Antonio Damasio presents "Feeling & Knowing"

good evening everyone and welcome thank you so much for tuning in tonight my name is kate bruns and on behalf of harvard bookstore the harvard university division of science and the harvard library i am so pleased to welcome you to this event with antonio dimazio presenting his new book feeling and knowing making minds conscious with an introduction tonight from harvard's greg kesten before i turn things over to dr kesten to introduce tonight's event i'm just going to say a few remarks this event is a part of our harvard science book talk series which brings the authors of recently published science-related literature to our cambridge community and now far far beyond it be on the lookout for more virtual science book talks coming up this fall including with ritu ramen on november 10th discussing her book bio fabrication and alexander redding and daniel kl chua on november 16th discussing their book alien listening voyager's golden record and music from earth so to learn more about the series visit the webpage harvard.com science or sign up for the bookstore's email newsletter at harvard.com we also have a youtube page where you can see any previous talks that you might have missed and i'm going to be posting links in the zoom chat in just a few minutes tonight's event is going to conclude with some time for your questions if you would like to ask something please go to the q a button on your screen where you can submit a question we're going to get through as many as time allows for and also a reminder that if you would like closed captions you can click on the live transcript tab at the bottom of your zoom screen i would also like to say a tremendous thank you for your patronage during these strange virtual times your support makes this author series possible and it ensures the future of a landmark independent bookstore so thank you to our partners at harvard university and thanks to all of you for tuning in and showing up for our authors for indie book selling and especially for science and finally as you certainly know with virtual gatherings technical issues can arise and if they do i will do my best to resolve them quickly so thank you for your patience and your understanding and now i am excited to turn things over to theoretical physicist harvard faculty and film producer dr greg kestin alongside his research and his teaching dr kesten produces incredible educational online content and i know him in particular from his work with the research team for pbs nova where he researched unconsulted on scientific content assisted in short film production wrote story lines and articles and he produced the awesome video series what the physics so without further ado dr kesten the digital podium is yours thank you kate um well i am honored to introduce uh professor antonio dimazio uh who is university professor david dornstein professor of neuroscience psychology and philosophy and the director of the brain and creativity institute of the university of southern california los angeles and awards he's received of which there are many are some of which are the prince of astoria's prize in science and technology the grummer award the honda prize and the pessoa and senori prizes he's the author of many books including descartes error the feeling of what happens looking for spinoza self comes to mind the strange order of things and feeling and knowing all of which have been published in translation and are taught in universities across the world and tonight he'll be discussing with us his most recent book feeling and knowing making minds conscious and you know in the recent decades many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable but in the book professor dimazio drawing on recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines has given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life in feeling and knowing he helps us understand why being conscious isn't the same as sensing why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings explaining for example why a plant isn't conscious but you are and explains why feelings open the way to consciousness um kirkus reviews writes dimasio is a deep thinker familiar with multiple disciplines and this work is as much a work of philosophy as it is of hard science readers will discover rewarding insights which we're excited to hear about tonight professor dimazio the stage is yours thank you so much it's thank you for your very kind and very generous introduction i'm pleased to be here uh it's the program changed a little bit i was going to have a conversation with joey graham a great poet who is interested in science as well um and i'm interested in poetry so that would have been a good good match but the event turned out to be different thanks to weather which changed things a little bit as i understand in in cambridge and in martha's vineyard um so thank you greg it's a great great pleasure to hear you and to hear your thoughtful comments and to know about your work as well so i think that what i'm going to do is give you an idea of what a book is and tell a little bit about its history and then tell you about the substance of the book so that then we can have a conversation because i know that many of you are watching and listening in different points and probably will have questions so let's start with what the book is this is a book that has an interesting history for those of you who know some of my best work either from scientific articles or from or from books now that i'm not exactly a brief writer uh and my books tend to be long and sometimes they 400 pages or bigger and my editor uh dan frank at pantheon a couple of years ago said would it be nice if for for once you would write a brief book a book in which you would make very directly tangible the kinds of things that you're interested in facts from the science thoughts that you have had and i was very surprised but my reaction was actually very good and i said well provided i can do that in my own time and and in my way and provided this cannot be confused with some kind of summary closed in closed on a given date but rather as something that is evolving and he said of course no problem so what we ended up actually is with 48 separate chapters but very small chapters actually and instead of 400 pages you have 250 or something like that and we did honor the idea that not only was i going to summarize or make or distill some ideas that are already settled in facts that are already settled but also talk about a little bit about the future and what i was expecting when i finished the book that would happen uh and i'm very pleased to say that this actually is taking place because since the book was finished there have been at least three scientific articles that have been published and that already advanced on the story that the book is telling um and so i i begin by by saying that the the book is a sort of haiku uh in the sense that i really tried to chip away at anything that was not essential when i was writing it uh reading it today which i've been obliged to do a couple of times i think i could have cut even more uh and i could have said things differently but that's of course the plight of all of us that write and publish is that if we're really honest and smart we we realized that we should do it again because it's never good or it is it's never good enough uh so uh with with the tribute to my editor dan frank who came up with the idea let me start with with what with what the book is about so first start with the title feeling and knowing making minds conscious um well feelings appears to be rather obvious knowing it appears to be rather obvious but what what i want is that ampersand between the two it's feeling really leading to knowing and after the colon i'm really saying that feeling and the knowing that it brings is helping make minds conscious that's really the the the the the aim of this particular book but let me start with what these words mean when i use the word feeling i want to be very clear that you in the audience are not listening to me talk about emotion and that's unfortunate in in most circumstances when people use the term feeling which i use often in very specific ways what people hear is emotion because the feeling of course connects with effect and the first notion that comes to one's mind when you talk about effect is emotion well let me make sure that we make these terms very clear and i'm using them in perfectly conventional ways and i would say that what happens is that in the in our daily parlance we use them in unconventional ways that are not very clear so uh when i talk about feelings i talk about experiences i talk about phenomena that are not visible to anyone uh you you cannot see my feelings ever i cannot see yours so it is something that is subjective it's an experience it's happening in my mind nobody has access to it whenever i talk about emotions i'm talking about something public if i now suddenly have moved and cry you will see that expressed in my face if i am in fear you'll see that express not just in my face but my whole body will recoil from the camera and you'll see that i am in fear and you know that i am in fear because the actions that i am taking when i'm in fear or in in moved to tears their actions that are extremely patterned we have our own individuality we all we all are in fear or angry or or cry in a different way slightly there's some individuality to that but by and large there is a pattern there's something that i like to call a little concert that is played and you know you can play that same concert you can say this can play the same mozart melody with different instruments with the full orchestra or with the cello only and so the variations are in a way relatively superficial when they're contrasted with what's in the score okay so emotions are about actions patterned actions visible inspectable to the outside world whereas feelings are not feelings are private subjective processes and the next thing that we need to talk about is the relationship between these terms and what i am really talking about in the book primarily i'm talking about what i like to call homeostatic feelings examples of homeostatic feelings you have hunger thirst you have desire you have well-being you have pain you have malaise all of those feelings that i'm talking about are feelings that have something extremely powerful in common they are all about states of the body they're all about states in which our bodies can be right this minute and that have a relationship to how our physiology is operating if you are undernourished at the end of the morning and you say i'm hungry that means that your energy level is dropping and in your mind you have a representation of your body in a particular state where it lacks energy to continue so you get that information you get that knowledge feeling knowing you get that knowledge through the feeling process and once again it's something that nobody will see you know because you are feeling you have that information coming to you directly from your body from lots of to a very complicated physiological process you're being informed that you are hungry or that you are thirsty uh you could also be informed that for example something went wrong uh in some part of your body and yet you are now in pain not only that you could have the feeling of pain and with some continuity over time if the pain is not treated and you are actually in suffering which by the way you can also use uh in a symbolic way when you have for example something go wrong in your career or in your love life and you say that you are suffering not exactly physical pain but you are using that same notion that came out of the physical pain that you have felt with the homeostatic feeling of pain and of course let's not be just unhappy and talk about well-being that's also a feeling now what all of these events have in common is the fact that in the case of omnistatic feelings they are giving you precious new information about the state of the body at this precise minute either good in which case there is well-being or different kinds of problem that you can solve by eating or drinking or by resolving to go to the dentist if you have tooth pain so what is happening right there is something that unfortunately people tend not to reflect too much on but it's something that i would say is quite momentous and this is really what the book is about is the fact that feelings are for me inaugural events in the great story of consciousness so when you have one of these feelings that i just talked about you are spontaneously naturally becoming conscious of a lot of things you're becoming conscious of something that is happening in your body so what what you're suddenly conscious of is not about something happening up in the outside world no it's in your body not only that you are referring it uniquely positively to your own body and that's the reason why you can talk about an experience all of this is is connected very nicely with your body so you have the feeling but you also have the location of that feeling that feeling is not happening across my living room over there that feeling is happening in my body or in your body so uh what what this is telling you is that um there's a feeling that gives you plenty of information and that information is yours and your salon and you can do something with that information so you're not having something that is from the point of view of biology and gratuitous you're having on the contrary something that is vital and that i believe happened relatively early in the development of organisms of our kind it didn't develop with all living organisms to begin with because when you go back in the history of living organisms you realize that they started out very humbly uh when you think about bacteria or paranecia or even when you think about other organisms that for example greg referred to like plants these are organisms that have a few cells or not that many and that actually do not have a nervous system they don't need it and they don't need it for a very good reason is that nervous systems probably only developed in the long history of evolution once our systems well first of all once there was plenty of multicellularity the cells galore and then there were also different organs and then there were different systems and all of this was becoming a bit jumbled and lacking in coordination there were there was something that was brilliantly produced by evolution which is the nervous system and nervous system first through nerves that connect to different regions and eventually through nerves that connected with central nuclei the kind of things that today exist in our spinal cord in our brain stem uh in our cerebrum those were systems that helped coordinate the functions of very different parts that sort of ran out of the possibility of communicating with some precision and individuality with just molecules that could be disseminated and available throughout the entire body so out of this growing complexity come organisms with nervous systems and once there are nervous systems eventually we'll come to the possibility of generating a representation of the state of your body in a particular way good better and different and that is what feelings are about and once again they are these inaugurations of what eventually becomes consciousness now of course today when we talk about consciousness we talk about something extremely complex that it involves not only representations of our body those that come in the form of homeostatic feelings but also representations of the world around why because we have devices such as our retinas and visual systems or such as our cochlear and auditory system that allow us to sense what eventually is the material in our vision or what is the material that we hear in sounds of the world or music or what have you and eventually we can do all this translated into whatever language we have developed and we can organize through the help of memory we can organize a complex reasoning process which allows us to have that precious development that we call rationality and that allows us to take on the world and look at it from the point of view of our knowledge of the world um with of course the proviso that all of that only makes sense and only is productive for us human beings if we combine it with this other world which is the world of effect and it's giving us the feelings that we have about our own body and eventually the feelings that we have of the motive states we're in whether they're happy states or fearful states or complete bliss um so the the the idea here is that feelings were the very beginning of this great adventure called consciousness and that contrary to the sometimes quite common view that consciousness is a problem that has no solution and that we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that whatever treatment we do always falls short and obviously i don't believe that i respect the idea that some colleagues have that it can't be solved but i don't share that that idea i think that especially when you when you when you look at it through the prism of feeling you you realize that there's a very beautiful possibility there i'm not saying that it's all fully explored but it's there and in one of the ways in which um feeling is so powerful in terms of providing a solution um is in the fact that whatever we see or hear or touch or taste we have a possibility of having those extremely complex highly evolved representations that come out of incredibly refined devices you know the cochlea or retina or the visual and auditory cortexes are absolute wonders uh and wonders that we fortunately have a very good grasp on because the science has been done and a lot of this science that actually has been done in your lack of the woods because harvard has been one of the major producers of results along those lines but then once you have those beautiful representations of the world that surround us we always have the possibility of connecting them to the representation we have of our own organism living in whatever conditions it is good better and different with pleasurable or painful or some something in between feeling and when when you connect what you see out in the world with what you have in yourself in the organism that that is mentally represented by virtue of having feeling produced in them when you make that connection you have consciousness resolved the consciousness that i have of the mountains to my right is a consciousness that happens because i can look at the mountains and i can connect them with the feeling i have of my body my body is here and my feeling is coming out of this co-mingling of neural processes evidently but also processes that come from the body and that are not neural at all so there's this marriage or interaction whatever you want to call it doesn't make any difference i just want to make sure that you understand that to have a feeling of happiness whatever feeling of well-being what you have a feeling of pain is not a perception of your body in some kind of state uh it's more than that it's an interaction that is going on between your nervous system and your body and as a result of that interaction what you get is a hybrid you're not this is very interesting in fact go back 20 years um i i fear to even read what i wrote say 30 years ago because i'm pretty certain that there are things that may be sort of generally acceptable but in this particular domain are quite incomplete because i did not know then what i know now and and i probably may have said well to have pain is to perceive something that is wrong with your body in one particular place you have an ulcer and you perceive pain which really means that you're perceiving what is going on in the the in the mucosa of your stomach of your gut well it's not quite like that it's more complicated because there's this interactivity and that's what makes feeling so completely different from the perception that i have of the outside world and that's also what may help us explain consciousness in greater detail not just of the conceptual detail that i've given you and of course as long as we only look at the body as a source of perception you don't really contribute to the solution of the problem of consciousness but once you know the physiology of what is going on in your nerve cells that are looking out at your body and what is going on in the body that creates that interaction then you have a grasp of some possibilities that can make us advance the world of physiology of consciousness so think of what you perceive in your body it's not just plain perception it's perceiving quotes you're really getting a grasp of this unity and it's so interesting because just think of this very obvious fact but that people tend not to to to comment on when you look out in the world or hear the world around you the world is there and you're here and there's this abyss between our living organism and the world that surrounds us when you think about the the world that is in your guts and your lungs and in your blood circulating in all the arteries and arterioles of your body it's completely different all that stuff is inside you you have this perimeter of your body covered by musculoskeletal elements and then by a skin over it which in itself is an organ it is one of the viscera um and all this there's all this stuff inside you don't need to go anywhere you just can interact freely because everywhere in every nook and cranny of your body the nerve terminals and everywhere in your body there are cells and molecules that are not in the nervous system but that can interact with the nervous system so the possibility of this dialogue is not just a possibility it's there all the time and and that's where you're going to get your feeling and that's where you're going to get your knowing and that's why this book is called feeling and knowing and it's about making minds conscious um i think i would as you probably have noticed i'm a little bit enthusiastic about this stuff and i probably could continue talking for an hour which would mortify my wonderful hosts at the harvard bookstore so i'm going to shut up right now and uh and and listen or read your questions thank you so much um we have some we have a combination of awesome questions coming at me from all directions so i'm gonna do my best to not repeat anything you've said or maybe recap things um let's see we have a question from mark in the audience dr dimazio who says are there basic emotions or what are they as well as private feelings and are both contagious through mirror neurons and somatic markers very good okay so um oh it disappeared um never mind so there are yes i would say that there are basic emotions and there's a certain repertoire of emotions that is uh very easy to identify um it's it's not i don't want to give the impression that emotions are something completely independent and and routine and and completely pre-packaged because i think there's we not just actors in the theater or film but we ourselves can modify the way in which our emotions are presented but the reason why any of us the audience may hear you that are helping with the this event but the reason why we look at somebody and can say that that person is sad or joyful the reason why we look at that person laughing and we have we're not going to confuse that with crying is that there is a certain amount of stereotypy in emotions so while there is room for interpretation while there's room to again i think i had a musical illusion uh illusion there's a way of interpreting the emotion but the core is extremely stereotypical uh and then you can have all the variations you want that's also by the way the reason why you very rapidly look at animals that have nothing to do with us in terms of their detailed physiology or have a lot to do with us their physiology but nonetheless they're different you look at a dog you look at an elephant or you look at a cat and you normally recognize emotions and you say oh that animal is sad or that animal is jumping for joy why because they're in there by the way with different bodies and yet there's something about the motoric of the animal certainly what they do with their paws or what they do with their faces that immediately puts in mind a certain emotive pattern so yes there are certain patterns of emotion that i would say actually are universal how far down i don't know i'm i'm not sure about uh picking up on the the sadness or joy of fish but i presume you probably could go there and and say something intelligent about it uh but then there are there's room for for variations and then all of this has its own effects on the body and as a result of those effects we have what i call emotional feelings so it's very different it's one thing is to have feelings like thirst or hunger or desire which are feelings that are that are the result of representing natural states of the body that have to do with their homeostasis have to do with the regulation of life in the body and another thing is to represent movements and a lot of actions that are actually being taken mostly by the musculoskeletal system because think about it when you laugh or when you cry it's the musculature in your face and in your body or when you have fear or anger it's a different system that is giving you those movements they're still in the body but they're not in the interior body the one that has that full circulatory connection uh through molecules and in the bloodstream so there's room there for a lot of a lot of variations and of course this has different ages because once again when you go to homeostatic feelings you can recognize them in creatures that are extremely simple um and when you go to the emotions as we understand them we're thinking mostly of the emotions of humans and the emotions of big animals where you can recognize through the motoric a certain kind of response thank you for the question let's have another one yeah we have several questions here about other types of um well primates in particular but so we have a question from bill that asks do other higher primates chimps gorillas bonobos have consciousness and if they don't how would you describe their experience if they have experiences so my my answer is absolutely i think they have consciousness now if you want me to prove that i can go through a lot of exercises to to prove that for you but i would say yes they have conscious it would be unthinkable to if anybody has a dog or a cat or an elephant at home i can guarantee you that you look at those creatures and you realize that they are conscious and and they are they they're conscious in the way they behave they're conscious the the way they look at something and uh there's a you recognize through the acts of that particular animal that something was understood about the surroundings something was even understood about the connection to you and of course that would not have happened if they were not conscious so i think that they just like us have a possibility of representing their selves those selves are being represented thanks to that world of feeling because they have you know the anatomy is on the surface very different but in the end extremely similar you have the same arrangement you have structures of the interior in different viscera you then have muscles you have muscles that move bones you have nerve endings that bring information about all this into the central nervous system you have the responses from the central nervous system towards all of these organs so that you can close this conversation you have a dialogue that goes from the brain to every part of your body and from every part of your body to the brain so the idea that they would not have feelings is absolutely anathema you know they do and that by the way is very important because of the way we have to face something that we as owners of the earth so-called have done very wrong which has to do with the way animals are treated uh and and there's a uh you know clearly um the way animals or plants for that matter are treated in some cases abused is not correct and it becomes very important for you to know that those creatures have feelings because once again it's through feeling it through the possibility of doing something that is harmful to those animals that you're going to get into the possibility of suffering now would you want to have the animals that are around you to suffer whether they're animals that you eat normally or animals that you just do bad things for like in mismanaged forests uh and so forth so it's very important that this notion of consciousness has enormous impact on that part of our lives that we very often are not terribly sensitive to but it's quite critical okay so we have a question that totally related to this i want to make sure i'm not getting i'm i'm not turned around here but so the question is are there creatures possessive of feelings that are not conscious does that like for example do spiders feel are they conscious ah okay that's a very beautiful question and it's not you you need to be very attentive to the answer i need to fabricate the answer right now and that is there's a distinction between sensing and feeling for example you can have extremely uh simple creatures living creatures that i that don't have a nervous system and that i think do not have a mind and that clearly i think do not have feeling and yet they can sense things um even unicellular organisms extreme simple organisms can sense in a part of their environment that for example the temperature is too high or the temperature will be too low or that there is for example if they need some kind of nutrient that the territory of the environment is bad in terms of the quantity of nutrients so that is not feeling because i think that what is happening there is a detection the the the word sensing is already a little bit loaded because sensing senses you you know the the language is just not it's not clear enough it's we have all the baggage of our culture that gives it special meanings but detection is clearly good because you can have detection actually for uh for a living creature as well as for an artificial creature that detects a robot that detects the presence of something so detection is one thing and it does not mean that that creature has feelings um i don't think that plants have feelings and yet they have detection of plenty of things that is happening for example to their root system there's little chapter uh in feeling and knowing which is actually about plants uh and and they they can detect for example the presence of water or the lack of water and they can orient the roots under the ground you don't see that but the roots are going to go in a certain direction until they find a place there's water now do plants have minds i don't think so um but yet they have the sense that they share with us uh not only are they alive and they need to maintain the cells of their their bodies but they but they have this possibility of sensing what's in their environment and responding accordingly i see the plants in my own room do that on a regular basis yeah do you talk to plants i don't only my dog ah your dog dogs that's very oh i'm sorry no i i talk to my dog but i do not talk to my plants okay but does your talk to your plans i do not think so i haven't seen her that would be the real the real feeling i'll let you know when that does happen please do please do um i want to turn a little bit to to creatures that don't that don't quite exist yet so um in your so in your discussion of ai and robotics from your book you don't rule out the possibility of producing a robot that is self-aware i was hoping you could discuss that possibility and how realistic the creation of that entity might be right the the i think that it's quite possible that we'll be able to create or to fabricate design and fabricate creatures that would have something in common with us at the level of feeling so what they would need to have is some kind of detector again something like i just talked about in terms of detection and sensing and then some kind of representation of that detection in terms of a sort of broader representation of their their whole body now it's very important to say that this would be a sort of feeling analog and it might give the overall organization of that artificial organism a sense of vulnerability which is the sense of vulnerability that we have or should have uh regarding ourselves i mean we we have to sense that we're vulnerable because we can have hunger and thirst and pain and there you are that's the those are the most critical of our vulnerabilities not even to talk yet about the social vulnerabilities that come later now what is very important is that once you announce that you could create a robot that thanks to for example a soft robotics would sense a little bit of its environment that is not feeling you know those creatures are not feeling for the for the very simple reason that they don't have life in themselves they are designed uh creatures quote unquote they have to have the quotes uh and so they they don't have that core vulnerability which has to do with life itself so we are we feel vulnerable and we are vulnerable because in the end as living creatures we have we sort of literally it's like flight you know you you can keep the plane in the air provided you have the jets you know making you know permitting propulsion of the plane in the air and if that fails or if the wings fail you crash and that's the same thing with us um there's that vulnerability that is very intense now the plane doesn't feel that vulnerability although it's vulnerable and these robots with substrobotics and simulacra or feelings don't feel the vulnerability or would not feel the vulnerability once they exist whereas we do we become built in we're so damn vulnerable that we actually come with the system that tells us watch out or else i love that distinction between vulnerability and not that's really interesting um we have a question from an anonymous attendee here i like this one so in your description feelings and consciousness arise from neuro physiological processes that promote survival where do you stand on the question of free will might consciousness be compatible with a purely deterministic view of our activities or is free will inherent in your understanding of consciousness well i think free will happens for us at this point in our culture has been happening for quite a while obviously historically but that's because we are able to think we're able to reflect on our condition and of course once you have once you are at that point you can take positions as to how much can you really control of your life and where the limits are and so forth but those other creatures the the the simpler creatures that sort of allow us to build a little bit of this history i i don't think they have free will you know there's no will to to begin with they are what they are what their what their um little minds are producing for them uh and that in itself is a very interesting question because because we know we don't know everything we should know but because we know so much biology and we know so much now about neuroscience as well we have the possibility of eventually deciding on which creatures clearly have the possibility of having minds and having will and those that don't um and you can also say of course that even if you have all the free will in the world your will is not going to be strong enough to stave off the bad uh or the or the the the destiny that your genome has set for you thank you i'm going to pivot a little bit just based on the questions we have here um alice is asking could you speak to feelings in a post-trauma situation and the possibility of feeling numb ah that's a very a very interesting question i whatever i can say and i i'm i'm not at all a specialist in this area and as obviously the the the person who asked that question must have got a lot of knowledge and interest in this area and as you probably know there are specialists that will deal with with trauma and and have all of all of the right analysis and the possibilities of intervention i'm by the way i'm a neurologist but i'm i was never specialized in that particular area which neurology and psychiatry and psychology have quite a lot to contribute to but when i hear about the notion of numbness which you encounter all the time from people that have had severe trauma you talk sometimes to a friend that has been through some horrible experiences i feel numb and what i see there is a reaction an adaptation so the you know our our brains are of course extremely plastic and our brains and bodies in their interaction extremely plastic and once you have a certain level of pain which may by the way be tolerated differently by different people uh there's a certain point in which things shut down and they shut down for your own good so for your own good you're not going to be feeling much and by by being numb by by shutting down the emotive effects of new experiences you are shutting down at the same time both the good experiences and the possibility of more bad experiences which of course our systems being extremely intelligent to begin with uh are going to want to avoid so you want to you'll get numb because you want to avoid more suffering you want to avoid more more trauma um it's very interesting how how the uh you know the uh i use the word intelligence there and i want something that i discuss in the book and may be interesting uh for the listeners uh is this idea of multiple intelligences not in the uh you know for example howard gartner uh um used to talk about multiple uh intelligences and that's in a different sense it has to do with the different capabilities the different specialties of our of our intelligence i'm talking about multiple intelligence in the sense that bacteria give plenty of signs of intelligence and plants give signs of intelligence and what it really means is that they are capable of orienting their lives in what appears to be a smart way even if it's not a smart way that they're deliberating on because they don't know that they're being intelligent this is the wonder of this so there are lots of things that we do that are very smart and we should call them intelligent and yet we don't know that we are being intelligent it's it's just part of our resources now when somebody asks me are you going to that halloween party that you were invited to uh and i said no actually i'm not i'm being intelligence in a very conscious way because i'm going to avoid that party for a variety of risks real or perceived and then i'm thinking about it but that's very different from what the plant does when it sort of pushes up in the air or projects a root under the ground okay we have a question from jacob here do you draw any inspiration in studying this from religious connections this is a topic undeniably tied to both religion and science where do you draw that line um can you repeat the beginning of the question yeah yeah so it starts with do you did you draw any inspiration in studying this from religious connections this is a topic tied to both religion and science where do you draw the line well certainly at the level of practice religion and science are different and the line can be drawn very easily i like your idea that some of the inspiration quote unquote could have been drawn from some conception of religion because of course religion is constantly reminding us of good and bad states and of the possibility of managing good and bad states intelligently so if you have good things prize those good things and be careful about how you use or misuse them and if you are in pain or suffering find ways in which you can correct that so that you can guess what regain homeostasis so probably the thing that i would say to the to the question is that um religion in our conception concept it's not that my ideas about homeostasis were influenced by religion although i would be perfectly happy to say that they were and they may have been but certainly religion has been drawn from homeostasis it's our it's our state is our confrontation with our own suffering that constantly asks us to find ways of alleviating that that suffering and through and through religion was a way of delegating that suffering as it developed and it continues to be for many people so i i think that the connections there are are quite close it's interesting that it can go in one way or another absolutely um yeah my my mother sees that in the field of medicine a lot she deals with end-of-life care and you get the same type of back and forth um okay we have time for i think one or two more this might be the last one we'll see how much time we have um but let's see we have a question here professor dimazio thank you for your important research and wonderful presentation can you talk about how the findings of your research on feeling and knowing can be used in educational settings by teachers and curriculum developers um and you know if you could give any specific examples on that front um this question's from mong new very good well thank you for the for the the question um well i think that the the the field of education as you know probably an educator uh and there's constant movement in that field we're constantly finding out that the way we are teaching is not ideal and that they're different ways in which we can approach teaching and of course we have the the big complication that teaching has all of these levels here we are harvard bookstore our bookstore which is connected with one of the greatest universities uh anywhere in the world that level of uh education that we're talking about that takes place within a university is completely different from the level of education that you're talking about when you are in quote-unquote grammar school um and the the the the the connection that i draw that is most important is let's make sure that education is not seen purely in a cognitive way if we're going to educate children to be very knowledgeable about the world and to be very rational about how they act in the world they have to have a sense of what what feelings and emotions are this is absolutely critical for several reasons one is that it's when you are very young that you are probably the most vulnerable ah your your dog didn't like this does everybody have access to her dog he manifested himself or herself um anyway so uh it's very important to to make sure that in the field of education you don't just address the issues of cognition the issues of enlarging your bank of knowledge and the possibility of reasoning clearly and logically over the facts but also take care of the facts that are from our primary biology and that are going to be there whether we want it or not when we are solving any problem in our lives when we are being whatever kind of professional we end up being and if you don't have that that coalition you're not going to be a very complete human being and you're probably not going to be very good to yourself and to others around you you need to have those two together and i'm sure you as an educator is quite aware of this well thank you so much um that we are we are at time there were so many more questions uh sitting here that i wish i could ask you about everything under the sun but thank you so much for joining us dr damazio i'm very pleased to have joined thank you very much thank you greg as well thank you kate and it was wonderful to answer your questions and i hope what you didn't get to ask you can get by reading the book absolutely for listening to the book which you can do too or listening greg was just saying that he listened to the book and and loved it like that too yeah um well thank you everyone for joining us this evening um if you would like to learn more as we've said copies of feeling and knowing are for sale on harvard.com via the links that i provided so on behalf of harvard bookstore the harvard division of science and the harvard library have a great evening keep reading and please be well thank you thank you very much

Channel: HarvardBookStore

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Id: A_BX5n6CWlg

Length: 58min 58sec (3538 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021