Words&Dirt

Antonio Damasio’s impact on my intellectual development would be difficult to overstate. I first encountered his work when I was assigned The Feeling of What Happens for a philosophy of mind course in college. That book fundamentally transformed how I understood myself as a thinking, feeling being, and when I read Self Comes to Mind a few years later, my perspective was embellished further by Damasio’s complex yet accessible presentation of his groundbreaking research on how the body-mind constructs consciousness and identity.

The Strange Order of Things, Damasio’s newest offering, strikes me as less impressive but also more ambitious than those that came before. It feels like a rehashing of Damasio’s older work applied to a new subject, human culture, with varying degrees of success. But it’s still an engaging read full of intriguing ideas, useful information, and fun speculation.

The central tenets of Damsio’s Strange Order are thus: (1) biological homeostasis is the foundation for human flourishing, (2) feelings, when combined with homeostatic imperatives and imbued with valence, provide the basis for the development of human cultures, and (3) cooperation between organisms, which is intrinsic to flourishing and cultural expression, is rooted in nonconscious and ancient biological phenomena. I’ll explain these in turn.

Anyone who has read Damasio previously or is familiar with his research will note his preoccupation with the concept of homeostasis. I’m in no position to judge whether the scientific community has failed to grant homeostasis the attention it deserves (Damasio’s contention), or whether Damasio is merely puffing up his academic hobby horse to make it seem all-encompassing, but either way his ideas on the matter appear valuable. Here’s how he defines the term:

Homeostasis refers to the fundamental set of operations at the core of life, from the earliest and long-vanished point of its beginning in early biochemistry to the present. Homeostasis is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative, whose discharge implies, for every living organism, small or large, nothing less than enduring and prevailing. The part of the homeostatic imperative that concerns “enduring” is transparent: it produces survival and is taken for granted without any specific reference or reverence whenever the evolution of any organism or species is considered. The part of homeostasis that concerns “prevailing” is more subtle and rarely acknowledged. It ensures that life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to a projection of life into the future of an organism or a species. (25, emphasis his)

Damasio later expands on this definition by adding: “One might say that organisms want their health and then some” (45). It is this “then some” that creates Damasio’s Strange Order. Without homeostatic flourishing, the argument goes, the biological sensing and mapping functions that undergird future projection and complex memory might never have come into existence, thereby obviating the development of consciousness, identity, sociality, and the plethora of cultural practices that derive from those qualities.

In order to complete (or at least extend) this picture, we need to also consider the role of feelings and valence in the production of cultures. For Damasio, feelings provide the foundation for mental experience and subjectivity, and, “as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures” (26, emphasis his). These homeostatic “deputies” are charged with three main duties: the generation of motives for intellectual creation, the monitoring of cultural practices and instruments for success or failure, and the negotiation of cultural adaptation over time (15). One of the great strengths of Damasio’s outlook is his insistence that feelings matter because they represent the deep evolutionary wisdom that resides within and emanates from human bodies. This doesn’t mean feelings should always have the final say or that they shouldn’t be subject to critique or revision, but it does encourage readers to realize that our feelings always have something valuable to tell us, even when we choose to ignore or override them. It is the ongoing dance between unbidden feelings that arise in the body and other, more intellectual modes of cognition that produces cultures in all their glory and horror.

Also important is the assertion that feelings are never neutral, but rather imbued with an intrinsic, value-laden property that Damasio calls “valence”:

Valence translates the condition of life directly in mental terms, moment to moment. It inevitably reveals the condition as good, bad, or somewhere in between. When we experience a condition that is conducive to the continuation of life, we describe it in positive terms and call it pleasant, for example; when the condition is not conducive, we describe the experience in negative terms and talk of unpleasantness. Valence is the defining element of feeling and, by extension, of affect. (102)

The undeniable presence of valence in our palette of feelings reveals that the human mind occupies a “weighted” space––a complex web of value judgments that is essential to and inseparable from our every interaction with objects, ideas, and other organisms. Valence, therefore, is a not only a critical source of cultural expression but also a mediator for cultural critique and augmentation.

Cooperation is another critical component in the creation of cultures. Evolutionary biology has traditionally focused on competition as the primary driver of natural selection, and it has been challenging for cooperation to gain legitimacy as an equally important player in the evolutionary epic. But, in concert with other thinkers in recent years who’ve sought to understand the profound impact of cooperative evolutionary strategies, Damasio puts the lie to the idea that evolutionary success is all about competition:

The principle is always the same: organisms give up something in exchange for something that other organisms can offer them; in the long run, this will make their lives more efficient and survival more likely. What bacteria, or nucleated cells, or tissues, or organs give up, in general, is independence; what they get in return is access to the “commons,” the goods that come from a cooperative arrangement in terms of indispensable nutrients or favorable general conditions, such as access to oxygen or advantages of climate…The homeostatic imperative stands behind the processes of cooperation and also looms large behind the emergence of “general” systems, ubiquitously present throughout multicellular organisms. Without such “whole-body systems,” the complex structures and functions of multicellular organisms would not be viable. (55)

According to this view, the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation are the groundwork for the complex biological systems responsible for all multicellular activity, including human life and cultures; without the substantial benefits conferred by successful cooperation, the biological complexity necessary for cultural development would be an evolutionary dead end. Further, Damasio claims convincingly that “the emergence of subjective mental states” is a “prime example of cooperation” sprung from the collaborative interactions between different types of cells, tissues and organs (67).

Damasio is careful to avoid anthropocentrism by emphasizing that cooperation took place in evolution long before “minded” creatures were around to conceptualize what was going on. The best example of this is his description of “the convenient treaty celebrated between two bacteria: a pushy, upstart bacterium that wanted to take over a bigger and more established one”:

The pushy bacterium operates as if concluding that “when we cannot win over them, we might as well join them.” The established bacterium, on the other side, operates as if thinking, “I may as well accept this invader provided it offers something to me.” But neither bacterium thought anything, of course. No mental reflection was involved, no overt consideration of prior knowledge, no cunning, guile, kindness, fair play, or diplomatic conciliation. The equation of the problem was resolved blindly and from within the process, bottom up, as an option that, in retrospect, worked for both sides. The successful option was shaped by the imperative requirements of homeostasis, and that was not magic, except in a poetic sense. It consisted of concrete physical and chemical constraints applied to the life process, within the cells, in the context of their physiochemical relations with the environment…The genetic machinery of the successful organisms made sure the strategy would remain in the repertoire of future generations. (235, emphasis his).

This empirically-supportable tale drives home the important lesson that cooperation is just as native to all organisms as competition. Once internalized, this lesson shows us that, at least at the intersubjective level of human consciousness and sociality, we can prioritize cooperative, positive-sum strategies over competitive, zero-sum strategies without feeling that we are somehow balking our evolutionary heritage by positing “unnatural” or “unrealistic” solutions to serious problems.

I doubt that many scientists or science-savvy readers would reject Damasio’s general outline of the biological basis for culture, but what of his comments on culture itself? The third and final part of Strange Order analyzes “The Cultural Mind at Work,” and is simultaneously the most entertaining and disappointing portion of the book. Damasio rushes through a robust list of cultural topics, spending mere paragraphs on subjects that demand their own book-length treatments. Here’s a in-exhaustive list from my notes:

• Creativity
• Religion
• The universal appeal of music and dance
• The algorithmic account of humanity
• The future and limitations of artificial intelligence
• Drug addiction and pain management
• The psychological effects of widespread rapid communication technology
• The dangers and benefits of population diversity
• Education
• Questioning the assertion that we are living through “the best time” in human history
• Ancient Greek Tragedies and Shakespeare
• Altruism
• Profit and greed
• Neuroscience’s tendency to over-favor the cerebral cortex
• The suggestion that modern computational sciences are enacting an odd reincarnation of Cartesian dualism
• Biological systems and neural networks as the original gatherers of “Big Data”
• The next steps for the humanist project

Damasio addresses all these topics and more in less than one hundred pages of text. It’s a pleasurable ride and written with a lot of artistry and passion, but my reaction was mixed due to the lack of detail devoted to each individual topic. I’m not convinced that other readers will necessary have the same problem, and will also admit that I’ve enjoyed this style more in other books (most notably the works of Yuval Noah Harari). Though I disagreed with some of Damasio’s speculations, I never felt like he stumbled into intellectually insupportable territory.

Overall, Damasio manages to put forth a level-headed picture, proving himself neither an optimist nor pessimist about the current state of human civilization. He ends on a responsible and honest note, pointing out that his ideas will need to be revised as new evidence comes to light, and also marveling at how little we truly understand about ourselves and the vast universe in which we are embedded. The Strange Order of Things demonstrates the clear value of combining a scientific mindset with cultural analysis, but also demonstrates the inherent weaknesses of that approach, reminding us of the need for additional perspectives.

Rating: 7/10