Looking for Spinoza
Monday, May 28th, 2007 @ 03:37
Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
by Antonio Damasio (2003)
Having been familiar with the prominence of (both Hanna and Antonio) Damasio’s names in neuroscience, I picked this book expecting a popular science book that provides insights into the neurobiological underpinnings of memory and emotions, something like Damasio’s colleague’s work, Joseph LeDoux’ Synaptic Self (maybe with some accounts of Spinoza). I was wrong — the book instead focuses on some basic points which are somehow, in an almost Whiggish manner, related to Spinoza’s ideas.
In his analysis, Damasio likens the structure of homeostasis machine to “a large multibranched tree of phenomena charged with the automated regulation of life”, with basic process such as metabolism, reflexes, immune system at the bottom, moving up to pain and pleasure behaviour, drives and motivation, and near the top we find emotions, below feelings, because “evolution came up with emotions first,” and are “built from simple reactions that easily promote the survival of an organism”. Damasio defines emotions as
actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviors. To be sure, some components of the emotion process are not visible to the n aked eye but can be made “visible” with current scientific probes such as hormonal assays and electrophysiological wave patterns
while feelings, on the other hand,
are always hidden, like all mental images necessarily are, unseen to anyone other than their rightful owner the most private property of the organism in whose brain they occur.
The definitions, while simplistic, do not bother me as much as the description of their mechanism and the somewhat superficial nunc pro tunc comments on Spinoza. It’s not so much its reductionist aspect — something that (neuro)scientists are often accused of — as the skimming-the-surface that makes this book more like a self-help with the semi-biographical references to seventeenth century philosopher to hoist its intellectual status. Considering Damasio’s expertise in this field, it is indeed a pity that the science in this book is minimal, its relations to ethics, IMHO, forced and superficial.
