A book review of Antonio Damasio's: book "Feeling & Knowing"
"A theory with more questions than answers about the hard problem of Consciousness"
Here, Professor Antonio Damasio, like a sculptor (and as he has done in previous books), continues to chip away at the nonessentials. Methodologically working his way towards the artwork with all the answers in relief at the center of the hard problem of consciousness.
Here, in elegant prose, suitable for the non-specialists, he proposes a fascinating multi-part heuristic theory of life, feelings, knowing, and consciousness.
As he continues to drill ever deeper towards the meat of the hard problem, he would be the first to admit that the story he tells here raises as many new questions as it gives answers to the old.
But in doing so, he does reveal some of the new more troubling aspects that the "hard problem" of consciousness is still likely to face.
At dead center, of course, is the most important question of them all: What is the functional mechanism that allows us to experience in mind a process that clearly takes place within our bodies?
Or, put somewhat differently: How does a body that contains its own mental machinery use it to create mental and physical experiences?
Rather than rehearse all of his previous work, we can "cut to the chase," and admit that when we reach the center of the hard rock of consciousness, in relief, feelings will be a part of the mix of what ever is found there.
Damasio's careful archaeological digs into "feelings" only reveal just how little we really know about them:
Did they evolve from "live" unicellular organisms or multicellular ones like bacteria? Or more intriguingly, from "dead" ones like viruses?
Remember, that both bacteria and viruses have "sensing abilities." And while this is not exactly cognition, it certainly is a form of intelligence.
The fact that viruses, even though dead, can still hijack living organisms and use them as Trojan horses to erect a pseudo-life for themselves, remains a colossal embarrassment for all of science.
Clearly both "live" and "dead" organisms possess primordial "sensing abilities" that span the "prelife-life divide," and could likely be the evolutionary forerunner of what we now identify as feelings (possessed by all live organisms).
But that is only where the troubling theories about feelings begin. There is another misunderstanding about feelings that needs exorcism: It is the misconception that they only interface with, and thus only "sense," the exterior environment of the organism.
Given that however one describes their "sensing abilities," it is a certainty that they originated from the inside of the organism where they also reside, it is curious how this point has been missed for so long?
In retrospect, it seems all but self-evident that the most likely place that feelings began their interactions was inside the organism, not from its outside.
Indeed, feelings probably always possessed this doubled-barreled sensing ability. Ever though, due to an embarrassment of unwarranted biases, like: that consciousness developed before feelings, and then in the prefrontal lobe rather than in the brainstem. It was thus logical to think that feelings sensed only the exterior of an organism.
Due to this embarrassing concatenation of misconceptions, we have missed fully one-half of the "feelings roadshow."
Once this missing half is properly accounted for, as it is in this treatise, we are into a whole new consciousness ballgame.
Armed with this new information, suppose the forerunners of feelings could actually "sense" both ways: internally as well as externally? What are the evolutionary implications of correcting such a gross misconception?
The author's research has uncovered and confirmed an important, if not a downright explosive attachment between feelings and consciousness. One that causes a complete realignment of our understandings of how the brain, feelings, consciousness, and knowing, work.
I will end this review by recounting the essence of this block blockbuster insight, one that leads the author further down a novel path of discovery about the overlooked importance of "feelings" and "knowing" in their respective roles of understanding how the mind and consciousness really work.
The discovery takes fully into account and underscores the fact that the simplest variety of "affect" begins in the interior, not the exterior of living organisms.
The importance of recognizing this point: that nature also prepared organisms to sense their own interior environment cannot be overstated.
Indeed, it is this "interior sensing ability" that Dr. Damasio thinks led to an organism's ability to map its own "sense of self."
From there it is but a metaphorical hop, skip and jump to cognition, perception and on to consciousness.
But the author's grand conclusion is not just a metaphorical leap into the unknown. It is well grounded in testable facts.
The most important fact discovered is this: It is only when the "feelings' component of the brainstem" is insulted or damaged that "the lights in consciousness go completely out."
When we are asleep or in a coma, it is the brainstem and not the prefrontal lobe that is in play.
Conversely, a similar insult to other parts of the brain leaves consciousness unaffected and undamaged.
In light of this profound discovery, is it not fair to ask: Is it not this "interior sensing ability" that may be the critical link back to non-explicit competencies, found both inside and outside primitive organisms?
Another five star production by Professor Damasio.
