In terms of the study of emotions, Antonio Damasio describes the 20th century as “the century of neglect.” If the research of emotion is said to begin with Aristotle, then by the end of 19th century we have a body of work that includes the writings of Pascal, Spinoza, Darwin, Freud, Sartre and William James among many others. But all of this success in the study of emotions was cut short in the 20th century when the study of emotion was given increasingly short shrift by scientists and thinkers who embraced a philosophically outdated Cartesian model of the mind in order to support the computational theories of intelligence made so popular by the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950’s. Today, the computational model of the mind advocated by the strong AI theory and Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, has been upset—-philosophically by Searle, Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus; in mathematics and physics by Penrose; and in the field of neuroscience by Damasio. Remarkable advances in brain study have provided us with a very different perspective––an emotional revolution, claims Damasio––which positions emotion as the very basis of reason. As the first mechanism of rational processes, it seems that emotion is a primal and practical necessity.
It is becoming clear that there are a whole host of medical ills that can be illuminated by emotional studies. Indeed, understanding how the emotional system works is crucial for the effective treatment stroke and mood disorders. Emotional studies have important applications in the social space as well; for while it is clear that what goes on in a culture economically, politically, and legally involves decisions that emerge out of rational processes, it seems that these rational processes evolve out of, and work alongside, emotional processes that have their origin in the survival of the organism; it appears that the way we produce moral behaviour is very closely tied to the emotional system in an evolutionary sense. Clearly, emotion has an immense role to play in our decisions as individuals and as a society; but how are we to understand this relationship between emotion and reason? What is an emotion? What is a feeling? And why is reason so dependent on both of them?
Damasio redefines the concept of emotion by amplifying its description into three categories:
1. Basic emotions––fear, anger happiness, as studied by Darwin and others––appear to be universal; even without the same names they are represented by the same behaviour in different cultures and even across certain species.
2. Background emotions, which are the most prevalent emotions we have. We are always in an emotional state, ie.discouragement or enthusiasm. Consciousness is always an emotive state.
3. Secondary or social emotions include compassion, shame, contempt, pride, and jealousy. These are entirely tied to social concerns, to those with whom and towards whom we act, others.
Secondary or social emotions were initially thought of as purely cultural constructions, but this has been shown to be not quite the case. While culture and education––the social environment as a whole––clearly plays an enormous role in directing the specifics of how emotions are applied, animal research has shown that a number of these emotions are present in primates who have been observed behaving compassionately, even towards other animals of other species. It seems as though these secondary emotions permeate our genetics and are as much a part of our biological make up as the primary emotions are.
Using William James as starting point, Damasio outlines the distinction and relationship between feeling and emotion–James’ inversion of the traditional view of the physiology of the emotion/feeling cycle has been been borne out by later research. James writes:
Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.
By interposing the body between the causative stimulus and the emotive mindstate, James shows the inseparability of mind and body; he also shows that body is represented in the brain, either directly or indirectly, and that the brain can map the body. However, James leaves out the possibility of an appraisal of the the stimulus itself. Although there is often no stimulus appraisal––fear may cause a direct body state––it does happen, especially when we are confronted with more complex situations. According to Damsio, James conflated emotion and feeling: on one hand James gives the impression that emotion is a variety of reactive behaviours; but then, on the other hand, he says that the perception that we get from the reaction is the emotion. This was shown to be an inconsistent view by the physiologists in the early 20th century.
In Damasio’s terms, emotion and feeling can be understood separately. Feelings involve cognition and are composite perceptions of:
1. partcular states of the body that are real or simulted
2. states of altered cognitive resouces
3. the deployment of certain scripts (descriptions) which can be really in the body or generated in the brain––ie. a desctiption of happiness
4. different states of cognitve ability in different body states––ie. time perception, learning attentiveness etc.
And all of this is connected to a causative state which is intentionality––how we feel ‘about’ or ‘towards’ something.
And human emotions are understood as:
1. largely unlearned programs of automatic actions and cognitive strategies aimed at the management of life. Largely but not 100% automatic––we can have some measure of control over them.
2. programs aimed at the management of life; one cannot do without emotions; they play an evolutionary role for the self and/or for the group
3. triggered by objects or situations that act on the mind, whether they are real or in the mind as a recollection; defects in particular aspects of emotion can be traced to lesions in certain parts of the brain.
In Damasio’s view, emotion involves an appraisal of stimulus, a triggering of emotion, and an execution of emotion and/or emotional states. Feeling involves an emotional trigger which stimulates brain structures to initiate a set of internal chemical changes which create changes to the viscera in the central nervous system. Thus, the experience of an emotion and the feeling associated with it involves a variety of changes in cognitive resources. Emotions change how we recall past experiences and perceive time; and they alter the relationship between our bodies and the world––even way in which we reason changes profoundly with emotive states. In brief, emotions and feelings change the way in which we attend to the world.
This relationship between emotion and feeling developed out of complex mechanisms of reaction built out of many other processes that were tied to survival: reward and punishment, scaling of internal needs, pain and pleasure. And it is certain that early creatures relied on such mechanisms long before emotions appeared as we understand them. In terms of survival, emotions and their components can be understood as exercising homeostatic or bodily regulating goals–they have everything to do with how an organism manages it’s life cycle. In our life cycle there is a mandate in our genome which drives us to persist and prevail––the emotional system is the latest expression in this blind desire to stay alive. As Damasio points out, the multitudes of cells in the body have a drive to persist, prevail and stay alive; to homeostaically manage the process of energy acquisition and transformation. This is the genesis of emotions and the birth of feeling: pleasure and pain.
It seems that there really is no separating mind, brain and body. The mind exists because there is a body; the body is the context for the mind/brain. The mind’s principle task is to examine and manage the internal economy of the organism. Feelings are always tied to the body, directly or indirectly; information about the body is so selective that it goes into specialised channels in the brain. Indeed, the brain creates chemical markers that have to do with specific bodily states. These markers allow the brain to carry out somatic perception which is key in the appraisal of stimulus (decision making) and the ability of emotional response to vary with context. Somatic-marker associations are reinstated, or recalled, physiologically and bias cognitive processing. In cases where complex and uncertain decisions need to be made, the somatic markers recall all reward and punishment experiences associated with the relevant stimuli, which are then summed to produce a net somatic state––that gut feeling. This overall state is used to direct (or bias) the selection of the appropriate action. Utilising the somatosensory cortex, the brain can even run internal simulations of responses or transformations in bodily states as representations in the mind. This is what Damsio terms the “as if ” body loop: it is as if the body was actually sensing or undergoing this or that experience recreated internally. This allows us not only to predict possible bodily or emotive states for ourselves but also to project them onto others. This clearly has relevance with regards to the secondary emotions outlined above as well as to predictive mental behaviour that rationalise potential outcomes.
According to Damasio, emotions are action programs which preceed feelings (which are the perception of these programs.) Emotions operate in multistage cycles and cannot be understood as being about or in one area of the brain that is a centre for this or that. They are modified by context––socialisation plays an important role––and reflect the ongoing management of life inside the organism; feelings give us a window into this internal life. Internal needs cannot be repressed. In the case of food, for example, the body declares a state of hunger because it wants to reach homeostasis and therefore lets this situation come into consciousness so that the mind can decide on appropriate action.
Cognitively speaking, we have multiple routes open to us. We have a fast route of decision making, which is biologically entrenched, and governed by powerful emotional, intuitive or “gut” responses to a given object or situation; and we have reason, traditionally understood as a slow methodical “cost-benefit” analysis. But these routes are not necessarily opposed to each other. In a healthy individual they work together in order to expedite the decision making process. Emotions also allow us to make decisions with out consciously confronting every option available to us; they allows us to freely and purposefully rationalise by removing or highlighting certain key options. Indeed, emotion seems to be the seat of practical reason itself; or, at the very least, it is the means by which it can function effectively. As some of Damasio’s patient studies have shown, damage to certain parts of the brain that are associated with emotion can have drastic effects in the realm of reasoning, both in terms of practical decision making and socialisation. And there have been those that, due to a break down in the somatic apparatus, have lost the ability to feel emotions while they can still intellectually understand their significance.
Emotion also plays a role in social processes that lead to social homeostasis. Most of our social engagements involve, to some degree at least, the projections into the social space of our biological needs. But the effectiveness and health of this social homeostasis would necessarily reflect the state of the culture itself and its emotional health and intelligence. It seems impossible, however, that a definitive account of this could be provided here. In the end it seems that everything we say about emotion needs to be put into context …
DAMASIO LECTURE: “Emotion, Feeling, and Social Behavior: The Brain Perspective”
DAMASIO LECTURE: MEDICINE TO SOCIETY I & II
Hubert Dreyfus on Merleau-Ponty, Computers and the mind:
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