Rationality, emotion, and consciousness.

In The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio Damasio asserts unequivocally the existence of consciousness and identifies what he considers to be observable aspects of it within the limits of current scientific inquiry. Building upon the theory of the biological roots of emotions that he constructed in Descartes’ Error, Damasio continues to present conclusions culled from his own work as a neuroscientist.

“[T]he highly constrained ebb and flow of internal organism states, which is innately controlled by the brain and continuously signaled in the brain, constitutes the main backdrop of the mind, and, more specifically, the foundation for the elusive entity we designate as self. I also suggest that these internal states—which occur naturally along a range whose poles are pain and pleasure, and are caused by either internal or external objects and events—become unwitting nonverbal signifiers of the goodness or badness of situations relative to the organism’s inherent set of values. I suspect that in earlier stages of evolution these states—including all of those we classify as emotions—were entirely unknown to the organisms producing them. The states were regulatory and that was enough . . . Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power . . . of telling a story without words, the story that there is life ticking away in an organism, and that the states of the living organism, within body bounds, are continuously being altered by encounters with objects or events in its environment . . . The apparent self emerges as the feeling of a feeling” (p. 30-31).

Emotions, as natural states, are impossible to control. “We are about as effective at stopping an emotion as we are at preventing a sneeze” (p. 49). We may learn culturally contingent modes of attempting to mask emotion, but the biological changes that occur are out of our sphere of domination.

There are six primary or universal emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust. Also, there are secondary or social emotions, such as embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, pride; and background emotions, like well-being or malaise, calm or tension (p. 50-51).

Damasio charts a hierarchy of biological phenomena. “At their most basic, emotions are part of a homeostatic regulation . . . Emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward or punishment, of pleasure or pain, of approach or withdrawal, of personal advantage and disadvantage. . . . the idea of good and evil” (p. 54-55). In a table, he ranks four “Levels of Life Regulation”: “basic life regulation,” which comprises the most simple survival drives; emotions; feelings, where emotions begin to be processed as images; and finally “high reason,” where conscious images become plans and behavior (p. 55).

Emotion, then, is inescapable, barring the severe brain diseases that have allowed Damasio to study these concepts. “[W]hen consciousness is available, feelings have their maximum impact, and individuals are also able to reflect and to plan. They have a means to control the pervasive tyranny of emotions: it is called reason. Ironically, of course, the engines of reason still require emotion, which means that the controlling power of reason is often modest” (p. 58).

Damasio assumes the metaphor of narrative. The organism constructs an account of itself through the biofeedback that it receives. “This account is a simple narrative without words. It does have characters (the organism, the object). It unfolds in time. And it has a beginning, a middle, and an end” (p. 168). “Looking back, with the license of metaphor, one might say that the swift, second-order nonverbal account narrates a story: that of the organism caught in the act of representing its own changing state as it goes about representing something else. . . . [T]he knowable entity of the catcher has just been created in the narrative of the catching process” (p. 170). Consciousness is essentially the feeling of biological knowledge. “You know you exist because the narrative exhibits you as protagonist in the act of knowing” (p. 172). The narrative is a “nonlanguaged map of logically related events” that can easily be converted to words (p. 185). “[T]he mind’s pervasive ‘aboutness’ is rooted in the brain’s storytelling attitude. . . . [T]he brain naturally weaves wordless stories about what happens to an organism immersed in an environment” (p. 189).

Consciousness connects the images that are occurring within the brain to the body that the brain is a part of in a meaningful way. “The feeling of knowing . . . such unsolicited knowledge . . . is the beginning of the freedom to comprehend a situation, the beginning of the eventual chance to plan responses that differ from the Duchampian ‘ready-mades’ provided by nature” (p. 182).

Varying degrees of neurological impairment in different parts of the brain allow Damasio to create a distinction between core consciousness (an immediate awareness of being) and extended consciousness (a sense of self that continues across time), which is predicated on the first but can be absent in certain disorders. But neither comprises the entirety of what it is to be a human being. “I do not place consciousness, either in its core or extended levels, at the pinnacle of human qualities. Consciousness is necessary, but not sufficient, to reach the current pinnacle” (p. 230).

Damasio ingratiated himself further with me in his literary allusions, referring to T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster on the heels of his Anna Karenina reference at the end of Descartes’ Error. He used the same line that has been floating in the sidebar of this blog for who knows how long. And why shouldn’t he? It’s a great statement.

Damasio ends by asserting a distinction between consciousness and conscience, declaring that the former can in fact be studied, in part because it is not the latter. “I see consciousness, instead, as allowing the mind to develop the properties we so admire but not as the substance of those properties. . . . [C]onsciousness is a grand permit into civilization but not civilization itself” (p. 309, 311). Consciousness, he concludes, could be the impetus for the banishment from Eden.