Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

"Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain" (Harcourt, 2003) is first-class philosophy and neuroscience book from a first-rate neuroscientist. Antonio Damasio is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology and Neurology as well as the Director of the USC College Brain and Creativity Institute in Southern California. He opens the book with his mission statement: "to understand feelings" (p. 7). Included in the first chapter are three wonderful drawings by Hanna Damasio who is the Dana Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology and Neurology at the Univ. of Southern California. The subject of chapter two is 'emotions' and opens with the question of whether emotions allow us to adapt to the environment? Dr. Damasio welcomes the question and lets us know that the goal of having emotions remains a "mystery" (p. 78). But thanks to the excellent scholarship of Damasio, the final cause and purpose of an emotion becomes more clear: to "provide a natural means for the brain and mind to evaluate the environment within and around the organism, and respond... adaptively" (p. 54). Damasio kindly gives us a "manageable description" (p. 64) of how an emotion proceeds from (i) a "single stimulus" toward (ii) the "recall of other related stimuli," then (iii) to "modifications" of the stimulus by a person's awareness and "cognitives process", and then finally (iv) to the "sustaining", "amplification" and "abatement" of the emotion by one's personal thoughts and cognitive processes. This "manageable description" of an emotion is valuable for three reasons. First, the four-step process is natural, for Damasio writes, "Our organisms gravitate toward a 'good' result of their own accord" (p. 51). Second, the clear description of an emotion above allows us to arrive at a clear definition of a "mood", which refers "to the sustaining of a given emotion over long periods of time" (p. 43). Lastly, Damasio's manageable description shows us our ethical responsibility to think about ways to sustain pleasurable emotions and to remove painful emotions. Aristotle writes, "Every passion and every action is accompanied by pleasure and pain, for this reason also virtue will be concerned with pleasures and pains" (Nichomachean Ethics, 2.3). Damasio agrees and writes, "We can simply use sheer willpower and just say no. Sometimes" (p. 52). A person's cognitive awareness can sustain and amplify pleasurable emotions and has the power to abate and reduce painful emotions. And we learn how use our cognitive power by making mistakes, by observing mature people and by finding time to think about the stimulus we are processing emotionally will lead to virtues. The subject of chapter three is 'feelings' and introduces the reader to the question of whether a feeling is an awareness "of varied body changes?" (p. 121) Damasio accepts the question even though he hopes the reader acknowledges that his solution is a rough draft. "I cau

Spinoza was a remarkable 17th century philosopher whose Jewish family fled the Portuguese Inquisition to find refuge in Holland. Spinoza held that `the mind' is simply a bodily process: it is not a separate entity from the body. Furthermore, he claimed that emotions, including spiritual emotions, are a body's signals to the brain: their purpose is to make the brain adjust the body's activities in ways that will bring it back to a state of balance with its environment. Spinoza built up a strong case for saying so in various publications. This idea was a direct challenge to the religious authorities. He received 39 lashes and excommunication from his own synagogue for his pains. After his death, even the tolerant Dutch authorities banned publication of Spinoza's works. Nevertheless, his ideas lived on and became a driving force of the Enlightenment a century later. Antonio Damasio is Van Allen Distinguished professor at University of Iowa College of Medicine. As a neuroscientist in the forefront of modern research, he specializes in finding out how the brain detects both emotion and feeling. The brain is receiving billions of reports every second from every cell in the body. Neuroscientists can record these signals in particular circuits in the brain. The brain integrates these reports and the result is perceived as an emotion. `Background' emotions work at a subconscious level and are noticed as states of well-being, instinctive dislikes -- and so on. `Primary' emotions are basic ones such as fear, disgust, sadness and happiness. `Social' emotions include shame, pride, envy and indignation. In turn emotion gives rise to feeling -- an internalized emotion of emotion. All these processes can be recorded as neural maps in the brain as they occur. These emotions and feelings manipulate the body to behave in ways that enhances its self-preservation. Damasio interweaves his neural science narrative cleverly with the thread of Spinoza's philosophy. There is a lot still to discover, but neural science is vindicating Spinoza's hypothesis: that our mental life is shaped by nature to serve the optimum survival of the physical body. There is a powerful lesson to be drawn: this mental life is designed to work in forager groups in the African Savannah. Our lives today are so far removed from these conditions that we are continuously stressed by emotional signals occurring in inappropriate ways. Today, we medicate our feelings with alcohol, drugs, and New Age therapies. However, the insights provided by neuroscience point the way to how we might structure our lives in ways that bring our bodies back into a state of harmony with our natures. Damasio does not venture into how we might do this, but I do tackle this question of evolutionary psychology in Deadly Harvest.

Part of this is a celebration of the 17th century Rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinosa whose world view is very much in concert with that of Antonio Damasio. Spinosa's demolition of Descartes' mind/body duality is the thread that Damasio takes up and weaves into this graceful and agreeable narrative. Furthermore, it is Spinosa's recognition that we are part of, and contained within, nature and not materially different from nature (another of Descartes' errors) that attracts Damasio's admiration for Spinosa.Leaving aside this framing device I want to concentrate on Damasio's argument about the nature of humans based on his experience as a neurobiologist, which is really the core of this book.Damasio recognizes that feelings, like consciousness itself, are perceptions, not states of mind. What is being perceived is the state of the body itself, and what is doing the perceiving is the brain. In this understanding--and I think it is a felicitous one--the brain operates as a sixth sense, something like the so-called third eye of the Hindus. It is not, of course, a supernatural sixth sense, but a sense organ in addition to the other five whose job it is to perceive the homeostasis of the organism, a sense organ that looks within instead of without. Instead of the sensation of color or sound, the sixth sense perceives emotions.Of course the Van Allen Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center does not use such a term as "sixth sense" nor would he allude to the third eye of the Hindus. He is a neurologist, a scientist and (despite his demurral) a philosopher. I mention these other ways of "knowing" in an attempt to provide a larger context for Damasio's argument.This argument is not original with Damasio (and I don't think he would claim it is). In one sense it is derivative from the growing understanding that consciousness itself, a kind of meta-awareness, is actually a perception. Damasio's "feelings" are part of this consciousness.A further part of Damasio's argument is that emotions are prior to feelings. First there is an emotionally competent stimulus (ECS). Then there is an "appraisal" of that stimulus which results in appropriate and automatic emotion, followed by feelings based on a perception of the emotion and the external situation. This is on-going, and we usually don't notice it. In extreme cases, such as danger, our feelings are more pronounced. In Damasio's scheme, an ECS might be a grizzly bear come upon suddenly while hiking. The "appraisal" would be the recognition that this is a bear, that it is big and it is potentially dangerous. The "emotion" would be all the systemic glandular, chemical and muscular responses in preparation for the flight or fight response. The "feeling" itself would be what we call fear.Damasio attempts to explain the experience of feelings in anticipation of "naysayers" who contend that such things are eternal mysteries. He makes a distinction between what

Damasio has leapt almost to the top of the philosophical pyramid with his books on feelings and consciousness. Unbound by consensus thinking, he shows how the brain and body collaborate in forming what we call the "mind". In this book he reaches back in time to the works of Baruch Spinoza, perhaps the first philosopher with insights on emotions and will. Spinoza roundly refuted the separation of mind and body postulated by Descartes - a thesis with amazing tenacity. Damasio wants to revive the teachings of Spinoza in light of modern research's recent findings verifying and enlarging the Dutch philosopher's ideas. He possesses a unique style in supporting his campaign, with an ability to mix conversational and clinical presentations with fluid ease. This is his finest effort. Damasio blithely overturns traditional philosophy by giving the body a primary role in developing emotions. What the mind feels, the body has already expressed. Because the body and brain are so deeply integrated in their functions, the combined signals are manifested as "emotion". Our feelings of joy, sorrow and the host of other classifications we use in defining ourselves are the expressions of the interactions. What we say about feelings may be applied to the entire realm of what we call "awareness". In short, the mind represents the body - we react to its actions. Spinoza, without realizing it, was far in advance of his contemporaries.Damasio uses the wealth of research he and others have obtained over many years to support his contentions. In line with those in the forefront of "neurophilosophy", Damasio attributes evolutionary roots for his proposal. Other animals, he reminds us, react in similar ways to similar stimuli. They haven't the ability to express their reactions in language, but the body language says it sufficiently. Human evolution merely took these root causes a step further. Language, however, and the urge to detach us from the rest of the animal kingdom led us to also separate mind and body. Damasio, following both Spinoza and the finds of cognitive science, seeks to restore the integration. With an intelligible prose style, enhanced by diagrams and line drawings, this book is a treasure of information. The questions he raises, while jarring to anyone steeped in traditional philosophy, need answering. He's never above noting where more work is required and posits topics to be investigated. The extensive bibliography is valuable in understanding what we know and what remains to be revealed. These revelations, Damasio reminds us, apply further afield than academic disputes over philosophical issues. The view of mind and body underlies most of our concepts of justice, government, public education and social behaviour generally. What gives this book its ultimate value is what basis we apply in addressing these issues. If traditional philosophy's foundation is a false bulwark, we must replace it with a more rational basis. Spinoz

Damasio's Looking for Spinoza is another great book with lots of great stuff to ponder; I highly recommend it. Here's one area (of many) I found interesting: In confronting our suffering and our need for salvation, in addition to Spinoza's requirement that we live "a virtuous life assisted by a political system whose laws help the individual with the task of being fair and charitable to others," Damasio writes (pg 275): "The Spinoza solution also asks the individual to attempt a break between the emotionally competent stimuli that trigger negative emotions--passions such as fear, anger, jealousy, sadness--and the very mechanisms that enact emotion. Instead, the individual should substitute emotionally competent stimuli capable of triggering positive, nourishing emotions. To facilitate this goal, Spinoza recommends the mental rehearsing of negative emotional stimuli as a way to build a tolerance for negative emotions and gradually acquire a knack for generating positive ones. [Wow!--Exposure/CBT, circa 1670, but without the cognitive distortions.] This is, in effect, Spinoza as mental immunologist developing a vaccine capable of creating antipassion antibodies." Additionally, Damasio writes: "The individual must be aware of the fundamental separation between emotionally competent stimuli and the trigger mechanism [which, as current neuroscience now shows, includes amgdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, cinguate] of emotion so that he can substitute `reasoned' emotionally competent stimuli capable of producing the most positive feeling states." In an earlier part of the book (pg 58) Damasio discusses triggering and executing emotion and writes that after the presentation of an emotionally competent object, regardless of how fleeting the presentation: "...signals related to the presence of that stimulus are made available to the emotion-triggering sites....You can conceive of those sites as locks that open only if appropriate keys fit. The emotionally competent stimuli are the keys, of course. Note that they select a preexisting lock, rather than instruct the brain on how to create one. The emotion-triggering sites subsequently activate a number of emotion-execution sites...[which are] the immediate cause of the emotional state that occurs in the body and the brain regions that [then] support the emotion-feeling process." "...[he goes on to say that these] descriptions sound a lot like that of an antigen entering the blood stream and leading to an immune response....And well they should because the processes are formally similar. In the case of emotion, the `antigen' is presented through the sensory system and the `antibody' is the emotional response. The `selection' is made at one of the several brain sites equipped to trigger an emotion. The conditions in which the process occurs are comparable, the contour of the process is the same, and the results are just as beneficial. Nature is not that inventive when it comes to successful solutions. Once