Episode 44: Antonio Damasio on Feelings, Thoughts, and the Evolution of Humanity

0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Today, we're very fortunate to have an extremely distinguished scientist. Antonio Damasio is a well-known neuroscientist and professor of neuroscience at USC, University of Southern California here in LA, where he is also a professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology. You might remember that a few months ago, we talked to Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, who also works at USC in the Brain and Creativity Institute, and we talked about embodied cognition, the idea that what is constituting our thoughts does not come solely from our minds, but also from our bodies, that our bodies have a role to play in understanding how we think, not just what we do. So, Damasio is the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute where this interview actually took place, and so, he's been a pioneer in this way of thinking for many, many years.

0:00:55 SC: And in his new book, which just came out in paperback, called The Strange Order of Things, he sort of summarizes what he's come to think about this, and he emphasizes, funnily enough, the idea of feelings. In Damasio's view, we don't take feelings nearly seriously enough when we try to explain how we think, how we behave, what makes us human beings. To Damasio, what a feeling is is a way of our bodies telling ourselves how we're doing with respect to the goal of maintaining homeostasis. Homeostasis is the condition that our body is in when our temperature is right, our oxygen level is right, and so forth. And feelings are somehow the very, very primal indications that we get from our body that something is not right, or that everything is going really, really well.

0:01:43 SC: So we actually trace, following his book, the origin and evolution of feelings from bacteria, which don't even have nervous systems, but they have sort of a precursor to the idea of feelings, all the way up through evolutionary time to human beings. And in fact, we go beyond that, not just to individual human beings, but to societies and cultures. Damasio tries to argue that the fact that so much of who we are as human beings is rooted in our feelings, is woefully neglected when we think about the origin of things like religion or politics or law or anything like this, any of the ways that human beings get together in a social context.

0:02:24 SC: So, I think both the specific point of view that Damasio has about these things, and his love for being synthetic and taking many, many different areas and mixing them together, and seeing how they interact with each other is very similar to a point of view that I took from a different angle in The Big Picture in my own book. So we had a wonderfully sympathetic conversation here. I think that these are really ideas that are both important and helpful, as well as a little mind-bending. So I think this is one you're gonna like. Let's go.

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0:03:11 SC: Antonio Damasio, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:13 Antonio Damasio: My pleasure.

0:03:14 SC: So, you've written several books, but we're gonna focus on your most recent book. And I think what I'd like to do is sort of give away the punchline at the beginning, and then we can go back and build up to it. So, as far as I can tell, the punchline is encapsulated in two words, feelings and homeostasis. These have a very different vocabulary word level of precision, but tell us about feelings. Why is a neuroscientist talking about feelings? This sounds like we're gonna share our feelings with each other or something like that.

0:03:45 AD: There'd be nothing wrong with that. No, feelings is actually an undeveloped interest that people ought to have, but seem not to. And it's the kind of phenomenon that has been completely forgotten, largely because of plain cognition. Throughout the 20th century and into our time, we have given a tremendous amount of attention to so-called cognitive phenomena, obviously the thinking processes, the processes of reasoning, memory, sensory processes as well. But people have forgotten that there is something that from a point of view of evolution precedes all of that cognitive development. And that has to do with feeling, with affect. With the fact that a living organism, and especially a living organism that is conscious and has mental states, has a constant qualification of those mental states, as favorable or unfavorable to life, is good or bad.

0:05:02 AD: And that's what we're talking about when we talk about affect and about feelings. And mind you, as you know from reading the book, feelings is by no means a synonym of emotion. On the contrary, you keyed into two very important concepts in the book, feelings and homeostasis. And neither of them is a synonym of emotion. Emotion is a different thing that we can talk about. So feelings is indeed an incredibly important phenomenon, is a phenomenon that I think only occurs in creatures that have nervous systems and minds. You need to have both, which doesn't mean, of course, that it is exclusively human, not at all. I expect most creatures with a nervous system that is complex enough, and with a complex body to have feelings. If they have feelings exactly like ours is a different story, but the essence of feeling is a positivity or negativity, something that we can describe with the term valence, and that has to do with how the feeling state is conducive or not to the continuation of life into the quality of that life. Valence designates that quality.

0:06:26 SC: So if it's not just emotions, so are emotions are subset of feelings or a kind of feeling?

0:06:32 AD: No. Emotions are, as the name indicates, actions. And that's one of the big problems that has been so badly served by the confusion of emotion and feeling that is part of the culture, of any culture, actually, this is quite widespread, is that emotions are in fact something that must have preceded feelings and that consists of certain actions that result in a better or worse adaptation of a living creature to the environment. So, when you have a response by some very simple organism that consists of withdrawing, you could say that that response is at heart an emotive response. So there is a movement and that's...

0:07:26 SC: The word motion is in there.

0:07:26 AD: Exactly, the word motion is in there and emotions such as we commonly know, for example, fear or the emotion of anger, or of compassion are collections of actions that produce a certain effect. And that result in a certain effect for the individual that is undergoing the emotion, and that produce a certain effect outside in other creatures or in the environment. But I like to talk about emotions as concerts of actions, that the best technical way of describing it is action programs.

0:08:09 SC: Okay.

0:08:10 AD: Whereas feeling, and this is very simple, feelings are the experiences of those action programs or, going even deeper, the experience of the action programs that enact life itself. So, when you tell me that, "I feel so well," and you're describing well-being, what I think you are describing is your experience of your organism functioning well, functioning in fact, in something that if not optimal is in the direction of the optimal, in terms of the way the homeostasis is being run inside your organism. And when you tell me that, "I feel kind of sick," what you're doing is describing the collection of actions, its integrated sense that you have that your organism is having certain kinds of actions that sort of describe life at that moment and unfortunately, it's not going so well. [laughter] And it is on the basis of all of this evolutionarily that then you come to have these highly organized little concerts, this highly organized packs of actions that we call emotions most typically. This is so interesting that people normally think of emotions quite correctly from the great exemplars they have around them. For example, fear, anger, disgust.

0:09:43 SC: Happiness, love.

0:09:44 AD: Exactly. So, they go immediately to things that are already highly organized and they don't think that prior to that, there were already states of affect, there were already things that were good or bad. For example, hunger, thirst.

0:10:02 SC: Nervousness. Is that a feeling?

0:10:04 AD: Nervousness I would say, it's both.

0:10:07 SC: Okay.

0:10:07 AD: And by the way, one of things that you realize is happening here is that our language is extremely limited and we end up having the same words for the emotive set as for the feeling itself or the mental experience of having the emotive set. So when you say, "I'm happy," you could be describing the set of actions that constitute your happiness, which are certain parameters of your metabolism, certain parameters of your musculature.

0:10:39 SC: You're smiling, you're jumping at.

0:10:40 AD: Exactly. So the attitudes that you're having, all of which is motor, it's motor all the way down and motor all the way up. But you could be describing also this feeling you have, which is your mental experience.

0:10:53 SC: And so the feelings precede the emotions, I think maybe by mistake, you said earlier, emotions precede.

0:11:00 AD: Well, it depends on what kind of feeling and emotion you're talking about. The very fundamental ones that I like to call homeostatic feelings, they follow the actions of your state of homeostasis. So it's probably better to say that the actions always come first.

0:11:17 SC: Okay.

0:11:18 AD: And then... And by the way, that would be in keeping with the fact that in the beginning, it was action, it was not thinking, it was not feeling.

0:11:27 SC: You weren't thinking too much when you are a bacterium.

[laughter]

0:11:28 AD: Exactly. You didn't have minds, but you have is bodies, and bodies act and bodies can make movements, can sense something, can respond and responses, whenever we talk about responses, we're talking about one of two things, either something that is acted by a muscle or something equivalent, something that allows an organism, even a single cell organism to move that action, or something that happens internally which is the secretion or the release of a molecule, that's an action as well. And in fact, those are the primordial action.

0:12:06 SC: An internal action is not one that we would see happening, but it's still an action.

0:12:09 AD: Exactly, exactly.

0:12:11 SC: That's right.

0:12:11 AD: And then as things get more complicated and eventually as you get nervous systems and you can access to this benighted state we call mind, then we have a variety of experiences that are very complex and that you can describe in relation to the interior and in relation to the outside.

0:12:31 SC: And in some sense then, the summary of feelings is that they're a way for us to recognize that we're deviating from this homeostatic state. So probably, at this point it would be good to tell our listeners what homeostasis is and what's so important about that.

0:12:45 AD: Exactly. And I think that one thing for our listeners that would be important to say is that, feelings follow homeostasis. The key thing in this whole story is of course, life and this set of characteristics that must be observed for life to exist, for life to persist. And of course, homeostasis is a sort of way of describing this rapidly, is a way of encapsulating all of this, and it consists of a set of operations that do a number of interesting things. One, is maintain life so that it can continue moment by moment. So you're running in essence to make it a little bit more complicated, you're running metabolism, you're using sources of energy, and you're using those sources of energy to maintain a machine which is made whether it is one cell or many cells in different tissues and organs, it doesn't make any difference, you need to feed those cells with sources of energy and you make this beautiful exchange that is really the heart of what metabolism is about, it's really an exchange.

0:14:09 AD: And you maintain cells alive, and when you have multiple cells they are integrated in such a way that they realize certain acts and they sense what's around, which is important if they're going to feed and they respond if you're coming with a poke that could destroy an organism. So, it's already from the get-go a way of leading that organism into the conditions that are essential for its maintenance, the primary one of which is the acquisition of sources of energy and defending itself. So we have these two things. You are not going to continue living if you allow yourself to be crushed and you're not going to continue living if you don't have a way of transforming a product external to the organism into a source of energy so that you maintain the machine going.

0:15:13 SC: Good. I mean, there's two things that are in here that I really wanna tease out before we get into the main part [chuckle] of our conversation. One of them is this idea, which I've said myself in talks, homeostasis is a form of stasis in some sense. You know, you can sit quietly meditating, not moving very much, but it's a very different kind than the table being static and not moving.

0:15:34 AD: Exactly.

0:15:35 SC: It's this kind that requires constant upkeep and this constant fuel injection and below the surface, there's a lot going on.

0:15:42 AD: Absolutely. It's really about activity, getting back to the idea that the reason why emotion and motion are keys to what we're talking about, is that it's all about activity. It's in a way a better... It's very interesting, when you talk about... It's the last thing that it produces is stasis.

0:16:02 SC: Right.

0:16:02 AD: I think that the source of the utilization of that radical stasis is from the idea that there's a maintenance of something which is in abstract the living condition. But it's not static at all, it's constantly activity. And for me, the best analogy is the analogy of the jongleur that is throwing balls...

0:16:26 SC: The juggler, we would say, yes.

[chuckle]

0:16:28 AD: The juggler, which is throwing balls up in the air and is constantly having to be extremely precise about where he's going to be so that the balls don't start falling, because once one of them starts falling, then the rest will follow. Instead... But it's all about activity and there's something that in the juggler analogy you also capture is how unnatural it is. You see, I think that people, of course, are surrounded by life and it looks very natural. Well, it really isn't, it's...

0:17:01 SC: It requires some upkeep.

0:17:02 AD: It requires upkeep and is an uphill battle, that's why it is so vulnerable and that's why you need all sorts of devices to keep it going.

0:17:13 SC: Right.

0:17:13 AD: And of course, they are already extremely powerful at the level of the single cell and then they become incredibly powerful when you're talking about multi-cellularity, even if you're talking about a simple insect, let alone where you're talking about a mammal such as we are. And then when you look at the big creatures, you realize something else, is that, homeostasis again, because of that stasis root, is very connected with stability. You have the idea of something that is in balance, but it is not in balance. And we're constantly struggling about points... It's not that homeostasis is the balance point in life. No, it's a range of possibilities and within that range, you could then describe values that come out of life and that we have arbitrarily given names, such as goodness or badness, health and disease, and you can describe a level that is optimal or a level that is so-so and is mediocre. But there are all of these different levels that are there in the process. And it's interesting, because our language at least gives us, or most languages give us some possibilities of describing this with words such as, for example, well-being. Well-being describes something that in the general distribution of states of life goes towards the good. But something like flourishing describes something even better.

0:18:56 SC: More dynamical.

0:18:57 AD: More dynamic, more rich, more expansive in the way it extrudes itself from the organism and interacts with the environment. Malaise is one thing but being sick with cancer is something else.

0:19:12 SC: Sure.

0:19:12 AD: And there are all of these different grades of homeostasis and of the descriptor that we have in most languages. We have all of these marvelous words to describe everything between sickness and death, and flourishing and happiness.

0:19:32 SC: On Twitter recently I said that we won't ever get true human-level artificial intelligence until computers can be bored. And this is my sort of cheeky way of pointing out, you turn on a computer, it can just sit there, it doesn't feel the need to do anything and this sort of, the role of feelings and homeostasis in biological life is an aspect which not only haven't we, but maybe we don't even try these days to capture in that artificial environment.

0:19:57 AD: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think that one of the problems with artificial intelligence is the way it has been conceived very artificially. Thinking about "organisms," that are made of rigid materials, materials that don't bend, materials that have a minimum of vulnerability and that is exactly the opposite of what life is all about.

0:20:27 SC: It's not this constant churning.

0:20:29 AD: No, life is about the vulnerability and the juggler trying to keep this thing which is the most unnatural you can imagine. In the artificial, for example, when you think of, most of the robots that one can think of as intelligent and very successful, there are things that are, you can destroy them with an axe and by a real act of violence, but they will not get sick. Not only don't they get bored, they don't get sick either, nor are they very happy. The robot that cleans your floor is not gonna be happier as a result of doing a good cleaning job. And Sean, on that point, there's also something interesting. So, we're very interested in that issue because I think there's a way in which the problems of feeling, the whole issue of feeling can be brought into robotics, into artificial intelligence in general. And there is an interesting development that has to do with soft robotics, which I'm sure you're aware of.

0:21:33 AD: And that has to do with materials that emulate a little bit some of the properties of living things such as, for example, movements that are, movement of a Cyclops and with materials that bend as opposed to material, you know, arms that are made of rigid parts, articulated in the most comical fashion possible, when you compare them with the way a limb and muscles really operate. And I think that, but a lot of that still does not aim at the critical issue of feeling. The critical issue of feeling potentially can be dealt with if we develop designs of robotics in which we have that vulnerability. In other words, trying to solve the problem in a way that looks illogical because instead of trying to create a machine that is super robust, the logic, if you're going to do something that in any way emulates life is to make it vulnerable.

0:22:42 SC: And also the ability to then repair itself when that vulnerability takes place.

0:22:46 AD: Exactly. And so, of course, we are very far from that, but I think it's a very important idea. And actually here at the BCI, we have an interest in that, we have been talking about this, one of my young colleagues, Kingson Man, is actually working on that problem and we think that it deserves attention. Also it's very interesting because the community is more receptive to it now.

0:23:13 SC: Getting there, yeah.

0:23:14 AD: Yeah. I remember the first times that I talked in public, a little bit like you and I would say, "Look, you're not serious about conferring feelings or any kind of useful mind, truly intelligent mind to a device such as yours." And people would be extremely offended, and probably I was not doing it the right way either. But now people have become very receptive and we've had numerous instances in which people say, "Oh, well, you're absolutely right. That makes sense." And I think it also comes from the fact that people are now more ready to accept homeostasis as a very important part of what we are as living creatures and feelings is a very good proxy once you have nervous systems in mind, which of course are late developments in the history of life.

0:24:09 SC: Right. But this is part of your bigger message, which is, when we're talking about AI in a robot that when you're thinking about what minds are, you can't separate them from bodies. They came from bodies, they still are embedded in bodies.

0:24:20 AD: Exactly.

0:24:21 SC: And that needs to be taken into account.

0:24:23 AD: Exactly. And a lot of what... It's very interesting to, there's all sorts of, almost each one of these topics could be a topic for one of your programs.

0:24:35 SC: I know. [chuckle]

0:24:37 AD: [chuckle] But just think of the fact that when you have a mind, you normally think of it as unconnect to a body and you think of it, now especially after the huge success of the past 100 years of biology and science, you think of it as in relation to the nervous system alone. Now, this is very, very wrong.

0:25:05 SC: In other words, not the rest of the body, just the nervous system.

0:25:07 AD: Not the rest of the body. And one of the points that I'm trying to make with The Strange Order of Things and why there is the words order and strangeness in the title, is that it didn't begin that way, it didn't. We've had life on earth for most of the existence of life. This long history, which is almost 4 billion years, we have had nervous systems, perhaps for 500 million, this is a pittance. In most of that time, we had extremely complex living creatures, first without many nucleus, even single cells, no nucleus or membrane, but then multi-cellularity and then in the creation of systems such as, for example, the endocrine system, the immune system, circulation, all of these things preceded the appearance of nervous systems. And guess what? They were conferring even with that so-called simplicity which is nothing like simple, they were conferring on those creatures a possibility of extremely intelligent behavior that allowed them to socialize, or not socialize, allow them independence if the energy around was sufficient to maintain that life or allow them to create alliances with others, like-minded, except there was no mind.

0:26:42 SC: Polyaffiliation, yeah.

0:26:43 AD: Exactly, polyaffiliation, and allowed them to fight or to do incredible things such as pretending that there's no conflict and moving away to another site. In other words, you have single-cell creatures that behaved for eons in ways that if you were describing them without saying it was a single cell creature, and you were simply making a notation, some sociological notation of the attitudes of the creature, you would immediately attribute intentions, a mind, purposes and all of those things. Well, they do have purposes, they do have intentions, except that they are not expressed in the way your intentions or mine are expressed, which is through a thinking process in which we identify a goal, and we try to execute that goal, because we have a mind and we have that mind because we developed at a certain point a nervous system. But all of these are sort of late developments and we have this huge spectacular history of life with intentions, with presumed purposes protecting life through and through, because that becomes the purpose, the unspoken purpose, and but that was all there prior to nervous systems and minds.

0:28:02 SC: And part of the role, part of the usefulness in telling that story is a slightly deflationary role in the sense that when we think of ourselves, and we think about feelings and consciousness and other things like that, it's just hard for us to imagine that this is purely mechanical. And there's plenty of our colleagues who give in to the temptation to assign something non-mechanical, non-materialistic, non-physical to it. But if you dig back into the evolutionary history, you see precursors of everything. And so, I love... Maybe you can even go into a little bit more detail about specifically bacteria and how they act and bacteria are pretty much the most primitive organisms that we have around. It has no... They are single cells, they don't even have a nucleus, but like you said, they team up and this is true even of bacteria today and was presumably true of bacteria billions of years ago.

0:28:51 AD: Yeah, exactly, yeah. And they team and they have a very rich social life and that social life can depend on the environment. You see all of this again, it pushes us into this core issue of life management and homeostasis. So for example, if they are in the terrain that is extremely fertile and that offers sources of energy galore, bacteria actually live there independently, they can be isolated. But if...

0:29:21 SC: They're introverts.

0:29:22 AD: They're introvert. But if they are in the situation of scarcity, if there's not enough feeding material, or if they are under threat, then they will group together and they form a coalition that allows them to defend themselves. And they do that, for example, the kind of bacteria that can attack your throat or mine and give us laryngitis, for example, doing exactly same thing, they will go into that terrain, they are on an aggressive mode and they want to feed off your tissues, our living tissues and then of course, it's going to provoke a reaction and our organism is going to try to defend itself against them. And then they, the bacteria, are going to try to defend themselves against the defense of our organism and they can, for example, form a palisade and produce chemical substances that will isolate them from the actions of our organism or the actions of antibiotics that we may take. So that all of this game is being played by these little creatures that you could not see without a microscope. And that don't have a cell but that have a life to defend come what may, even if they don't know they have a life.

0:30:47 SC: And probably none of us would say that in some sense, if this is a valid formulation, that the bacteria truly have intentions, planning, desires or whatever. But I think the point is that, when you look at how they actually behave, you see the behaviors that later evolved into intentions and desires.

0:31:10 AD: Exactly. So, there is something very beautiful in the fact that this plan of life, the way it operates, is organized, contains these devices, these strategies. And all of those strategies then become more expressed as you have a multi-cellular body and as you have, for reasons that have to do with multi-cellularity, a controller, because you see that the reasons why you end up having a nervous system is that as your body grows bigger in a multicellular way, what was very easy to control in terms of the release of a chemical molecule that would diffuse and would be sort of noted everywhere in that little body, now becomes very difficult to exert that control because you no longer can expand that all over a bigger organism. So you have a nervous system and the nervous system is helping you control the stuff, it's helping you, for example, coordinate the motility.

0:32:15 AD: Is helping you put a certain sector working in a certain way once you develop, say, something like a heart beating that needs to do the propulsion of blood inside a tubular structure. So all of these things are constantly being developed with a logic, and that logic is the logic of life, and of course the way it operates evolutionarily is another story, but it's as if you could constantly tell the story as look, you're gonna have single creatures with life, no nucleus. Then you give them a nucleus, the story gets more complicated, then you give the multi-cellularity, then you give them a nervous system to help with multi-cellularity, otherwise you can't cope with that.

0:33:05 AD: And then eventually you come to this very beautiful and unexpected development, which is the possibility of creating maps of what is going on within the structure or within a body, and of what is going on outside. And that's through emergence of minds. It is very beautiful, because on the develop... On the side, which has to do with the interior where you make maps of what is going on inside your body, that's the line that is going to lead you towards feeling. Whereas the side that looks at what is outside, and uses eyes or ears to pick up on sounds or the morphology of structures, that's something that gives you access to the exterior. But those are exactly the same things that you and I have in our organism, except we have it with an enormous wealth that not every creature does, but that duality, what goes to the inside and what goes to the outside, is very critical, and maybe you don't want to go there, but...

0:34:15 SC: No, go there. [laughter]

0:34:17 AD: I can tell about the things that have to do with the interior that are fabulously, fabulously beautiful. So probably, the most important for your listeners is the fact that when you think, if you ask the man on the street or any of our colleagues that has not thought about these problems, where do minds come from? The person will say, "Well, brains, obviously, we cannot have minds without brains." That sounds logical enough. And I've just stated it many times when I was talking about the emergence of minds. The issue is that although brains are essential for the making of minds as we know them, it doesn't follow that all the aspects of mind come exclusively from nervous systems. And here we enter a realm that is absolutely central to current-day neuroscience and to philosophy of mind, is that we have been in a very bad way attributing minds exclusively to nervous systems, to the point that people will say, "Well, you have minds because you have chains of neurons firing, using synapses." And thus, of course, where minds come from.

0:35:46 SC: We call it neuroscience.

0:35:47 AD: Exactly, and people are very happy with this. Well, it's not as easy as that, because when you look at this huge world of affect, the world of feeling and the emotions that can be associated with it, you actually realize that this is not being generated primarily out of the nervous system, but with the participation of the nervous system. Where the stuff is coming from is, guess what? Your body, is your muscles, whether the striated muscle with which you can move an arm or the smooth muscles, which are around blood vessels, and which can be tight or loose, but are absolutely critical to the maintenance of an organism, and what is being imaged mentally in relation to affect is actually those phenomena that have to do with the body. So when you think about feeling, when you think about feeling anxious, for example, or when you think about feeling very relaxed and happy, what you are describing or what you are experiencing is actually a state of the body that is being described mentally thanks to a coalition of your body structures and your nervous structures, and it's the two together that are creating the foundation of mind, which is your state of affect.

0:37:29 AD: Of course, we have totally inverted things in the 20th century by going completely crazily into a cognitive track, ignoring feeling and emotion, and thinking about thinking as if it were the true substance of mind.

0:37:47 SC: As if we were brains in vats.

0:37:48 AD: Exactly, right, you had synapses and firing, and so forth. And this is crazy in many ways. First of all, it totally denies the reality that we're dealing with in the partnership of bodies and nervous systems. But then it also does something else is that the nervous system by and large does not work only in the way that is conceived in the typical brain in a vat scenario. Our brains are... Our nervous systems are quite synaptic, no question about it. But then there's this huge world of non-synaptic transmission and contacts, which uses different rules. So when you have the typical text book neurons and synapse, you have an axon that connects via a synapse to another neuron, and that axon in the most advanced form is myelinated. So, that axon has been insulated, so that it doesn't leak current, and is actually protected from the influences of the perineural space.

0:39:01 AD: When you go to the interoceptive system, that's the system that brings into your central nervous system signals that have to do with your skin, with your interior, with the organs, with your gut or all of that stuff that comes via spinal ganglia, and that comes via nerves such as the vagus nerve. All of those, all of those neurons are not myelinated. So they are not insulated, and they are open to the vagaries of the surround.

0:39:39 SC: They're listening to their environment.

0:39:41 AD: They're listening to their environment, and so there are all of these molecules that can have an influence. So yes, this neuron is eventually going to fire, but it's not going to fire in the same predictable way that the neuron that was insulated will do it. So it's gonna be different. It's gonna be modulated by the environment. And by the way, this is not a small amount of neurons. This is probably the majority of neurons in our nervous system operate this way. Not only that, the spinal ganglia, which come all along the spine, you have this ganglion with a bunch of cell bodies. Those ganglia including our trigeminal ganglion which has everything has to do with our head, not an unimportant part of our body, all of that is open in terms of blood-brain barrier.

0:40:35 AD: So instead of having a blood-brain barrier, which selectively stops molecules from crossing and entering the central nervous system. On the contrary, it's open, which means that the stuff that is circulating, what you're taking, what you have been drinking or what you have been taking is going to have an influence over how that operates, which really means that not only do you have this huge participation of the body in the operations of mind, but even the nervous system transmission of signals from one to the other is influenced by the state of the body. So it's a very complicated picture that has nothing to do with brain on a vat. Let's put it this way.

0:41:19 SC: But it's part of our prejudice. That it's the thinking, cognitive, conscious part of our brain that is coming up with these games, and it prejudices, it puts itself at the top, right?

0:41:27 AD: Exactly, yeah, and I think that, by the way, one of the big difficulties on the issue of consciousness, which we can all agree has become one of the most popular topics in neuroscience and in psychology and cognitive science in general is that the conception that you have of how minds are made by nervous systems or by bodies in general is going to influence the way you think about consciousness. And I think that, by and large, the traditional views have not been favorable to a clearer view of what we have in front of us, and I think that it's maybe a little bit offensive to some people, but I think that the problem is far simpler than it's normally taken. I'm not saying it's simple. I'm just saying that the idea of a hard problem that you cannot transpose, I think is wrong.

0:42:28 SC: I did have as a previous podcast guest, we had David Chalmers on the podcast, who is the champion of the hard problem of consciousness, separating out the easy problems of action and perception from the hard problem of inner experience, right? And I notice that in your book you take two pages to solve the hard problem of consciousness, and then move on.

0:42:45 AD: That's right, that's what it deserves. No, no, no, I'm not gonna joke about it, because it's more serious than that. The reason why the section on consciousness actually became much smaller in the book is that I had decided quite some time ago to write something on consciousness alone, and then there was so much on consciousness that it unbalanced... The book is about the strange order of developments in biology in general in relation to homeostasis and feeling, not about conscious, although all of this story on homeostasis and feeling is absolutely critical for conscious decisions.

0:43:32 SC: Well, I was going to say if I understood those two pages, I think that the efforts seem to be...

0:43:36 AD: By the way, there are 10. Don't exaggerate it.

0:43:38 SC: Are there 10? But the hard problem, I think that there was only two.

0:43:40 AD: Oh, okay, very good. Maybe.

0:43:44 SC: But I thought it was... I'm also not that convinced that the hard problem is a true problem we're gonna be struggling with for many years. And I think that what you... But then, if I were channeling David Chalmers here in my role as the podcast host he would say, "But there's some fundamental difference between how we act in the world, our objectively seen motions and statements, versus our inner experience." And what you try to be, seem to be saying is that, "Look, if you just look at evolution, and you just look at the existence of feelings, trying to maintain homeostasis, you would naturally find if you were smart enough that it makes sense for organisms to develop the properties of having inner experience." Is that a fair way to say it?

0:44:29 AD: Absolutely. It's absolutely. Yeah, and I think that you develop... Things that, for example, are very interesting and that are not clear is at which point consciousness develops. For example, the relation between consciousness and feeling it's so tight that one could say that, "Well, definitely you cannot have one without the other." You can not have a conscious organism that would not be at the same time a feeling organism. And another thing interesting that you can say is that when you tell me that you have a certain feeling, you tell me that because you're conscious. If you were not conscious, you could not tell me that. So the two things are completely associated. And I think that if I would have to venture, this is exactly where it began, it began first out of necessity, because feeling being the representative of homeostasis is the critical issue that needs to be a guide, needs to be there rather for how we're going to continue life. And then it made sense, and it was good, and obviously it was selected because it was so favorable evolutionarily, it made sense for us to know that that was happening, because what...

0:45:50 AD: By the way, Sean, you may want to point your listeners to the fact that throughout a good part of the history of discussions on feeling, especially in the 20th century, people used to say monstrous things such as, "It's useless, they're useless." It's something that you can do without. What you want is to be smart. You want to speak well, represent well in words what you have thought abstractly, do equations, do the math, create new objects. Do all of these things, but feelings are absolutely unnecessary in the middle of all this. Forgetting the fact that you would not have done any interesting things, if you did not have feelings to protect your life or to invigorate you to pursue a certain goal. You extract feelings from the machine and the machine stops. There's nothing. Why, why continue?

0:46:47 SC: This sounds like a very American perspective, this feelings don't matter kind of thing. You said that your book was more popular in Europe than in the US.

0:46:54 AD: Well, I don't know if that... There would be other reasons for that, but anyway, yes, it could be, it could be. I think that it's certainly an attitude that has come from the huge success of a number of sciences and the huge success of the... The realization that complex thinking is, of course, the way into great science and technology. You're not going to do science and technology with feeling alone, but you're not going to do good science and technology without feeling.

0:47:28 SC: Not going to be interested in doing any of it, right?

0:47:30 AD: Exactly. So why would you care?

0:47:32 SC: The physicist in me thinks of this evolutionary history you've sketched out as a series of phased transitions, right? From non-life to life, and then to eukaryotic life with cells, then multi-cellular life. And you mentioned the importance of images, internal images. So where does it... So we have images of both ourselves and the outside world inside of us, inside of our brains. Does that happen? Do we develop that gradually or does that sort of appear on the scene at some point, that capability?

0:48:00 AD: Both, it had to appear at a certain point, the possibility of imaging, and by the way, it's best talking about images to talk about maps, because that sort of cues people into the idea of how it could be made.

0:48:16 SC: It's a relationship.

0:48:17 AD: Yeah, it's a relationship. It's really mapping. It's plotting something in terms of another material, in terms of another medium. So I can plot what's on that wall by making a sketch that has those frames of those pictures. It's that idea. If you can do this, whether it's the visual, which is of course the easy one to explain, but you can do this in relation to what you touch, you can do this in relation to what you hear, and when you come to smell and taste you do this in terms of the consequences of certain molecules that you are processing, but that mapping function appeared, of course, it required nervous systems, 'cause if we didn't have nervous systems you would not have the... You wouldn't have the paper to create the copy.

0:49:06 SC: Right.

0:49:06 AD: You needed a substrate.

0:49:08 SC: A place to store the information.

0:49:09 AD: Exactly. To depict it, and to eventually to store it in memory. So nervous systems are key there, but the nervous systems probably started doing a dual mapping of certain things in the outside that were very important and certain things inside that were also important. And those happen to be, just not very beautiful perhaps, in the guts. So that's why there's this discussion very often, people talk about the gut as the second brain. And that's pretty comical, because it was the first brain.

0:49:50 SC: Chronologically, it was first.

0:49:51 AD: Chronologically, it is the first. At first, we were sort of floating digestive systems, and you had a gut, and the nervous system was there to create peristalsis to give action to that. But of course at the same time if you have digestion, you were having digestion of something that you ate, and in order for you to eat, you better have some sense of where the thing that you're going to eat was, and that comes from the sensing of the outside. So, it probably co-developed the internal, the internal mapping, and the external mapping. And of course, it's still with us today, and it's not by chance that so many of the feelings you have actually relate to the gut.

0:50:42 SC: Yeah.

0:50:42 AD: For example, anxiety. A lot of the fundamental expressions have to do with it, what happens in the gut. So is highly conserved, and you can imagine that non-human creatures probably have something quite similar. The other is, of course, respiration, because a lot of our, a lot of the feelings that have to do with our well-being are tied to the kind of air flow you have. Does the air flow easily or is it constricted?

0:51:11 SC: Right.

0:51:12 AD: But again, all of those things are under autonomic control. You don't tell your bronchi to constrict, it can give you an attack of asthma. They do if the right molecules are there.

0:51:26 SC: Did you ever read De La Mettrie's Man a Machine?

0:51:30 AD: Oh, yes, many, many, many... I can't promise you that I read the whole thing, but I... There was a time, my Descartes time.

0:51:39 SC: I taught a course at the University of Chicago for undergraduates on the history of atheism, and De La Mettrie was one of the first people to come out in public as a self-proclaimed atheist. And it's funny that he names his book, Man a Machine, because in fact he puts a lot of emphasis on the body, and he says, "Look, I'm a different person when I've had coffee and when I've not had coffee. How can you possibly think my mind is separate from my body?"

0:52:04 AD: No, no, no. There were plenty of smart cookies then.

0:52:09 SC: That's right. But okay, so now, half an hour ago, I said there were two aspects of homeostasis I wanted to tease out. We've got one of them. The other is this future directedness of it. So, I think that people would think of homeostasis if they looked it up in the dictionary as maintaining some features, maintaining our existence within this controlled set of parameters where we can flourish, but you have this extra aspect that is almost teleological, that is sort of planning for the future. Was that... How did that come in? Was that always there? Is that a late development on the scene?

0:52:48 AD: In terms of evolution?

0:52:49 SC: Yeah.

0:52:50 AD: Or in terms of my thinking?

0:52:52 SC: Oh no, in term... Either one, but evolution is what I was thinking of.

0:52:54 AD: Yeah, anyway, okay, both. In terms of my thinking it came late, but what's so interesting, and this is why it's so important not to describe homeostasis as just balance. So again, it's a range of possible states that are compatible with life. But then there is this aspect that has to do with the... In a way you could call it and you could force yourself into calling it a prediction. It's a sort of internal knowledge, non-explicit internal knowledge that there are certain conditions under which you're likely to go under, you're likely not be salvageable, and that you need to protect yourself for such conditions. And one of the easy ways to protect yourself in these circumstances is to hoard up material that is essential as energy supply. So that's one of the reasons why it's so obvious that people are not... The homeostatic machine is not just giving you the, say, the thirst or the hunger for a certain amount of food and then you stop. No, it actually lets you overeat or over-drink, so that you can have some stores for the rainy day and they come in handy. And by the way it's interesting that from a general human point of view, it's so interesting that people who have very severe diets and who actually do something quite unnatural, which is not eat anything and going to a state of enormous thinness, those people are actually vulnerable to...

0:54:33 SC: To disease.

0:54:33 AD: To diseases.

0:54:34 SC: They don't have the resources.

0:54:35 AD: Exactly. So we need some of those resources, we don't need to be fat, but we need to have fat stores, for example, for the moments in which you have a disease. Because when you have a disease you're going to have a huge consumption of those products, and if you don't have them, you go under. And so, that's one part that has to do with the future. And then of course you have the constant for creatures that are thinking, you have the constant utilization of the states of feeling by past experience to allow you to construct a better future where you will not fall into the dangers you fell before and so forth. So that's where a system... A primary feeling system can give goods to a thinking system and again, it's so important, because without those guides, without the fact that you not only have experienced pain and have experienced, let's say hunger, but you haven't reflected on it because you stored that memory and you have had the possibility of bringing it back, and you have the possibility of having certain warning signs that will bring that memory back.

0:55:56 AD: And that's what is constantly playing in you to correct your behaviors, that's why it's inconceivable that you're gonna have a social life in the ample sense of the term, if you are not guided by feelings of every kind of the feelings that have to do with you for example, having been loved or having been ostracized. All of those things are going to... That were experienced, they're memorized as effect not as a feeling, because interestingly, we don't make memories of feelings. Which is quite...

0:56:30 SC: Really?

0:56:31 AD: Yeah. [chuckle] It's quite interesting. Just think, if you'd made memories of all the pains you have suffered, for one thing there would be no child birth.

[laughter]

0:56:42 SC: Well, that's true. You would never write a book.

[laughter]

0:56:45 AD: So, another. So you don't actually make memories of the mental experience of suffering or of joy for that matter; what you do is maintain a number of commentaries on those things, and then you can reactivate by something I call the "as-if body loop." You can reactivate some semblance of the state you lived through. But it's this interplay that of course involves not just feeling but thinking about feeling and memory that is what is guiding a lot of our activity. And of course, that's the kind of thing that allowed the creation of cultures.

0:57:32 SC: Yeah. So good. It's exactly where I want to get to. I mean, we're already being pretty ambitious going from bacteria to us and consciousness and the whole thing guided by this interplay of homeostasis and feeling, but you correctly, I think, point out there's also a story to be told about how we become social and how we talk to each other and how we develop culture.

0:57:51 AD: Yeah, yeah. How we develop all these instruments that again, with the typical lack of concern for the feeling component of humanity, people attribute just to great thinking. So we're very smart people and we reason beautifully, and that's why we're developing moral systems. [laughter] Come on. We just don't... We develop moral systems because we are naturally informed of things that are good for you and compatible with happiness. And you also develop the knowledge that they are good for other people, so you have the guide or the primitives, the originals that are going to shape what is your moral behavior are coming out of your knowledge. Sometimes without paying too much attention to it of what it is to experience life, to suffer, and to be ecstatically happy. And you either want other people to have that or you don't, or you want to make them suffer. But all of that comes out of that core information.

0:59:01 AD: So the way we develop moral, and by the way religious systems, that would come from the same tissue, from the same set of phenomena. The way we do out of that systems of justice. The way we create, for example, systems of governance, systems that include economics, and diplomacy, and so forth, all of that comes out of this core of feeling reasoned through an intelligent system. So once again, we are in this sort of apparent dilemma, which is not, that you cannot do any of this without thinking. You cannot do any of this in a complex way without language to express that thinking, but nor can you do it without feeling. The two things have to be together. If you just have feeling, you're obviously not going to become a modern philosopher, but if you are very, very smart and not feeling, you'd better not be a moral philosopher, or you're gonna be awful.

1:00:04 SC: Is this a reflection of David Hume saying reason should be the slave of the passions?

1:00:09 AD: Well, I think David Hume was a brilliant thinker on exactly the same note.

1:00:14 SC: Yeah.

1:00:15 AD: I think he's one of the people that I very much respect. And there are some people that are sort of heroes of mine because they got it when they might not because the knowledge wasn't there. Hume is one of them. Spinoza is another, in very different. Actually, Spinoza probably is the most unexpected and profound because it's so simple, but the guy got it. He realized what was life. He realized this idea of the conatus, the forces that were impelling life in a certain direction. So he, of course he didn't have the word homeostasis, but he was describing all of this. He was describing life conditions that are good or not so good. He was describing a root for moral behavior in these fundamental conditions and putting it all in terms of moral systems and philosophy of action in the world, and so forth.

1:01:19 SC: Spinoza seems like one of those philosophers who is often neglected or forgotten, but there's always a whole bunch of people saying, "You shouldn't forget this guy." [chuckle] "He actually had a lot figured out."

1:01:28 AD: You are quite right. And especially in the American tradition, Spinoza is very much ignored.

1:01:36 SC: Yeah.

1:01:36 AD: Spinoza is through and through a European philosopher. And I remember when I wrote my book about Spinoza, it's a book called Looking for Spinoza. And I got one review by philosophy. Philosopher reviewer that shall be nameless who said that I had written a book about a minor philos... Something quite, not only was he not terribly appreciative of my work, [chuckle] but he was even less kind to...

1:02:12 SC: To Spinoza.

1:02:12 AD: Spinoza was a minor philosopher.

1:02:14 SC: Well, the times change.

1:02:16 AD: The times have changed.

1:02:17 SC: But so, if I wanna push back a little bit, sure, we're organisms. We want to maintain homeostasis. We've developed this capability in our minds to have maps and images of the future, and plan, and be social. But does that... Would Karl Popper worry if we were here that this is too good to be true. It can explain everything. You do talk about religion a little bit in your book, and you say, "Well, on one hand, religion has some aspects that help us have good feelings and maintain homeostasis. On the other hand, it has some aspects that make us feel bad, and get into wars, and people are oppressed." Are we still reaching for more explanatory precision here, or is this what we can hope for?

1:03:00 AD: No, I think we can get much more precision on them. I think obviously we want to have more precision in the description of the phenomena themselves, and how they... How, for example, the phenomena of feeling have acquired the power that they have, but there's something that I think answers your question, which has to do with the enormous confusion under which we are when we don't make clear distinctions between both feelings and emotions that are positive versus negative. For example, it's quite typical for you to read some politician or some pundit that says, "Well, we have to be rational individuals. We know how to think. And the last thing we want is to give this to become too emotional." How many times a week do you read in the main newspapers that certain bad things happen because people are being too emotional? The curious thing is that every time that people make that accusation, they are referring to negative emotions, [chuckle] not to positive emotions.

1:04:15 SC: Shouldn't be too joyful. Yeah.

1:04:16 AD: Exactly. Nobody is claiming that you get into all these problems because of being over joyful and hopeful for the world and being magnanimous, and being full of generosity, or compassion, or admiration for others. Well, those are emotions and the respective feelings. And those constitute a huge amount of what our effective life is. What we do have, though, is fear, and anger, and spite, and contempt, and many other thing, and pride, and all of these things, which are the ones that get us into wars and into conflicts that are tragic.

1:04:57 SC: They serve uses as well.

1:05:00 AD: And they serve uses. And of course, they are there. They were conserved because guess what? We were saved evolutionarily by tons of fear and by tons of anger, because if we didn't have the fear, we would have been eaten by some other creature or killed. And if we didn't have anger, we would have been killed by the guy who had the bigger gun. So, they were useful. But the question is that they're not useful all the time. You need to know the time at which you should use those because you are under the control of reason.

1:05:35 AD: So, the idea that... Well, you have these problems because you're being over-emotional is silly. You have the problems because you can use the wrong emotions, and you use the wrong emotions if you don't have a layer of control over your emotional apparatus that comes out of reason, comes out of thinking, comes out of information, sheer knowledge that says, "No, that's stupid, don't do it." And that's where you can get the combination of the two.

1:06:08 SC: I had Paul Bloom on the podcast earlier and he wrote this wonderful titled book called Against Empathy.

1:06:14 AD: Yep.

1:06:15 SC: And his argument, if I can cartoonishly summarize it, was we tend to empathize with... Empathy sounds good but we empathize with people like ourselves. And instead of doing that, we should be rational about morality and how to behave and so forth. And I tried to argue against him, number one that... He agreed actually with the first one which is, your initial motivation to be rational has to come from somewhere. To be moral has to come from somewhere. But number two, I thought that if you're just being empathetic with people like yourself that might be a natural trap to fall into but the diagnosis shouldn't be, you have too much empathy, is that you're doing empathy wrong, [chuckle] that you should try to train yourself to be empathetic with people unlike yourself because otherwise you will think you're being rational but you will discount their experience.

1:07:03 AD: Absolutely. I entirely agree with you and I think that comes to the point that, thanks to our reasoning abilities and thanks to our knowledge, we have possibilities of shaping and controlling the affective system, not to suppress the effects but use it better and use it, well, intelligently.

1:07:24 SC: Right, yeah. It's a give and take.

1:07:26 AD: Yeah. And it's not... This dismissal of emotion as something irrational is just silly. Because a lot of the time, it isn't; and even if it were irrational in some sort... If it is irrational in some circumstances, there's no reason why you should not strive for doing better and doing it under rational control. So it's not to do reason instead of emotionally feeling is to use reason to control, to select and control the most appropriate emotional and the most appropriate affective response. And I think that's an entirely different world.

1:08:08 SC: Yeah, yeah. So good, that leads me into my final question. We've already talked a little bit about the implications of this point of view for artificial intelligence. And we also talked about how this point of view helps explain and account for the emergence of culture and so forth. What are the lessons for culture and society going forward from this understanding of why we have culture and society in the first place? We're at a point in our human history as liberal democracies and so forth where nerves are frayed, where people are feeling anxious. There's a lot of debates which are carried out at a very superficial level but have I think deeper resonance about identity, who belongs in our culture, who we should support, who's on our tribe, who's on our team. Is there something that some bit of wisdom or maybe just some practical advice for guiding our society once we have this better understanding of why we have society in the first place?

1:09:07 AD: Yeah. That's an excellent question. I think that probably the best message is... Look, we know a little bit more about how we function, and this schism between a rational creature or an affective creature is false. This is fiction. This does not accord with our nature. And then try to learn as much as possible about how your nature functions. For example, in the kind of conflicts that you are referring to, so typical now, especially with the enormous power of social media, what we need is to defuse the knee-jerk reaction that is caused by giving in to the very easy provocation of anger or fear, especially anger. There's something about the reactions of anger. And they're manipulated beautifully by political systems so that if there's something that you want achieved, make sure that people will go for it with anger, generally against some cause or kind of person.

1:10:24 AD: And so I think that knowing how this works from the inside, having no illusions about the fact that we're either just purely smart people, theoretical physicists, that's my example. [chuckle] Well, knowing that we're just bad people with bad emotions, just... It's more complicated than that and try to move forward by having one influence the other. Now, it's not easy and I don't think that... Most of the time these days I'm more pessimistic than optimistic about having a great success come out of our struggles, but we're certainly not going to get any success if we don't realize what we are humanly, in general, in terms of our life and this peculiar thing that is having a mind in a very complex living creature. And starting with that with a little bit of humility is probably the best.

1:11:27 SC: I mean going, making it more local, bringing it down 'cause we can't always affect the world, but do you think that the way you live your life has been importantly colored by this way of thinking about what a mind is?

1:11:41 AD: Never thought about that. I guess so. I guess so. Yes, I would say so. And there's certain choices that I've made that were probably influenced by that.

1:11:52 SC: Well, that's good advice for then people listening to buy the book and maybe they'll [chuckle] make better informed choices. Alright, Antonio Damasio, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:12:01 AD: Thank you, Sean. Thank you.