Introduction
In "The Strange Order of Things," neuroscientist Antonio Damasio takes readers on a fascinating exploration of human history, culture, and consciousness. But this isn't your typical historical account. Instead of focusing solely on human intellect as the driving force behind our achievements, Damasio argues that feelings play an equally important, yet often overlooked, role in shaping our development and innovations.
This book challenges the conventional wisdom that places human intelligence at the forefront of our accomplishments. Damasio contends that our feelings - such as fear, pain, pleasure, and curiosity - are vital to our consciousness and underlie every major advancement in human history. From the first campfire to the latest technological breakthroughs, our emotions have been inspiring and motivating us all along.
As we delve into Damasio's insights, we'll discover how early organisms experienced their first feelings, explore the core components of consciousness, and examine how today's anxieties can be traced back to conflicts with our survival instincts. This journey through the strange order of things will provide a fresh perspective on human development and the intricate relationship between our feelings and our achievements.
The Underestimated Role of Feelings in Human Development
When we think about the story of human civilization, we often picture a neat and tidy narrative that emphasizes human intellect as the primary driver of progress. However, Damasio argues that this perspective is misleading and promotes a strange order of things - one that places human feelings as secondary to human intellect when it should be the other way around.
Feelings have played a crucial role in our development, particularly as a feedback mechanism. Consider one of the most basic functions of our body: eating. Feelings of hunger and satisfaction provide important information about our body's state and can spur the mind into action when food is needed. Other feelings, like pain and curiosity, have led us to develop remedies for ailments and solutions to problems. It's these feelings that have prompted us to question and better understand the world around us, as well as come up with innovations to overcome the challenges we face.
Thanks to the information and inspiration provided by our feelings, we've excelled in providing ourselves with nourishment, clothing, shelter, and medical attention - all things that make us healthier, warmer, and more secure. But feelings don't just trigger developments; they also serve as a continuous monitor to judge how well something is working and if it needs improvement.
Another aspect of human advancement that often gets misplaced in the order of things is our social behavior. We tend to link our cooperative abilities to higher brain function, but in reality, these instinctual behaviors go back to well before human beings had any bright ideas.
Scientists have discovered that social behavior can be observed in bacteria, one of the simplest organisms in our evolutionary history. While these microscopic organisms are emotionless, they do process sensory information about their environment, which is what our own feelings evolved from. This sensory perception is enough to exhibit social behavior.
For instance, bacteria will join forces and group together to build up defenses against threats or to gain access to resources. If certain members of the group are recognized as freeloaders or fail to contribute, other bacteria will give them the cold shoulder and refuse to cooperate. This demonstrates that even at the most basic level of life, there are rudimentary forms of social interaction and cooperation.
So, while we may think of our complex social structures and cooperative behaviors as uniquely human traits, they actually have their roots in the most fundamental aspects of life. Feelings, in their most basic form, are at the heart of today's social interactions, and understanding this can help us appreciate the deep connections between our emotions and our social nature.
The Emergence of Feelings in Basic Life Functions
To truly understand the role of feelings in our development, we need to go back to the very basics of life. What bacteria can sense and what you can feel at any given moment might seem worlds apart, but they're connected by a fundamental concept called homeostasis.
Homeostasis can be thought of as an instinctual desire for balance or equilibrium, and it's a fundamental part of every living thing. In fact, it's considered the driving force behind the internal processes that have kept all organisms surviving and thriving since the beginning of life. You can think of your personal feelings about your state of being as agents acting on behalf of homeostasis. After all, feelings like hunger and fear are part of the processes that keep you alive and safe from harm.
As our brains have evolved over time, so too have our feelings. What was once a set of basic feedback mechanisms has developed into what we call self-consciousness, which has enabled us to reflect on homeostasis and what it means to be alive. This evolution in feelings has not only led to inspired techniques for meeting our basic health and safety needs but has also produced art and philosophy to help us explore these feelings. Politics, technology, and science can also be seen as responses to the pleasurable gains and painful losses we experience as a result of pursuing homeostasis.
Homeostasis is so fundamental to keeping living things alive that it's thought to be as old as life itself, estimated to have started around 3.8 billion years ago. However, it took most of that time for the right ingredients to come together and make it possible for us to have the feelings we have today.
The most essential ingredient was a nervous system, which is believed to have evolved around 600 million years ago - making it a relatively recent development in the grand scheme of things. A nervous system is crucial because it allows messages from around the body, including pain and hunger, to reach the brain.
The second evolutionary ingredient that eventually followed was the mental processes that turn those messages from merely mechanical responses to conscious experiences. It wasn't until these two pieces were in place that feelings as we know them first emerged.
This understanding of the origins of feelings helps us appreciate how deeply rooted they are in our biological makeup. Our emotions aren't just surface-level experiences; they're intrinsically tied to our most basic survival mechanisms and have been shaped by billions of years of evolution.
The Connection Between Feelings and Mental Imagery
To recap our evolutionary journey: we started with single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, that could only sense and react to events of a physical or chemical nature. For a long time, life was limited to these purely mechanical reactions. But then simple organisms developed a nervous system, followed by the development of mental processes. These two things combined to produce the feelings we have today.
But what were those first primitive feelings like? When these two pieces of the puzzle were first in place, organisms were able to do more than perceive and react - they could now map what they were sensing. To be more precise, an organism could literally map an outline, or "draw" a picture of an object being sensed in its environment by activating specific cells in its nervous system.
You can do something similar when you close your eyes and touch an object. The nerves in your fingers will let you draw a mental map of the shape, assisted by your sense of the object's temperature and texture. This mapping ability was a game-changer for organisms, as it not only allowed them to generate images of their external environment but also of their internal world. For example, if an organism was being attacked, it could map the area being targeted.
While both external and internal mapping can be directly related to an organism's survival, the internal mappings are different in that they tend to be more interpreted and "felt" rather than pictured in full detail. This is why we call such internal images "feelings."
When organisms began to reflect on these feelings, it provided a critical evolutionary advantage. The "feeling" organisms were soon thriving and therefore passing down this beneficial trait and growing in numbers. After all, organisms that are better at sensing and responding to feelings, like pain, illness, and danger, are bound to live healthier and safer lives.
As time went on, organisms' brains continued to grow and develop new abilities, like imagining more abstract images, which could then be transformed into innovative new objects. Other critical developments included memory and being able not only to retain images but play back entire events. These advancements paved the way for human creative intelligence.
This connection between mental imagery and feelings is crucial to understanding how our minds work. Our capacity for imagination and mental imagery evolved in tandem with our capacity for feelings. When we picture images in our mind's eye, they are accompanied by feelings - and the more vivid the image, the more intense the feeling.
The reason there's such a strong connection between mental images and feelings is that we tend to apply both as a response to the experiences we have. This places those experiences on a spectrum of quality, from pleasant to unpleasant. In other words, our feelings create qualitative experiences.
There is even a word for the emotional levels we use to judge an experience: valence. The amount of positive or negative valence an emotion has will define the quality of the experience. This process is extremely important to the enrichment of life.
The Deep Connection Between Mind and Body
It's often seen as bad, or even dangerous, to let our emotions get the better of us. We think it's better to let reason and logic dictate our behavior. But Damasio argues that the more harmful behavior would be to ignore your emotions since the richness they provide also plays a critical role in your well-being. Even though emotions can get messy and melancholy, without them you'd be left with a dull, colorless version of the human experience.
Along these same lines, it's important to recognize that your feelings are crucial in bringing together your body and mind - so much so that it's practically impossible to separate the two. The body and mind are so deeply intertwined that the mind can influence the body just as much as the body can influence the mind. In fact, you could easily look at the body and mind as two sides of the same coin - with the coin being a human being.
Nevertheless, there is the problematic popular opinion that the body and mind are separate, with the nervous system serving as the transmitter that links them. But if we looked at this from a physiological perspective, we would recognize that the brain and the body have continuity.
First of all, the brain is part of the nervous system, while the nervous system is deeply connected to the body. So, when feelings arise, it's due to a simultaneous interaction between the body and the nervous system. Put plainly, the mind and the body aren't physiologically separate. They're crucially intertwined.
This understanding challenges the long-held belief in the separation of mind and body, often referred to as Cartesian dualism. Damasio's perspective aligns more closely with modern neuroscience, which increasingly recognizes the intricate connections between our mental and physical states.
The Two Main Aspects of Consciousness
At any moment today, you might have a flood of images going through your mind. You could even think of these images as playing out on a giant movie screen in your head. But the impressive thing is, we're aware that our mind is both the projector and the audience. This awareness is known as consciousness, and it allows you to act as a spectator of the world around you as well as of your internal world.
Damasio identifies two core aspects of consciousness: subjectivity and integrated experience.
The first core aspect, subjectivity, is your own personal perception and feelings. While the mental images play out, there is what psychologists refer to as affect, or the influence of emotions on our behaviors and perceptions. This is how subjectivity is created, as we each have our own emotions and feelings coloring our personal perception of things.
There is nothing physical about subjectivity. There's no tiny version of yourself sitting at a desk in your brain deciding how you feel about this or that. Instead, there are two main ingredients that allow the process of subjectivity to turn the flow of mental images into meaningful thought:
Your unique perspective, which includes what you see and hear. Coming from your eyes and ears, this information will be unlike anyone else's, and it provides the basis for what gets turned into those mental images.
Your personal affect: the emotions and meanings that you apply to your perceptions.
The second core aspect of consciousness is known as the integrated experience. This is the process of applying a piece of subjective mental imagery to the bigger picture of your experiences, and it's an important part of how you make sense of things.
According to the old adage, if you only look at the trees, you'll fail to see the forest. In other words, you'll never perceive the big picture if you only look at that picture's component parts. With the process of integrated experience, the movie screen in your mind isn't playing a bunch of random images - there's a recognizable plot. Once the mind began adding images associated with subjective feelings, the missing pieces in the plot fell into place, things began to make more sense, and the beauty of consciousness as we know it began to take hold.
This understanding of consciousness helps explain why our experiences feel so personal and unique to us. It's not just about processing information; it's about how that information is colored by our emotions and integrated into our broader understanding of the world.
The Role of Feelings in Human Culture
When you think of culture, you might think of the theater, or of museums full of artwork. But human culture is so much more. Indeed, it encompasses all of our inventions, ideas, and creative accomplishments. There are some people who believe that culture's driving force, the engine that brought us both the first wheel and the latest spaceship, is our intellect, pure and simple.
But Damasio argues that intelligence alone won't cut it. For creative intelligence, one must add the ingredients of feelings and consciousness. In fact, when we look back at history, we can see how our feelings played a direct role in the great creative leaps taken during the course of cultural development.
Prior to the evolution of complex minds, early humans came up with inventions as a direct response to homeostatic feelings of hunger, fear, and cold. These feelings spurred innovations like shelter, clothing, and fire, as well as tools for hunting and defense.
A major subsequent development was religion, which likely came as a response to feelings of grief and loss over loved ones who'd passed away. Another contributing factor was likely the fear, dread, and anger that was felt toward natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, and plagues. Religion offered both explanations as well as a much-needed sense of security.
Then came the arts, including music, dance, painting, poetry, and theater. These also provided a sense of comfort and consolation by offering people entertainment and uplifting feelings. It's no coincidence that singing or the notes of a cello can stir deep, warm, and pleasurable feelings.
After art came the development of philosophy, which was spurred on by the feelings of awe and wonder that arose when people beheld the cosmos and tried to grasp its mysteries.
Eventually, modern science emerged, and here too we can see how feelings led to innovation. In modern medicine, the obvious feelings pushing science forward are pain and suffering. But in physics and chemistry, there are also feelings of discomfort, frustration, and inconvenience that drive innovations further in hopes of bettering the human condition.
Clearly, without emotion, we'd be lacking a powerful motivator for cultural development. This perspective challenges the notion that human culture is solely the product of our rational minds. Instead, it suggests that our emotional experiences have been just as crucial in shaping the world we've created around us.
Homeostasis and Modern Anxieties
In some ways, we live in a time of unprecedented comfort and health. Science and technology have reduced mortality rates and made it easier to travel, access knowledge, and experience all the world has to offer. But despite all these advancements, there is still a sense of crisis. Rather than enjoying life, many live in a state of constant distraction, with happiness levels on the decline in some areas. Looming over us every day are threats to our survival, including climate change, cyber warfare, and the menace of nuclear weapons.
While many of these problems can seem overwhelming, Damasio suggests that some can be explained if we look again to the ancient properties of homeostasis. The primary concern of homeostasis is with the individual organism, and our subjective nature often results in mental walls forming that keep concerns focused on individual well-being, rather than the well-being of others.
This doesn't mean that homeostasis can't be extended to include the family, or small groups. But, generally speaking, our sense of homeostasis will never suddenly change to be concerned with wider groups of people, especially if it's as wide and diverse as that found in many nations, societies, and neighborhoods.
Collective groups of similar people are commonly referred to as a "body," as if it were one organism. Nonetheless, such bodies will still lack the basic homeostasis of an individual, as each person in the group is ultimately driven by his or her own self-interest.
So, many of the problems facing today's cosmopolitan world aren't that surprising, since our homeostatic responses were refined over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. We can't expect to suddenly be receptive to the homeostatic needs of a culturally diverse population that has only existed for a few thousand years.
When we consider homeostasis, we can see that its conflict with modernity is like a clash between two worlds. The principles of homeostasis were formed by the rules governing the natural world, and they dictate how we experience and respond to our environment. This is a process that has less to do with logic and more to do with emotions of pleasure and pain.
Yet we've invented a new world around us, one that attempts to manage our experience in a logical and scientific way, with vaccines and genetic interventions. This is why many feel conflicted and confused about modern life. After all, we're trying to replace our instinctual processes with gadgets and creature comforts designed to make us feel that balanced equilibrium. But the question remains: Have we gone too far?
This perspective helps explain why, despite our technological advancements and increased comfort, many people still struggle with anxiety and dissatisfaction. Our ancient homeostatic mechanisms, designed for a very different world, are often at odds with the realities of modern life.
Conclusion: The Strange Order Revealed
As we've journeyed through Damasio's "The Strange Order of Things," we've uncovered a fascinating narrative about the role of feelings in human development and culture. This book challenges our conventional understanding of human progress, suggesting that our emotions and feelings have been just as crucial as our intellect in shaping who we are and what we've achieved.
We've learned that feelings are not just surface-level experiences, but are deeply rooted in our biological makeup, tied to the fundamental concept of homeostasis that has guided life since its beginnings. From the simplest organisms to the complex human mind, the drive for balance and survival has been a constant force, shaping our responses to the world around us.
We've explored how the development of a nervous system and mental processes allowed for the emergence of feelings as we know them, and how these feelings are intimately connected with our ability to create mental images. This connection between feelings and mental imagery has been crucial in the development of human consciousness and our capacity for creative intelligence.
Damasio's work also highlights the deep connection between mind and body, challenging the notion that they are separate entities. Instead, he presents a view of human beings as integrated wholes, where our physical and mental states are inextricably linked.
We've seen how feelings have been the driving force behind many of humanity's greatest achievements, from the development of tools and shelter to the creation of art, religion, philosophy, and science. This perspective offers a new appreciation for the role of emotions in human culture and innovation.
Finally, we've considered how our ancient homeostatic mechanisms might be at odds with the realities of modern life, helping to explain some of the anxieties and challenges we face in today's world.
"The Strange Order of Things" invites us to reconsider the hierarchy we often place on reason over emotion. It suggests that our feelings, far from being obstacles to progress, have been essential to our development as a species. By understanding this strange order - where feelings precede and shape our rational thoughts - we can gain a deeper appreciation for the complexity of human nature and the forces that have shaped our world.
As we move forward, facing the challenges of the modern world, this understanding can help us navigate the sometimes conflicting demands of our ancient biological heritage and our rapidly changing environment. It reminds us that our emotions are not just reactions to the world around us, but active participants in shaping that world.
In the end, Damasio's work encourages us to embrace the full spectrum of our human experience, recognizing that our feelings and our thoughts, our bodies and our minds, are all part of the intricate tapestry that makes us who we are. By acknowledging this strange order of things, we can perhaps find new ways to address our modern challenges and continue the remarkable journey of human development.