Episode 44: Antonio Damasio on Feelings, Thoughts, and the Evolution of Humanity
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 เม.ย. 2019
- Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
Patreon: / seanmcarroll
When we talk about the mind, we are constantly talking about consciousness and cognition. Antonio Damasio wants us to talk about our feelings. But it’s not in an effort to be more touchy-feely; Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, believes that feelings generated by the body are a crucial part of how we achieve and maintain homeostasis, which in turn is a key driver in understanding who we are. His most recent book, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, is an ambitious attempt to trace the role of feelings and our biological impulses in the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, and our flourishing as social, cultural beings.
Antonio Damasio received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is currently University Professor, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Professor of Psychology, Professor of Philosophy, and (along with his wife and frequent collaborator, Prof. Hannah Damasio) Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Among his numerous awards are the Grawemeyer Award, the Honda Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Science and Technology, and the Beaumont Medal from the American Medical Association. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
This is the best podcast on neuroscience on the internet
Perhaps we have known this without knowing we knew. ¨I have a gut feeling...¨ ¨I feel it with all my heart.¨ ¨He makes my skin crawl.¨ ¨It gives me goose bumps.¨ etc.
again coming here taking one more prominent mind bending and spectacular speaker love and respect from Pakistan .
I’ve been toying with the notion that emotions are “narrowings of choice”. What I mean is that when one experiences an emotion, e.g. one is angry, the available set of actions that can be chosen by the mind is much reduced. If you are angry, your actions will be aggressive, all other possible actions are suppressed. The same applies to fear, etc. If you’re afraid, your possible actions are constrained to deal with that fear.
All emotions seem to narrow the possible actions available to the mind. This narrowing of choice can then be used as the very definition of what an emotion is. The connection with feelings is that being in this restricted state “feels” a certain way. Emotion comes first, then we have an accompanying feeling that represents it.
Mike Thanks! I’m aware of that Damasio patient but Panksepp is new to me ... def will look him up.
Yeah but emotions can lead one to make disastrous decisions so they are not necessarily evolutionarily advantageous.
Yes feeling is awareness of certain frequencies inside of ourself. Those frequencies are emotions. And once we are set on that certain emotion/frequency, we are limited to act within that range. Can only act from that frequency only.
Dr. Damasio finished his book, "The Feeling of What Happens", with his speculation on whether AI can ever truly achieve consciousness. I like how Dr. Carroll approach this topic in this pod cast.
Great podcast. Thanks.
Bravissimi, Raggazzi! Excellent and coherent synopsis of the exchange of energy systems between organisms, the feelings affecting our actions and the intelligence required to produce moral principles. 🇨🇦💕
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Big fan of both Carroll and Damasio. Glad that Carroll did this podcast. The sound is quite low on Damasio's side probably adding to the issue is his soft delivery.
Yes! Finally!
the end
Fellow portuguese and I also went to Universidade de Lisboa
I am so proud
marvelous sir sean c
Highly recommend his book, Self Comes To Mind.
P.S. Also recommend V.S. Ramachandran's, The Tell Tale Brian.
Descartes's error is also a good book
For a while now, I've felt like there's been this human struggle between rationality (intellectual integrity) and happiness in ideological dogmatism. And I feel it would be inaccurate for me to say that the happiest "state" a human could be in could be achieved in the absence of cognitive assurance or certainty (or intellectual homeostasis so to speak). But I also feel like it would be fallacious to say that we could actually obtain pure, unadulterated knowledge in the philosophical sense, even if only because we have the capacity to doubt anything we believe to be true.
So it seems as though, despite our desire to be correct in our beliefs, what we tend to desire more is to _feel_ right in our beliefs. But yet humanity's efforts to override that desire has led to an immense amount of benefits for us in not only our standard of living and well-being, but also has informed us about ourselves and how we are as human beings which has allowed us to better optimize our world for our well-being.
Perhaps there is a point at which, though we may not be justified in dismissing doubt, we can still leave some unanswered questions to rest for the sake of it being an impractical pursuit? But then I think about how many religious people will say that the reason why science, or the study of the natural world, got of the ground in the first place was because their ideology posited that the universe was comprehensible in the first place.
I don't know. It just seems like an irreconcilable struggle.
The more Mindscape-Podcasts I listen to, the more I’m beginning to appreciate Sean Carrolls normal talks and books and lectures, where the good stuff is already condensed, and I get the ideas presented in Seans own rigorous thinking and exact speech . - While I’m sure he is doing his utmost to present his guests fairly, and often he even delivers their supposed punchlines in a very agreeable format on a silver platter (“is it fair to say...”), to which even his guests admit, that they “totally agree” or could not have said it better, I get the impression, that some guests are clearly better than others in taking it from there by following up with their genuine ideas and work... Edit: to be more blunt: This could have been over in 20 minutes without missing a point: Sean had it pretty much covered in the pretext to the recording of the conversation. (I know that it is a rhetorical “trick” to say what you are going to say, say it, and say what you have said (= repeating it three times), but this podcast seemed a bit light concerning “density of ideas” and “clarity of thought”.)
what and amazing podcast i been loving all the podcast you do on the subject of morality and feelings on what constitutes by good and bad i love the science that explains this type of stuff , i would love to see more phycological/Neuro Scientific / Biological podcast in the future , in particular on the topic of cognitive dissonance and Bias
I agree, these types of podcasts are fantastic.
If you want more on cognitive dissonance, check out the first or early podcasts from Sean, it's specifically on that topic.
So to be clear at 6:50 he is saying 'emotions proceed from feelings' not 'precede' ?
There is a lot to unpack with this episode and deconstructing feelings, emotion, cognition and action takes some time to process. Nevertheless, relative to inculcating boredom to AI, i think we need to add "meh" and ambivalence to future robots....
Spinoza has made a comeback, to a degree, in the last decade. See Rebecca Goldstein's book and TH-cam available lectures. (She is married to Stephen Pinker, former guest on Mindscape.)
What’s the distinction between his conclusions and Joseph LeDoux’s?
Love it! Oh wait, that’s an emotional comment. 🥰
They're going to have a hard time getting those comical arms to do what is optimally needed, so wait for the attachment of biological to mechanical, not to mention comical as well. . Mind bending talk.
Emotions---->Climate
Feelings ----> Weather
@@yourfairyGodgod
Stop hurting my weather.
As I understood it, the more accurate analogy would be:
Feelings : individual microscopic phenomena in the climate system, as well as the entire complex system as a whole.
Emotion : Mesoscopic, somewhat distinguished, temporally localized phenomena such as a storm.
Disagree: "emotions are action". When I had locked-in syndrome (open heart surgery), my conscious body was incapable of action. My autonomous body had action, from the autonomous sensors (signalling poor oxygen, hydration & temperature levels). My conscious feelings & the accompanying emotions tried to over-ride my dysautonomia. There was massive discrepancy between my conscious self and my medical (autonomic) body.
These dysautonomia reactions are common to others who undergo open heart surgery.
The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures Kindle Edition
by Antonio Damasio (Author) Less than $5 usd
Read many user reviews of the book on Amazon. Seems that so many readers do not like, do not agree with the author & the book. So I won't bother. The video above also seems to be so unimpressive, like the comments on the book.
Greg Zeng I like the way you view science, which is by feelings.
exactly
The maps are not the territory (reality)
Crux of matter brain is not hero of the story to know anything,there is more going on it's biology,neurology, neurobiology, psychology, epigenetic.......... All working to generate your experience
no hard problem....
The only "hard problem" is the tyranny that common words, and the structures of human languages, exert over the thinking of our scientists and philosophers.
Have you thought about trying to get Graham Hancock on?
So much subtety in this conversation. Then there's the comments...
At around 31 minutes in, Sean wanting to maintain his mechanistic/materialistic metaphysical view, resorts to behaviorism. The bacteria moves, but it is a machine that is moving. Scientists in the 19th century practiced live vivisections on animals dismissing their howls of pain as mechanistic effects rather than affects.
If you object to materialism, what is your alternative?
And how do you differentiate between the hundreds of different pseudo-scientific descriptions of reality?
Do you follow the idea of Prana, or Chi, or Native American mythology, or Egyptian or Greek or Roman or Viking or Nordic or Celtic or Slavic. Or what about Indian there's a subcontinent with tons of mysticism
The challenges is that all these pseudo-sciences have incredibly different systems of classification and ways of making sense of reality
And largely it does not mesh with our scientific understanding
People love to take their jabs at science and materialism but yet they all seem to love using computers and the internet and cars and phones and TVs and all the infrastructure that science makes possible
There is no credible examples of replicable infrastructure technology or achievement that comes from pseudoscience
chris P So the options are either materialism or pseudo-science? I try to keep my mind open, but I’m inclined toward the Agential Realism of Karen Barad and the Process Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. Bernardo Kastrup also has some interesting ideas in defense of idealism.
@@donvandekrol6468 no I guess my point is people make these veiled and vague attacks on science by calling it materialism or mechanistic
But the bottom line is that humans are biological creatures. We need food and water and a healthy infrastructure in order to live. All of that is material. The only way to transact with the world in an agreed way is to understand some basic principles of Science and that is all going to be based on understanding the world as some material
Philosophical ideas are not going to feed people. They're not going to produce a working infrastructure.
And yes at some level the basic choice is between either understanding science and the material world or advocating for vague pseudo-scientific ideas
Science is the only thing that has been shown to repeatedly work to give Youmans understanding and progress
I'm not saying there's not a place for philosophy and discussing ideas. But none of that changes the necessity of scientific understanding. Even in those times when we were religious societies the necessity of infrastructure was still all scientific
Again I'm not saying that there's not more to life than simply scientific understanding. Obviously there is music and culture and all sorts of creative and artistic expression. But unless you have a basic understanding of the material that we are all made of and at least functionally can transact with the world in a healthy way you're not going to at all create a prosperous Society
chris P I’ve found that before I attempt to criticize other’s perspectives, I try to understand them. What I understand from your comments is that you conflate “science” with a particular philosophical and metaphysical understanding of the nature of nature which is increasingly coming under attack by ... science. You asked what my alternative to (the philosophy of) materialism is, and I provided several which are related. I see no indication that you spent even a minimum of effort in any kind of research, choosing instead to persist in uneducated assumptions - which is the common thread of pseudo-science.
Face it we're material beings. We need oxygen to live. Oxygen is a simple molecule. We understand what it is. If the human organism doesn't get the right amount of oxygen it will soon die.
If you want to present some ideas feel free... just citing names of people and then expecting me to do the research...well... probably better just to present your ideas
If you have an alternative to the fact that, we are made up of material namely atoms and molecules, And that this material can be studied through the scientific method, and we can find models that give us accurate predictions about reality... Please Present the ideas....
Just like I did by alluding to the fact that we know all the molecular Pathways of the human organism. If we don't get the right amount of oxygen, the right ratio of carbohydrates fats and proteins, the essential vitamins and minerals the human organism will die and decay. This is what all the evidence indicates
There is no evidence for any Supernatural or mystical realms. Again if you have specific ideas feel free to present. For example, You are using a computer and the internet which is made possible by the scientific method, the only method that has given reliable results and this method is based on the fact that the universe is made up of material.
Please no more name dropping or alluding to vague research and this and that person in this and that study. Like many people do.
The fact is people love to make stuff up we are imaginative creative creatures, they have a long history of making up theories about reality that have a little evidence to support them. Even intelligence smart people who actually do meaningful scientific research also engage in science fiction like speculation. The human mind, the human cognition, is naturally prone to a Superstition, wishful thinking, to personifying Nature, and seeing patterns where they are not.
This is a bit of a head scratcher. I have no idea what Damasio is trying to do when he defines "emotions" as "actions". I don't know anyone in the world who would accept that definition, and it doesn't seem to help him or his theories at all. If an amoeba has a recoil response to some stimulus, most people would take an "emotional response" to include both an observable behavior and some mental component of negative valence. It seems like he is just defining emotions in this way in order to make his pet term ("feelings") have more importance. This is silly.
The section on the hard-problem is just eye-roll inducing. Sean seems totally incurious about the nature of the space of possible experiences (qualia space, etc.). We may, as they both seem to agree, find an explanation of biological systems that tells us when/why a particular system has experiences. The hard problem is a legitimate, unanswered observation that, even with such an explanation, it doesn't seem like there could be any way to know *what* those experiences are, and why they are *that* specific way rather than some other way. An explanation of conscious experience should tell us *what* experiences we will have if we add a 4th type of color receptor to our eyes. The hard problem just says: that's a really hard problem. I don't understand how intelligent people can have such a negative reaction to it, as if it's akin to Scientology or something.
Pollen Applebee - go smoke weed with your philosopher friends, leave the science to the experts.
@@LKRaider everything I mentioned is a very scientific problem - but feel free to keep plugging your ears and yelling at people. That will surely help.
he's got a wiki page and dual nationality....uni prof directing brain and creativity...so i better listen up....i'm intellectually a pup....spend most of time ....attempting to survive...moron that matter later...
no sarcasm intended, i'm just a font of spontaneity...lol
You are a font... for dots as well... For some.... Reason....
@@panlan1 and spontaneous usually doesn't involve pausing in your sentence multiple times, but maybe you're mememing 🤷♂️
i meme well..