Giving the Body back to the "Mind"

In the last couple of years, I have started to seriously devote part of my life to reading a bit of philosophy, supposedly based on the most vigorous application of the principles of reasoning. In the process, I discovered a most amazing phenomenon viz. how most philosophers, whilst philosophizing, seem to do their reflections as if they and consequently the human race did not have a body! They can no longer afford to do so. The reason? A book which ought to have been a bombshell has appeared, but almost in whispers. The book is Antonio R Damasio's "Descartes' Error": Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.(1994) ("DE"). Damasio (b1944 in Portugal) is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California ( where he heads USC's Brain and Creativity Institute) and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute, whose research concentrates on how our neural systems serve our memory, our emotions, our decision-making, our consciousness and the construction of our image of our "self".

What exactly is the error of Descartes in the title of his book? Descartes is the philosopher who built the entire superstructure of his philosophy of "rationalism" upon his most famous saying: "Je pense, donc je suis" (in his Discourse on the Method 1637) or "cogito, ergo sum" in Latin (in his Principles of Philosophy 1644) or "I think, therefore I am" in English, of which he wrote: "this truth, "I think, therefore I am" was so certain and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I came to the conclusion that I would receive it without scruple as the first principle of the Philosophy for which I was seeking....From that I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence, there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this "me", that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am,is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is" (DE 249) "It suggests that thinking and awareness of thinking are the real substrates of being...[which] celebrate the separation of mind, the 'thinking thing" (res cogitan) from the non-thinking body, that which has extension and mechanical parts (res extensa)"  (DE 248)

To Damasio, we are first, then we think, not the other way round. "Long before the dawn of humanity, beings were beings. At some point in evolution, an elementary consciousness began. With that elementary consciousness came a simple mind; with greater complexity of mind came the possibility of thinking and even later, of using language to communicate and organize thinking better. For us then, in the beginning it was being, and only later was it thinking",Damasio says (DE 248) And even now, our body comes first. "And for us now, as we come into the world and develop, we still begin with being, and only later do we think. We are, and then we think, and we think only inasmuch as we are, since thinking is indeed caused by the structures and operations of being." (DE 248) "This is Descartes' error: the abysmal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, up-pushable, nondivisible mind stuff on the other; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism" (DE 249-250) He picked on Descartes and not Plato because Descartes' error "remains influential. For many, Descartes' views are regarded as self-evident and in no need of re-examination" (DE 250). To Damasio, even in mid-20th century, this is the view of "many cognitive scientists who think that they can investigate the mind without recourse to neurobiology" and even "some neuroscientists who insist that the mind can be fully explained solely in terms of brain events, leaving behind by the wayside the rest of the organism and the surrounding physical and social environment--and also leaving out the fact that part of the environment is itself a product of the organism's preceding actions." (DE 250-251). He thinks that the idea of a disembodied mind also seems to have shaped the peculiar way Western medicine approaches the study and treatment of diseases and that  as a result thereof, psychological diseases are usually disregarded and considered only as if were, on second thought. Even more neglected is the study of the body-proper's effects of psychological conflicts. Descartes' error has thus obscured the roots of the human mind in the biologically complex, fragile, finite and unique organism and implicitly also obscured the tragedy following upon the downgrading that knowledge because where humans fail to see the inherent tragedy of conscious existence, they feel far less called upon to do something about minimizing it and may thus have less respect for the value of life. (DE 251)

Damasio speculates whether when Descartes chose as the inscription on his tombstone, the enigmatic words "Bene qui latuit, bene vixit" from Ovid's Tristia 3:3.25 (He who hid well, lived well"), he was not rejecting his body/mind dualism and whether his "I think, therefore I am" merely served to ward off religious pressures ( according to which "in the beginning was the Word,.the Word was with God, the Word was God etc. ) of which he was keen aware"? 

To Damasio, a comprehensive understanding of the human mind requires an organismic perspective:not only must the mind move from a non-physical cogitum to the realm of biological tissue, it must also be related to a whole organism possessed of integrated body proper and brain fully interactive with a physical and social environment. He does not think that this perspective would debase what some think of as the human spirit or soul. It's "just that soul and spirit, with all their dignity and human scale, are now complex and unique states of an organism...to recognize its humble origin and vulnerability, yet still call upon its guidance." (DE 252). He agrees that this is a difficult but indispensable job to remind ourselves daily of our complexity, our finiteness and our uniqueness but he also thinks that it is a job which we will be far better off than "leaving Descartes' Error uncorrected".

In his studies, he discovered many feed-back loops between the different parts of our brain as well as feed-back loops connected to various regions of our muscles -, He thinks that "reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were" and that "emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all". On the contrary, he thinks that "they may be enmeshed in its networks, for worse and for better" (DE xii) .He thinks that emotions are part of homeostatic regulation and
are rooted in reward/punishment mechanisms and uncovered many cortical and subcortical induction sites for human emotions, e.g. in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala He recovered William James'
perspective on feelings as our body's internal monitor camera on our own body states, but expanded it
with an "as-if-body-loop" device which allows for the substrate of
feelings to be simulated rather than actual, thus foreshadowing the
simulation process discovered later by other scientists in regard to the so-called "mirror neurons" in certain parts of our brain. He demonstrated
experimentally that the insular cortex is a critical platform for
feelings, something which is confirmed by the findings of other scientists.

Damasio thinks that the "strategies of human reason probably did not develop, in either evolution or any single individual, without the guiding force of mechanisms of biological regulations, of which emotion and feeling are notable expressions." Even more, he thinks that "even after reasoning strategies become established in the formative years, their effective deployment probably depends, to a considerable extent, on a  continued ability to experience feelings." (DE xii) But he has also discovered not just that feelings may have potentially harmful  effects on our reasoning power but surprisingly that the absence of feelings and emotions in our thinking process is "no less damaging, no less capable of compromising the rationality that makes us distinctively human and allows us to decide in consonance with a sense of personal future, social convention and moral principle." (DE xii). To Damasio, "Emotion and feeling, along with the covert physiological machinery underlying them, assist us with the daunting task of predicting an uncertain future and planning our actions accordingly." (DE xiii). He also found out that "human reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert, across many levels of neuronal organization, rather than on a single brain center, as is commonly thought. "Both "high-level" and "low-level" brain regions, from the prefrontal cortices to the hypothalamus and brain stem, cooperate in the making of reason." (DE xiii) with the lower ones the same as those regulating the processing of emotions and feelings along with those body functions needed for an organism's survival and such lower levels maintain "direct and mutual relationships with virtually every body organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations that generate the highest reaches of reasoning, decision-making, and by extension, social behavior and creativity...The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason." (De x iii) but "the dependence of high reason on low brain does not turn high reason into low reason: The fact that acting according to an ethical principle requires the participation of simple circuitry in the brain core does not cheapen the ethical principle" and in a normal individual, the will remains the will and the only thing which changes is "our view of how biology has contributed to the origin of certain ethical principles arising in a social context, when many individuals with a similar biological disposition interact in specific circumstances" (De xiv) What he found is that "the critical networks on which feelings rely include not only the traditionally acknowledged collections of brain structures known as the limbic system but also some of the brain's prefrontal cortices and most importantly, the brain sectors that map and integrate signals from the body." (DE xiv). This is the way he envisages how feelings work and how they are related to the relevant brain structures: if you imagine the view from a "window" that opens directly onto to a continuously updated image of the structure and state of our body as a landscape, then the "body structure" is analogous to object shapes in a space while the "state" of the body will resemble the light and shadow and movement and sound of the objects in that space. "In the landscape of your body, the objects are the viscera (heart, lungs, gut, muscles), while the light and shadow and movement and sound represent a point in the range of operations of those organs at a certain  moment. By and large, a feeling is the momentary 'view" of a part of that body landscape. It has a specific content--the state of the body; and specific neural systems that support it--the peripheral nervous system and the brain regions that integrate signals related to body structure and regulation" (De xiv-xv)

But there is more to emotions that what is described in the previous paragraph. Damasio explains further: "Because the sense of that body landscape is juxtaposed in time to the perception or recollection of something else that is not part of the body--a face, a melody, an aroma--feelings end up being "qualifiers" to that something else." In other words, our emotions "color' our "perception" of objects and people in the external world. How? "The qualifying body state, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by a corresponding "thinking mode": fast moving and idea rich when the body-state is in the positive and pleasant band of the spectrum, slow-moving and repetitive when the body-state veers toward the painful band". In short, we think fast and we open ourselves and branch out into further novel ideas happy when our thoughts or thinking concludes that the experience is a pleasant one and our thoughts slow down and we withdraw into ourselves when our thoughts or thinking concludes that the experience is unpleasant or painful. Is that not why when people feel "happy", they open up  and are more willing to explore the external world and internal changes within their heart and when they feel pain, they withdraw and close down or close up. Is that not why happy children tend to be "brighter" and more creative" and unhappy children tend to be dull and unimaginative ?

In Damasio's view, feelings are therefore the sensors for the match or lack thereof between nature ( by which he means both the "nature" we "inherited" as a pack of genetically engineered adaptations and the "nature" we have "acquired" in individual development, through interactions with our social environment, mindfully and willfully as well as not) and circumstance. To him, feelings (subjective)and emotions (objective) are not luxuries" but " serve as internal guides and ...help us communicate to others signals that can also guide them" and contrary to what scientists previously think, feelings are neither elusive nor intangible and "are just as cognitive as other percepts" : they are "the result of a most curious physiological arrangement that has turned the brain into the body's captive audience. Feeling let us catch a glimpse of the organism in full biological swing, a reflection of the mechanisms of life itself as they go about their business." ( DE xv) They are essential to our survival: "Were it not for the possibility of sensing body states that are inherently ordained to be painful or pleasurable, there would be no suffering or bliss, no longing or mercy, no tragedy or glory of the human condition." (DE xv)   

Damasio also suggests that the cortical architecture implicated in our "recall" or memory processes and "learning" involves multiple, hierarchically organized loops of axonal projections that converge on certain nodes out of which projections diverge to the points of origin of convergence (the convergence-divergence framework) and our ability to recall memories is an integral part both in what we normally consider as our "consciousness" or "awareness" and also in the building up of what we call our "self-image" both in the present and throughout a period of time i.e. our personal history or biography which is intimately linked to what we consider as our "character" or "personality" or our "self".

In the book, Damasio also dealt with a third idea: how do we get our "image" of our "mind". To Damasio, the way we look at or think about our "mind" (which for him are "neural processes we experience as our mind" ) is by using our body (as represented in our brain) as the frame of reference. He says that we use "our very organism" rather than some "absolute external reality" as the "ground reference" both for the construction we make of "the world around us" and for the construction of "the ever-present sense of subjectivity that is part and parcel of our experience" and that "our most refined thoughts and best actions, our greatest joys and deepest sorrows, use the body as a yardstick". (DE xvi). Contrary to what many philosophers think, Damasio suggests that "the mind exists in and for an integrated organism" and that our "minds" would not be the way they are were it not for "the interplay of body and brain during evolution, during individual development and at the current moment". He thinks that "the mind had to be first about the body or it could not have been." and that only on the basis of that "ground reference that the body continuously provides"  can the mind be about many other things, real and imaginary. He bases his view on the following findings and statements of opinions:
1. the human brain and the rest of the body constitute an indissociable organism, integrated by means of mutually interactive biochemical and neural regulatory circuits (including endocrine, immune, and autonomic neural components)
2. The organism interacts with the environment as an ensemble; the interaction being neither of the body alone nor of the brain alone
3. The physiological operation we call "mind" are derived from the structural and functional ensemble rather than from the brain alone and that mental phenomenon can be fully understood only in the context of an organism's interacting in an environment.
He was compelled to conclude with such principles from his investigation of the disorders of memory, language and reason in numerous brain-damaged human beings, whether the relevant mental activity relate to the simplest or the most sublime kind of thinking. From one study after another, he was thus led to the belief that "relative to the brain, the body provides more than mere support and modulation: it provides a basic topic for brain representations." He asked himself the question: "How it is that we are conscious of the world around us, that we know what we know, and that we know that we know." He answers: "love and hate and anguish, the qualities of kindness and cruelty, the planned solution of a scientific problem or the creation of a new artifact are all based on neural events within a brain, provided that the brain has been and now is interacting with its body. The soul breathes through the body and suffering, whether it starts in the skin or in a mental image, happens in the flesh." (DE xvii).

The question of human consciousness has been a subject of numerous philosophical debates called the "mind/body problem". It looks as if we now have at least some support from brain neurology that "mind" is a name we apply to some merely neural and physiological processes in the human brain in its interaction with the rest of the human body and is situated in that physical body. In short, the "mind" is merely the name we give to the activities of an embodied brain ! If so, should we not re-interpret the word "spirit" and "soul" accordingly?

Damasio has also written some other books on the neurology of the human brain and on our human emotions: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999); Looking for Spinoza : Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (2003), and  Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, (2010). He is well worth some careful reading if we wish to find out how our body and our emotions affect our "reasoning processes".