The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
Book Review: Hopefully Confused, But Not Without Insight
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a book about consciousness and the sense of self. Unfortunately, the *relationship* between these two things is something that Damasio has apparently not thought much about; he spends most of the book more or less equating the two, to various and ever-changing degrees. But our sense of self is *something we are conscious of*; it is not consciousness per se. Yes, it is a particulatly important something; but at the level of deepest *mechanisms*, my consciousness of my self and my entire autobiographical history may well be indistinguishable from my consciousness of the slight itch below my left shoulder blade. There is some provocative discussion here of medical conditions in which consciousness is impaired or absent (although Damasio seems unaware of one of the best such instances, automatic behavior in narcolepsy). And there is much insightful theorizing about how the sense of self might be constructed neurally, from circuits integrating sensory and proprioceptive (self-sensory) information. But because Damasio never stops to question just how the latter topic might be related to the former, the end result is a hopeless muddle. That's a shame, because there are some things (like the centrality of emotion) that Damasio hits right on the head (so to speak). Buy two copies: one to read and one to hurl periodically against the wall.Book Review: Damasio has become the "Dr Joyce Brothers"of Neurology
Summary: 1 Stars
What is most amazing about this book is the audacity of the author who willingly takes credit for the work, ideas, research, and theories of others. Damasio, however, has many friends, who are willing to go along with a wink and a nod, and write fabulous reviews about a truly inspid book written by a man who has never had an original thought. Some of these "friends" have a financial stake in his success, such as the New York Times--an organization which in fact created him as a celebrity in order to market him. This book represents more marketing hype and you will note in the wonderful reviews it has received, that not a single reviewer (i.e. friend of Damasio) can detail anything significant about this book other than to offer up platitudes. Yet, this book is about platitudes and is written by a man who has become the "Joyce Brothers of Neurology."Book Review: An eye-opener!
Summary: 4 Stars
The great value of Damasio's book is that it is written by an expert, but with a general audience very much in view. Damasio is both an experienced practicing psychiatrist and a neurological researcher of considerable standing. I am myself a linguist, and have tried my hand at reaching the general public in a book (in Swedish) on Language and the Brain. That has at least made me realize how difficult it is to make intelligible the biological base of such abstract structures as human language and human thought. On this score I think Damasio succeeds excellently. He may not have the philosophical breadth of Daniel Dennett, or the research brilliance of Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman -- both of them referred to by Damasio. But he achieves a rare balance between clinical experience and sound scientific argument. Whereas most philosophers, since Plato and Aristotle, have laid stress on the connection between consciousness and the very highest functions of the mind -- foresight, logical thinking, creative imagination -- Damasio highlights its humble roots in the body, its connection with feelings and emotions which we share with other animals, as Darwin showed in his treatise on The Expression of Emotions in Men and Animals. This basic "core consciousness", as Damasio terms it, arises from the brain's ability to connect and relate its representations of aspects of the outer world -- objects -- with its continuous representations of the inner world of the organism. This is the foundation of the concept of self, which eventually will incorporate all of the organism's experiences throughout its life: the "autobiographical self". Throughout, Damasio explains how such representations can be identified in the brain. Typically each representation is distributed over many brain structures, not, as the 19th century phrenologist thought, one place for each. In the same way, the second or third order representation of the self is not to be found in one single spot (the pineal gland, as Descartes thought). There is no "homunculus" in the brain, no central representation of a little man, a "ghost in the machine", to use the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle's term back in the 1940s. Damasio does not shun the anatomical and physiological details. He sometimes goes into great detail, which the ordinary reader will find quite demanding. However, the main point about the biological base of consciousness, is never left out of sight, and will whet the appetite for a second or third reading of a rich and rewarding book.Book Review: An objective study of subjectivity
Summary: 5 Stars
I much appreciated reading Damasio's book. First and for most because Damasio's study logically combines objective neurologic facts with rigorous introspective analysis. At last, «hard» science can be profitably put to work to tackle global subjective problems. Damasio seems to be at the forefront of this relatively new trend. And his book is a good reference point to help any serious reader to think about the way consciousness works.Brain injuries mentioned in the book show that, contrary to widespread belief, consciousness does not originate in the cortex, or in a «higher» human faculty; it originates in the more primitive areas of the brain. Damasio stresses that it is a fact, not an hypothesis, independantly of what we may think of his thesis exposed in the book. The core of his thesis is that consciousness originates from the internal representation of perceived modifications to the body (to the «proto-self» ) caused by perceived external objects interacting with the body during that time. We become conscious of ourselves, of the external objects and of the interaction between the two at the same time.
Even if most of the time, the language used is very easy to understand, I had difficulties grasping his multi-levels concepts about the self and about consciousness. At first they seemed to me badly defined and arbitrary. But further attentive reading, further exposure to the neurological facts put forward by Damasio and further thinking made me see the reasons behind those concepts.
However, I still think that Damasio's notion of the self is a too passive one. He doesn't emphasize the essential role of the «inner drive» of the body (instincts, impulses, basic desires, etc.) in the making of consciousness. It seems to me that the concrete feeling of that basic inner drive is a unifying whole in front of the external world and objects. It is much more concrete and real than any other internal representation of our own body. It is that drive that made us (as babies) interact in the first place with external objects, experience with them and distinguish them from us. So, it surely must have a central role to play in the process of consciousness, maybe taking the place of Damasio's more general «proto-self».
Anyway, Damasio's book is a great one that made me think a lot and put order in my own thoughts. He is a courageous scientist trying to explain objectively what is going on subjectively. He is upgrading with the newest science what great thinkers like Hegel and Piaget had been doing (in other fields of knowledge).
Book Review: A scientist turns philosphical
Summary: 4 Stars
Until this century, philosophers were generally people with immense scientific and empirical expertise who also asked, "So what does it all amount to?" Now, we have scientists who don't know how to think about that question and philosophers who have no body of knowledge to think about when they ask it. Dimasio breaks the mold: Using the medium of a trade book to raise rigorous philosophical thinking unwelcomed within science, he provides the finest theory of mind since William James. This book is a model of how we ought to be thinking about minds: using both careful philosophical reflection to know what to make of scientific information, and scientific information to know which theories we should even bother thinking about any longer, Dimasio escapes the blinkered (and misleading) thinking of true-believer scientists and no-knowing philosphers.