One of my intermittently reluctant cousins is a “hard”
scientist. He is a biologist and also,
nominally, a faculty member at a high powered institution. I say nominally because his teaching contract
involves being in a classroom for one clock hour a year. He is, in fact, a teacher because he has a
very active laboratory and teaches the graduate students who work with him how
to do science. He is an educator – but as
an educator he functions more like a tutor than a traditional college professor
– in part because he is, essentially, a researcher. What does he research? A number of things, but when I visited him a
few years ago he talked with me about his study of mitosis – that basic cell
function that old fogies like me first saw on film strips when we were kids – and
now can be seen on YouTube.
It turns out that, while mitosis has been illustrated
forever, we really haven’t known much about what was going on that the cell was
able, as my cousin put it, to tell the genes to line up. We also didn’t know how it knew when they
were lined up so that the separation could begin. The language that he was using made it sound
to me like he was anthropomorphizing the process – as if the cell had some kind
of ability to think and communicate. He
was saying, “How does the cell say, ‘OK guys, time to split. So, everybody go to your places.” Somewhat foolishly, then, a few weeks after
visiting him and becoming excited about what he was doing, I sent him a link to
some material about plants and other entities without central nervous systems “communicating”. Oh, boy.
Big mistake. He thought I was a
really flaky “soft” scientist – mostly soft in the head. He patiently explained to me in a return
email that the ideas about cells “communicating” in anything like the way that
we do is pure poppycock.
Reading Antonio Damasio’s The
Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Culture, I finally
found out what was going wrong. My
cousin, it turns out, actually was seeing, literally on a microscopic level,
the basic processes of life. These basic
processes – and Damasio spends most of his time talking about the basic process
of homeostasis – get played out, Damasio argues, in larger and larger scales
with more and more complex faculties at work, but, if we step back a bit, we
can see that these basic processes – and especially the process of homeostasis
– are precursors to increasingly complex processes and his thesis is that
complex communication patterns within and between organisms are based on, reflect
and follow the rules of earlier, more primitive systems which are designed to
maintain homeostasis. My cousin was not
anthropomorphizing the function of cells; the function of cells gets played out
in human ways all the time – we communicate by saying, “O.K. Everybody line up”
when we get ready to serve food to a group of hungry people, and we ask each
person what they want, and each person takes what they need and this helps them
maintain their energy and body weight, which mirrors – in a very eerie sense –
what a cell does when it seeks out food – or when it reproduces itself using
mitosis. Even though the cell can’t, in
fact, say line up – it uses chemicals that are produced in response to internal
and external stimuli to create the needed order (just as plants, which don’t
have central nervous systems either, but do have shared homeostatic needs, communicate
using various chemicals).
My cousin was decoding which chemicals were used when in
order to “communicate” to the parts of the cell that it is time to line
up. My cousin’s ruminating about the
communication process was anthropomorphizing, but it was also, in a weird way, anticipating
what would evolve from these basic processes.
And the anthropomorphizing was not just a ridiculous poetic attribution
of intelligence but, according to Damasio, recognizing a system of
communicating that would be mimicked at each successive level of complication
as we evolved into more and more complex beings so that, by the time we get to
people and to consciousness, and to talking and to social systems, we are still
working to create homeostasis and still using homeostatic mechanisms, though they
are vastly more complex. All that said,
my cousin was absolutely right, there is no central nervous system, no
consciousness, and the genes do not “hear” the command to line up. Similarly, as dramatized in the novel Overstory,
plants do, in fact, release chemicals that other plants react to, and these
“communications” enhance the homeostatic functioning – generally of both
plants.
Damasio proposes that the ability to achieve and maintain
homeostasis is the central marker of life.
Does this mean that our homes – with their thermostats that help them
maintain a constant temperature – are alive?
Yes and no. Thermostats are
homeostatic devices for inanimate objects, but this kind of homeostasis is not
living homeostasis because living homeostasis involves not just maintaining
things as they are, but moving into new and better spaces: living
homeostatically involves both maintaining and growing. Homeostasis is the mechanism behind evolution
– on the grand scale – and going to a rock concert because that is “fun” on a
more prosaic level. We seek something
better – for ourselves and for our offspring – and have had to do that in order
to achieve the level of functioning that we have. Over and over in this book, the things that
we think of as most human – cognition, culture, space flight – are traced to
the natural culmination of incredibly primal motivations – the motivations of
bacteria which include, across time, becoming multicellular organisms and, my
cousin would add, finding out how to replicate oneself through the process of
mitosis.
Damasio maintains that the driver of homeostasis, in the transition
across evolution from relatively simple chemical interactions to, for us humans
(and probably for many other complex organisms) is the more much more complex
system that registers to our conscious experience as feelings. Emotions are hardwired into us as a means of
sensing and integrating huge amounts of information from various sources and
applying valence to them – is this particular state good or bad for us? Should we proceed further – proceed with
caution – or retreat? Is this desirable
– is it beautiful – or is it dangerous?
But our feelings are not just flight or fight – they are sensitive and
intricate responses to images – images that can come from our senses, from our
imagination, and also – and this he emphasizes - from our viscera – and,
because of the importance of the messages that they convey, they have the power
to interrupt – or to disrupt – ongoing processes. “I can’t think about that now – I am in pain
and need to attend to the pain first.” “I
had a thought, but then I looked out the window and noticed a brilliant sunset
and now I am entranced by that and need to attend to it.”
What is most revolutionary about these ideas to me is that
this is a bench scientist – a highly logical and rationally driven person - saying
that we are primarily and essentially feeling beings. It is our emotions that primarily determine
our functioning because they are what is monitoring – essentially all the time
– our homeostatic functioning. Thinking
is a very important part of being human and accomplishing what we do, but our
primary drives – even our ways of knowing – are essentially, he states,
emotional, not cognitive. The statement,
“I feel that to be true” illustrates the idea.
We very rarely decide on something based on a proof and its final Q.E.D.
statement that allows us to know that the proof is true. Indeed, in mathematics, those proofs are
always contingent on assumptions – on axioms – and the axioms, in turn, are
based on how we imagine the world – both through our senses, but also through
our visualizing the world as it appears and as it might be. This is not to diminish our cognition as a
tremendous asset that has helped us achieve dominion over all the lands, but it
does say that cognition serves our emotional needs, not the other way around. And that is just the motivational side – the other
side of the equation is that reason is used to satisfy our hunger for order –
for things that feel right – and it is the feelings that are the determining
factor in our thinking process – not the thoughts. We are finished with a problem when it feels
right.
Though this sounds very psychoanalytic, in one way it
definitely is not. Damasio maintains
that feelings are necessarily conscious – indeed they are integral in the formation of consciousness. Damasio is not proposing
a dynamically unconscious feeling system – with feelings taking the place of
Freud’s drives. Damasio proposes that
the feelings inform drives – while Freud sees feelings as pointers towards
unknown and basic drive processes. In
this position, I think that Damasio is aligning himself with another
neurologist, Mark
Solms who maintains that Freud’s
id is, in fact, conscious. And, like
Solms, Damasio is working to understand how consciousness and subjectivity
operate neurologically. Reading along
with Damasio (and Solms), then, is like reading a detective novel as much as a
work of science. Damasio uses
observation, in much the same way that Darwin did, but his observations are
about how the mind (and – in one of the strange things the book points out – we have a second,
semi-autonomous mind – a largely independent nervous system that
governs the functioning of our gut and that is responsible not just for
digestion, but is an important component in our emotional system) and the
nervous system more generally work and then imagining that into our conscious
functioning.
Damasio is asking big questions in this book and he is
bringing intriguing data to bear on addressing those questions. He is asking why we have consciousness, how
it works, and what it means to be a subjective being. He is asking how we sense the external world,
but also how we sense our internal, visceral world, and what the relationship
between those two highly interrelated sensory systems is. He is not primarily a clinician, but he is
asking questions that have clinical relevance.
He notes, for instance, that most of our serotonin sensitive neurons are
in that semi-autonomous gut mind. Could
it be, I wonder, if the positive impact of SSRIs has as much to do with calming
our gut as impacting our cerebrum? And
this leads to questions like the relationship between eating (and overeating)
and a sense of well-being. In an age of
plenty, have we been poorly prepared to thrive by our long evolutionary history
that has focused on gut well-being along with – or even above – all else?
This is not, I don’t think, a definitive work – especially in
the section on the making of cultures.
Yes, homeostasis is relevant to the creation of culture and that is a
useful lens – though I think the further into the book we get the more
speculative his thinking is. But I don’t
want to be critical of that. If we are
to explore subjectivity – if we are to get a handle on what it means to be
human – we need to make some leaps.
Being strictly and tightly bound to the empirical evidence will only get
us so far. We need to feel our way into
being human – and into understanding what it means to be a human being, even if
the process of doing that can make me feel self-conscious under the watchful
eye of my hard scientist and occasionally reluctant cousin.
I report on watching Damasio and Mark Solms speak at the 2020 American Psychoanalytic Association meetings here.
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