. Necker-cube illusions illustrate bistability, as i
suppose do waking and sleeping states.

Descartes' error was to separate thinking, rationality from the body.
Hence to isolate them from the passions, including feelings and
emotions, preventing Descartes from conceiving the entire organism as
a thinking, feeling being. Damasio finds in Spinoza an almost
biological vision of the human being.

As I pointed out above emotions ARE a kind of thinking. It seems to
me that your reviewers think that there can only be one kind of
cognition and that it has to take place in the theatre of the mind
somewhere. But we can (as in Damasio's gambling task) get a "feeling"
for the right choice (and that feeling is right) long before we have
any kind of conscious analysis of why it is the right choice.

Let's see. Tachistoscopic tasks suggest that a very rapid appraisal
takes place of material flashed on a screen (more rapid than conscious
seeing) and that these rapid appraisals offer information to the
theatre of the mind in the form of feelings (such as embarrassment).

On the other hand learning research suggests that a slow non-cognitive
learning is also available to us. I say "non-cognitive" to mean again
that it is not readily available for conscious inspection. Asking a
person to run a simulation of a complex factory for example, where the
person has to control the flow of inputs and so on to get a consistent
high quality output from the factory, shows that the person concerned
can indeed learn this task and perform it well. But such test subjects
can't explain how they do it. All they can say is that a certain
pattern of responding "feels" right. Again, a complex kind of thinking
is happening, and it manifests in the way a person responds, but it is
not the kind philosophers seem so fond of - clearly atriculated
reasons and logic. You can find lots of examples of this kind of
research in Guy Claxton's book, "Hair brain, tortoise mind".

Also think of the kind of learning that happens when a musician learns
an instrument. The really highly skilled musician knows the instrument
through his hands, and often can't begin to explain in words what his
hands know. That kind of learning how again often manifests as a kind
of feeling - people will say, this "feels right" when asked why they
do someything.

So it seems to me that your reviewers have a rather narrow
understanding of thinking - one they have drawn from logic books and
linguistic studies. But the evidence suggests that thinking is a much
bigger than language and logic. Much of it involves pattern finding,
and subtle attention to rapidly presented information that flows too
fast to get to consciousness. Yet the conscious mind, that "rational"
centre of a person, can still use that information by paying atention
to his or her feelngs and intuitions. The body of the person has done
a fair part of the thinking for that person. Your emotions, in other
words, are information about what you think of something independent
of what words come out of your mouth.

Spinoza was the best of all possible men, more virtuous than mere
mortals. It takes some courage to claim such a paragon as your own
model. Of course people have done so, among them Goethe, George Eliot,
and Gilles Deleuze. When Nietzsche first encountered Spinoza he took
it as a magical blessing that he had finally found an intellectual
companion.

Spinoza said some very unusual things about the mind. You need to be
embedded in the seventeenth-century discourse of substance and ideas
in order to venture a confident opinion about what the historical
Spinoza meant.

"Spinoza speaks of "the idea constituting the human mind," and "the
body." Damasio speaks of our minds being made up of, among other
things, images (plural) of parts of our own body. That switch in
number seems to betoken an enormous change in sense."

Spinoza's doctrine that "the human mind does not perceive any external
body as actually existing except through the ideas of the
modifications of its own body."[5]

Damasio suggests when you notice the sharp bend in the dark road
ahead, the bend has had an effect on your body, beginning with the
visual system and continuing to an arousal of fear, an emotion. But,
note, this totally ignores any cognitive input -- the creation of the
bend as an idea in the mind which then causes the brain to have a
fearful reaction.

You can see your reviewers problem - he thinks there is only one
formal and conscious route to acquiring information about the bend,
and that the emotion must draw on that formal conscious route. But the
tachistoscopic studies suggest that aspects of the visual information
are rapidly analysed and turned into feelings and emotions via a
separate route and that this takes place faster than the conscious
mind can form a "idea" of the bend in the road.

There is of course interesting feedback between these different routes
of processing. A beginning driver may have no understanding of the
danger a bend may constitute, but if he survives, his "emotional"
processing will rapidly spot such bends in the future and he will
discover that he has a feeling of danger even before he perceives
consciously that a bend awaits him when he encounters that threat
again in the future.


"Spinoza experts will have to assess Damasio's enthusiasm. Some like
it a lot, while others find it repugnant. For my part, I gladly say
that he went looking for Spinoza, and this is the Spinoza he found,
and more power to him."

Hume thought that we project onto things our own ability to produce
changes. Thus when the baseball shatters the window pane, we think the
ball caused the window to break. Which it did-but all that the
"caused" means here, taught Hume, is that the collision came first,
the breaking next, and that balls flying in certain directions are
regularly followed by broken windows. In short, Descartes, Leibniz,
and Hume "de-anthropomorphized" striving and causation. Damasio, and
Spinoza as read by Damasio, are engaged to "de-anthropomorphize"
anthropos.

I had a friend, who sadly died a week ago who argued that children
come to understand processes by imagining themselves as those
processes. So trying to understand how a petrol engine works, she
argued, involves (say) initially a kind of projection of yourself into
the idea of a cylinder being driven by an explosion and turning a
crankshaft etc. Of course that isn't how textbooks present it, but it
doesn't mean that such an imaginative route can't work. Again it seems
to me that your reviewer is too wedded to rationality and words to
understand how real people think.


The appendix to Part I of Spinoza's Ethics is a marvelous diatribe
against finding purposes in things: against "the notion commonly
entertained, that all things in nature act as men themselves do,
namely, with an end in view." When conatus in physics became kinetic
energy and momentum, physics ceased to be anthropomorphic. Was Spinoza
trying to do the same for living organisms? I am an organism that self-
regulates in such a way that it tends to go on existing, feeling
joyful. But much can go awry with the organism, externally and
internally, inducing sorrow. Did Spinoza mean by conatus not striving
and endeavor, as he is always translated, but the brute de-
anthropomorphized tendency to continue, a very complex version of the
stone that also just tends to continue when you drop it? The organism
sleeps poorly, put out of sorts by a bad bed; a part of it monitors
this inharmonious state, and acts so as to achieve greater
equilibrium. But then what about me, the person who feels
uncomfortable, who tries to buy a better mattress? The concept of the
mind as a complex piece of metabolism seems to have mislaid the "I."

It seems to me that your reviewer doesn't have much insight into
systems thinking. An early book, by Powers, is entitle, "Behaviour:
The control of perception". I think it was published in 1973. Anyway,
the point Powers makes is that we achieve control over the world by
controling the perceptions we receive from the world. Ultimately, all
any of us can do is to tense and relax our muscles. Everything that
human beings accomplish turns on tensing and relaxing muscles. Powers
suggests that there are at least nine levels of control that sit on
top of the tensing and relaxing, randing from controlling the form and
pattern of the tensing and relaxing (for example to control a steering
wheel you can't randomly tense and relax - there has to be a
configuration to your hand, etc) all the way up to bery general
purposes and intentions. It takes a child a long time to master this
complex system of controls. It is not achieved over night but the
result of many hours of practice and learning. So a systems theory
doesn't not suggest that homeostatis is a flat hierarchy with one
purpose - it can easily accommodate a picture of te body as containing
multitudes of hierarchically organised control systems that interact
with one another. This is a rich and complex picture quite different
from your reviewers understanding of equilibrium.


"Double aspect" theory. Alas, simple accounts of Spinoza say mind and
body are two aspects of one substance. It would be better to say that
personal accounts of what I feel and do are one way to express events
of my own mental and physical life.

Then there is the physiological, neurological, and anatomical way. It
includes talk of homeostasis, and Damasio's series of devices that
monitor one anothe.

As we come to know more about the body, brain, and mind we shall of
course let our knowledge affect the language of persons by
metaphor."Damasio proposes something different: instant anatomical
identification of emotions; this is what they really are, that is what
joy is."

For Damasio my fear of the customs officer is merely correlated with
something external to me. How different from "my" point of view, where
I am terrified of this faceless official. Moreover, there seems in
Damasio's account to be no "I" left who decides how to handle the
situation. There is just self-regulating homeostasis going on in this
organism.


Lots of people including Hume, doubt this theory of "I" or self. se
Dereck Parfitt.

"Damasio will surely go on lobbying for an identification of the
personal language with current anatomical conjectures. But I suspect
that the internalism of neurologists like him is a bit like the
internalism of Descartes: it gerrymanders into existence a problem of
reality and all the arid philosophical baggage that goes with it. The
problem begins with the first two sentences of Damasio's book, the
weird internalist idea that the schoolteacher attends to images of her
thirty children, and images of their shouts, and not to the children
themselves and to what they are saying."

Strange but your picture of Kant - the one you have expounded - is
exactly the same the one your reviewer ridicules here.

There is, of course, a debate in psychology (and philosophy) about
whether perception is direct or whether it involves a whole cognitive
and emotional apparatus. Gibson is the most famous exponent of the
direct view, which does accord to some extent with that of
wittgenstein. Indeed the two, alongh with Vygostky, are often classed
together. But Kant, your favourite, is squarely in the mediated
perception tradition. People used to ask J J Gibson questions about
how direct perception could possibly work - how did the invariants of
the perceptiual field get detected. I'm told he just used to turn off
his hearing aid so as not to have to hear the question. Still the rest
of us think that some process happens, and when you start to pull that
process apart, well then you end up like Gregory and other cognitive
and neuropsychologists who think that a good deal of information
processing takes place in the brain, and that illusions and
hallucinations and the like (perhaps also what Ulrich Neisser called
"analysis by synthesis") show that we don't have an immediate direct
contact with the world. But this is a different issue from the one
raised earlier.

A book that argues against Damasio:

Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
Bennett is a distinguished Australian neuroscientist, and Hacker is
the Oxford author of an invaluable many-volume line-by-line analysis
of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

Yes of course people will argue against Damasio. If they didn't
science would not advance.

Lance

.

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