Mixed Mental Arts, ep. 330: Strange Orders – Antonio Damasio

ladies and gentlemen welcome to another episode of mixed metal arts and today in the idea dojo we are lucky to have Antonio Damasio now if there's a set of words that I've said more in the last 300 plus episodes this podcast then de cartes error I don't know what they are so this is honestly a pretty landmark moment in the podcast to be able to finally sit down with Antonio Damasio and talk directly with Bryan to the man whose work has honestly changed my life ladies and gentle we're at USC at the neuroscience I guess Institute brain creativity Institute yes with a great professor and dr. Antonio Damasio from Portugal you don't have a Portuguese accent otherwise known as the Mick Jagger admission no it was actually a Texas headline oh really I think it was from Dallas there was a review right and him since she wanted me to be the model um Brian okay by all means us have Marlon Brando and make sure I said I said Brando he speaks and professor DiMaggio speaks in a very sort of low voice and he makes you reach as Brando did when he mumbled so I called him the brand of neuroscience and now he's good because you also lowered your voice as you talked about Marlon Brando yes that's good acting notes why did be why did they call you the Mick Jagger of neuroscience I don't know no no but well uh well I will say there's a difference in you and Mick Jagger and that is that Mick Jagger hasn't written a new song in 30 years the Rolling Stones are a cover band of themselves okay and they're still riding on those laurels so you know I I'm done with them you on the other hand have written an original book that this book is strange order of things is such an ambitious work of sitting there reading it and I went this guy whoever this dude is I mean I'm seriously he has decided to it suck you in and I want to go I want to just start this interview because it's very difficult to figure out even how to get into this because in the book what's new and original we do a lot of reading is the idea that bacteria and even insects to an extent under circumstances have their own culture if you define it as you know the kick essentially there's almost an ethical code among bacteria bacteria that's not pulling its weight gets kicked out there's an all-out war with bacteria sometimes bacteria cooperate with each other whatever the case right and I and you use the word homeostasis in every chapter over and over again and I always thought of homeostasis as balance but it's not right so let's stop there so first point homeostasis homeostasis is really regulation of life and it sounds like a it's a bad word by the way the word that one should use is hum your dynamics to give it exactly the dynamic look and not make people think about that status yeah and not make people think about balance but it is really the the set of principles imperatives that regulate all life whether it is the life of a single-cell organism or our lives which are obviously very complicated and it is very important it's there from the get-go so when you think about the first obviously single-cell organisms that appeared 3.9 billion years ago they already were being run by homeostasis if they hadn't been for it hadn't been for homeostasis they would not have stayed alive so it's the thing that makes you persist that the thing that makes you continue makes you and whatever creature it is all creatures are run by this prince can I ask you though to make it now I want to dumb it down even further wooden thorough thorough in I think it was Walden said that I need enough shelter and enough food only so that I can keep my body temperature at a certain degree and and that's the most comfortable so I I really you know if I guess whatever that might be there's a requires certain about a shelter sleep water and food epsilon and and and and once my body temperature is at that degree that would be would that be a good way of looking at homeostasis it's a perfectly fine one I mean the many ways of looking at it for example finding energy to maintain your organism going is another way but temperature is a perfect example temperature for example blood pressure you there there's certain parameters of our physiology of our function that need to be kept and so there's a sort of lower point in a higher point and you need to keep the current values within that range so it's really about ranges it's never about a set point it's not the thermostat that you said and you know kicks in or right because when you're having sex or when you're you're cheering for your favorite sports team you're you're gonna be elevated but that's part of homeostasis because that's a dynamic completely so it's really as a set of rules and regulations that have as a goal because they have a goal it's very interesting we normally are a little bit shy of talking about purpose and goals because if you have a perspective of evolution say Darwinian evolution we you want to avoid the idea that there was a a creation that led things in a certain way and the the the the fundamental idea in in Darwinian thinking is that the purposes were sort of discovered as things went along and as certain kinds of routine behavior what-have-you were selected because they were good well and it's very important distinction you make because we both and we've often and I have until it's book given credit wisdom culture modes of behavior ethics morality I have all I that has been the fundamental distinction between all life and human beings exactly and that's one that's the main thing that well they're they're a couple of yeah I think that there are about seven important ideas in this book that are there that I have defended but that's one a very important one in other words don't be so smug don't think that we creatures there are human have invented all this stuff because in fact the stuff has been invented before us even by multi single-cell organisms exactly and in the in what I you know I never say that that bacteria have cultures it's a little bit easier to say it for social insects but I don't say that either what they have is a number of strategies of social behavior that resemble the strategies that we use in cultures in our culture of the human cultures so if you have creatures that have certain strategies of cooperation or strategies of conflict that that that was not invented by us that's the way a multitude of organism the organisms operate for one reason they need to fend for themselves and given certain circumstances they need to find the way of continuing because otherwise the the circumstances or others outside of that group are going to damage them and are going to make them perish so nothing would work if it hadn't been for homeostasis and one very important point in the book which will can come back to is the fact that homeostasis then gets represented in our minds once creatures have minds which really means once creatures have brains because you cannot have minds without brains it gets represented in the form of feeling and what we have when we have well-being we are in fact it's like getting a lateral without like getting an email from our organism saying everything is okay don't do too much we've and when you have discomfort when you are in pain when you when you have malaise and you're coming down with a cold or with the flu it's sending you the notice that things are not okay watch out you're getting your you're getting out of homeo stays exactly your dynamics your your homeostasis is under threat and if this continues this way you're going to get sick and after getting sick you're gonna die so I feel badly and now I want to feel better because I have to figure out what actions today so you're making the argument that feelings in fact are directly connected to homeostasis who biology absolutely our biology absolutely the end end that they're adaptive and useful and that is a real rebuttal of everything that sort of this Western enlightened culture believed well and not just Western in mind I mean talk to the Japanese the idea that feelings your emotions do not get in the way of your duty right I mean you know it's so so amazing you can imagine how distressing it is to hear somebody talk about feelings you say well we don't think your feelings are a decoration we don't have any reason why we should have feelings they exist but it doesn't mean that they are important or useful there's no reason for it and this is of course a colossal mistake have you where where have you heard that where what schools have thought it always it's actually quite widespread in the schools of rationality objective Jack yeah well of course the the more the more concerned you are with rationality the more you can tend to do that but it doesn't need to be for example one of the great figures of the classic enlightenment let's say the the Scottish and French enlightenment is David Hume David you mean fact always said that well reason is fine but reason should be a slave of the passions this is actually going even more he said that Hume said them some reason should be a slave and a slave is that right that's exactly right if you live that way oh I really don't know that's a hard way to live isn't it it is and I think that's the way that we all live by ology but I think that's the thing is something or deluding themselves into thinking that their reason isn't the slave of the passions I mean really it always yes not always and you know it's it's you you just need some some equilibrium in in that it's not I can equally we actually what you need is reasonableness there's a difference between between reason and reasonableness and when you think about the way emotions evolved in creatures that were not at all like us but that we have inherited that the features that we have inherited what we find is that they are in fact quite reasonable for example if you are and the threat from a predator or from some Cataclysm in the environment it is perfectly reasonable to be in fear because fear will make you stand on attention and then choose some routine of reaction or not even choose have that automatically given to you by the organism so to say that fear is you know it's an emotion is irrational of course it's not irrational it is extremely reasonable to have fear it is extremely reasonable under certain circumstances to have anger and fight back of course it reminded me of a great story of the Zen the Zen master who was they came to kill him and he ran away and his students said you ran away I mean you're a Zen master you're not you're the one who's supposed to not bat an eye as they chop you into a thousand pieces he said that makes no sense they were there to kill me I got afraid and I ran away and that's how why I'm here today yeah you know that's a reasonable and you know it's interesting if you look at anger which is obviously something very interesting because when people say you know I always say when people people tell me well emotions really are bad and look at all the other troubles that we have in our society because people are too emotional well give me a break they are good emotions and bad emotions to be grateful to be compassionate to love are not bad emotions they're good emotions and we better have more of it not less on the other hand if you have contempt you have too much fear and if you are too angry and you are in the rage and if you that sat on revenge for example which are all effects that come out of anger in general then that's not good but it doesn't mean that it was not good in times past in evolution for a variety of creatures including for humans you know if if you are you know when you're angry you have sometimes the chance of fighting back and winning over your adversary sometimes just by frightening the adversary you don't even need to fight the adversary so it's not that anger is just an awful stupid thing it is something that probably has outlasted its value and probably we would be better off if our society was less angry and let and would respond less with anger with a variety of circumstances with creativity as opposed to exit or whatever much right it's right - I mean in terms of trying to live without emotion you obviously you know Descartes cerar lays out what that actually looks like for someone like Eliot very good that's exactly exactly the point is that we if you are if you are shut down of the possibility of having emotions you're also taking away the guidance of your be help tell a story about Elliot yeah we would love to hear Elia Kazan your lips yeah because then people haven't read it it's a very very important and interesting yeah it's a sort of emblem for a group of people and there are unfortunately many people that have damage to certain structures of the frontal lobe so it's about the front of of our brain in the window intro medial prefrontal cortex and that's it even the more stress you guys are so good I'm complete you got fans over here yeah we're huge fans I'm good good okay so you damaged those structures and what you lose is the ability to have the correct emotive response in relation to a particular situation and what you what you're losing really is your ability to intuit what is coming next so and you you you lose the the ability to modulate your behavior so you you basically go flat there's much less emotive 'ti sometimes none or it has a very high threshold which is something that also also can happen they're the they're people that it's not that they lose the ability to emote is that the threshold is so high that it really takes some you know catastrophe to realign and exactly do we mode interview and that's something with you being you know smart and alert to a few things that I've done this distinction between emotion and feeling is critical and that's good for your viewers and listeners is that when you emote you have an action program is really like a concert it's like playing a number of notes or for an orchestra to play a number of instruments in a certain sequence that's what an emotion is for example take fear I always talk about the the mini concert of fear that you can for example freeze your face changes you have for example you lose blood that is coming into the face and you get pale you get contraction contractions in your gut you get a solid strangling of the airway all in and then you you do this in part under the control of a secretion of certain chemical molecules into the bloodstream there are orchestrating all this stuff so it's not one thing it's a slew of things that is happening very rapidly over time and that is the emotion and as the name implies you have the route of movement motion it's really emotion towards the outside but and that's the kind of thing that you can find even in very simple creatures that do not feel what they are going through but we have the possibility of having not only the emotion but also the experience of what is happening to us so you know it's unfortunate that the word is the same but when you have the emotion fear you have that collection of responses when you have the feeling of fear you have the experience the mental experience of what it is to be in the state of fear Wow yeah so you're kind of observing yourself exactly so it may be two things going on there exactly and and that's the entry into the world of consciousness you know I am convinced actually the world of consciousness begins with feeling because feeling without consciousness is an absurdity the complete absurdity I mean why would the only way you become self-aware exactly so you become the the value of feeling the value of the information that comes in feeling derives from the fact that you are conscious of it you know that it's happening to you so they it's a it's and usually what's happening to you I've heard consciousness that was not possible without the understanding that you are going to eventually die but you are a limited organism that there is an end to this game I would question that really yeah yeah I think that that's that's a derivation of the fact that you have consciousness in fact because you know you know about yourself and you can also know about others and because you have the knowledge of what life is like for you and for others and you can observe and you have a lot of a lot of knowledge in fact then you can predict and you can see quite obviously that you know that there's a decline in that you're going to die but it's not that knowledge of dying that is giving you the consciousness what is giving you the consciousness is a very complex biological process it is allowing you to be to be aware of what is going on in the interior of your body and placing all of that in the perspective of you have you almost have this the apes have it oh yeah they do or in space they do yeah I I think that there there are a few creatures to whom I'm ready to deny consciousness and those are the ones that do not have a nervous system but anything with a nervous system so a dog and these these are they there but they certainly don't have the God the kind of consciousness that we talk about the idea of image making correct and and and story and mythology and all correct I would not be I would not go to the point of denying it to some of the higher Apes or sea mammals I wouldn't be surprised if in fact they even have the concept of narrative actually they don't have a concept of nary they have the possibility of narrative maybe but you know the only thing is that that they don't seem to have potential and human beings have potential there's absolutely no know the difference there is is huge and I think the difference is huge because with with us you have consciousness of course and you have feeling you cannot talk about one without the other but then we have a lot of other things that are important we have a huge capacity to learn and to store memories and to start memories of different levels and then we have the capacity to put memories in story-telling form we can tell stories to ourselves on download those absolutely and we also have the possibility of relating all of those memories to feeling States so if you ask me and actually I have that in the book in the strange order of things if you ask me what is most distinctive about humans and it's different from anything else besides the fact we have language that that's a capacity we have that is very special and of course it's distinctive of humans but sometimes people ask questions like this or say well you're finding so much commonality among the living things that what's left for humans why are we so special and I said well we're special in many ways for example the the degree to which we have been able to create cultures is of course very special and all that one can see the foreshadowing you know that there's sort of this background idea of something that is culture like in simple creature like social insects for example but still it's nothing of the the quantity and quality that we have in in humans I mean you imagination right amoeba mean we created arts we created moral systems we created belief systems governance economy the technology science all it's easy it's a monumental development in the monumental development that actually evolves very rapidly over relatively short time well to the point where we're gonna be able to control our own evolution it seems in fact right now right now we have two kinds of evolution we have the biological and the cultural there is a cultural evolution and the two are going in and sometimes are not speaking to each other they don't speak to each other and there's even a possibility of conflict yet let me just get back to the idea of another very special thing about humans and that is the fact that when you or I have pain we feel that basis suppose you have pets up suppose you're sick and you are in pain and you are you feel threatened and there is a possibility that you may be sick and seriously sick what we do is something quite momentous because we have that in the setting of all of our life all of a sudden in that moment you have the history of what you were and the history that inevitably connects with other people the friends people you love family you name it but then you also have a connection to the future that you have anticipated because we're here in this room and we know what we want to do tonight we know what we want to do this weekend and we know what we want to achieve in the next months or years of our life we're constantly building the future and you know my wife Hannah as many years ago when we were talking about these things she said right we have memories of the future which some spares of the future sounds paradoxical but is in fact quite correct we're constantly memorizing our anticipated plans so with the the pain that we feel at the certain moment is put in that context which is huge and it's totally you can make it I can make it either better or worse exactly and very often it makes it worse because if you are if you think about what you're missing mmm that's horrible why do you think that is what is the is there can you have you ever isolated or thought about the evolutionary purpose for that if there is one if there is one very good question is if there is one because it doesn't follow that we have to find purposes for everything yeah whether it's very interesting because very often because evolutionary biology is such a and the beautiful important field we very often feel compelled to find find justifications for everything oh we have this because well it's linked in desire you know we and so you could say that the the expectation of the future is linked to what you want because you're chasing sensations you remember and you want to repeat those sensations yeah and then you can you can sort of like because you're an imaginative creature you can then say if I add this to that it would be even better you know yeah I'm probably thinking of orgies personally but I mean but you know it's true that we we tend to chase sensation and try to maximize that sensation if you're a hedonist and if you're if you're into the intellect to you you're trying to do the same by exposing yourself to more ideas absolutely but what is what's so important is that that's something even you know I'm extremely liberal in relation to to animals I'm always want to give the benefit of the doubt and if you don't know why not raise the possibility that animal acts actually has those capacities wouldn't not just seeing enough but that is something that I don't imagine that many animals have and I cannot imagine again maybe elephants or some great sea mammals have some projection into the future but it's gonna be restricted yeah it's not gonna be like ours yeah Helen isn't also the other thing that's truly stupendous about us is not just that we make culture but that we accumulate culture over time and then it could evolve and we can end up with these massive cultural toolkits absolutely and we have the possibility which is totally unique which is the possibility of creating records of that culture and then allowing us to reflect on those creations and by the way all of that is constantly evolving and generally evolving for the better because principle once you invented writing you had not only to depend on an oral transmission of ideas like save Homer wrote but but the entire stuff had to be maintained by by actors that would recite it for new generations we can put it all in in stone or in emails and we can consult it and that expands our abilities because you can reflect on the stuff and you can modify you can you you can have dialogues with the cultural products we have dialogues with the the the scientists that came before us or with a novelist or the filmmaker that has done something quite spectacular on which we can reflect and we can also create heuristics and one of the heuristics that I care about and explain to our audience yes a heuristic is just a rule of thumb you know proverbs are in essence a heuristic right there little sayings that we use to groovy groom each other and also to make decisions to go one way or the other and one of the most important heuristics that we use in mixed mental arts is Descartes error because it is you know the constantly we make this assumption that somehow we can escape our emotions right we're rational creatures yeah yeah don't be emotional how am I supposed to not be emotional and politically awesome and that raises another question I wanted to ask you about do you believe in free will yes you do oh why does Sam Harris was talking about I'm sure you look up to him Sam Harris was talking about how he doesn't believe him pretty well and I'm not bashing sam harris i like him if i listen to his podcast but but I'm just kidding cuz he's a neuroscientist and you are too of course they I think that the question is the quantity of it and the circumstances so are we've if you in its we have to be very practical about it if you deny if you deny free will there's absolutely no way that you're gonna have him a morally operating society because then everybody can say well I'm made to do that's Russ so there's a damage to my prefrontal cortex you can excuse you can excuse yourself in ourselves for all the damage the way he would argue it isn't I agree with you but the way he would argue it is that you're not aware of where that impulse came from so if you choose to learn Chinese yep whatever is in you has always been there too you know there your body has a certain chemical makeup but then really it leaves it's very weird I don't know where you go from there I don't know how you build I honestly don't know how I even build a justice system or also you can't okay over you can't and also the whole point of self-reflection is to come to understand your impulses like a child doesn't understand why it does things but the whole point of an education is to help make us more self-aware so that we can be like oh I'm about to lash out here at everyone and it's not really because sam Harris would then say though something about you caused you to be on you can educate keep going all the way down it's ridiculous like I agree with you yeah so I I think that what we we have to we have to do two things one agree that we have some degree of free will and more in certain circumstances than others because there are circumstances where maybe we're doing things for example if you are if you have a piece of chocolate and then after a while instead of telling yourself I should not have one more piece of chocolate you actually say the hell with it I'm gonna have another one you can say well you're not really free to say no because the first piece of chocolate you need so much dopamine that made you desire then neck one okay that's true yeah but if you just just forget about free will you will have no way of trying to better yourself and in fact achieve some control over that particular behavior and we can do that all the time in the only way we can behave humanely towards others is by insisting on generating and educating growing measure of free will even if it's perfectly fine to say at the get-go you probably don't have much of it but that's what education is all about exactly educate civilization is better than indicating that the civilization proud project is a project about controlling the modicum of free will that we have been allotted and essentially actually redefining the parameters of the homeo dynamics yeah so that in instead of our parameters incorporating violence and murder and all these sorts of things that we're narrowing the parameters and we're saying okay you're angry what do you do with that anger rather than shouting or screaming or killing someone let's try and understand what those feelings are about and see if we can do so that way Steven Pinker and his new book talks about I mean that we are becoming more civilized we are becoming less violent and less impulsive maybe even you could even say that I mean the fact of the matter is there these things are have been we've learned from our mistakes to an extent absolutely and with it's undeniable and and we have you know the the the civilization project is actually a very interesting one and it's constantly being remade but but but we need to endorse it very very seriously or we've been in great big trouble and yeah I found myself hoping that Sam Harris's point of view on free will doesn't catch fire well did you get to Dan I think it's a dangerous idea well it's it's a looser idea because I mean it's good that we're talking about this with you as well because personal responsibility is a feeling right like it comes with there's that there's a sense of like I'm in charge of my life I have a sense of ownership I'm empowered and that leads you to make very different choices then like it's all out of my control cookie cookie cookie cookie well Sam I'd like the way you use homeostasis said all the time Sam Harris uses the word rational or rationally or rationality every other sentence he's out he's a he's a rational fundamentalist right it's interesting a lot of those a lot of those choices it's quite sort of giving reason to him on the on the like of free will it's not probably ended and he's controlled completely because by personality that's the way you adopt a certain attitude in relation to the well you could even say that he yeah or something happened to him where were the idea of emotion and not being rational was was painful and for example let's not to psychiatry [Music] here's in terms of emotionality you know I think what's interesting is because I work with students I'm a tutor and so when I read your book as a tutor I was like it's what everybody needs to know about because it's so obvious when you're dealing with teenagers that there is so much emotional life going on and that it is what is interfering with the educational process but the key thing is is that you know the sort of the Enlightenment idea like I often compared it to your check engine light that's what feelings are and so the Enlightenment ideas you're driving along I'm trying to get somewhere and then these annoying lights keep coming up on the dashboard wouldn't it be better if there were no check engine lights as opposed to the approach that I think emerges from understanding your work is oh that check engine light is on it's telling me something useful let me try and understand what that feedback is and adjust accordingly right you know I think all of this is a you know we need a sense of proportion the I think reason emotion is oversold and reason is a result and by the way the Enlightenment is of assault as well because the you know there's no there's no just one enlightenment and is not just good things coming out of the Enlightenment they're pretty bad things as well and it's actually a rather artificial period you know when most people talk about the Enlightenment if they know a little bit about history they're referring to generally the the 18th century and the period that's from the early 1700s to about 1789 and covers really the American and the French I thought the Enlightenment more Francis Bacon in Newton well you can extend the in life and there are many many people that do for example Girja is part of the Enlightenment and so is nature and we was at the very end of the 19th century and and you and you can push it back to some people that will include the cart and Spinoza in in the environment Spinoza is actually very you mentioned sparrows in the book I think don't you oh I I do and I wrote a book about Spinoza which is called looking for Spinoza which was I think my my third book because you know Spinoza has the great advantage to having advanced the notion that is really the notion of homeostasis with a different name of course the term homeostasis was only coined in 20th century but the people really worked on that were scientists of the 19th century called Claude bergna French of amazing biologists but before that Spinoza had talked about the conatus and the cannot resist this force he described it as a force you know in keeping with the the 17th century situation he was in but that's a force that makes you go in this a force that there's not a long life to stop unless something well there's Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had a very similar idea force which was the will the will to you know Chauvin I was really cynical there was the idea that you you had a will to procreate and essentially that required some heating and that that would never go away you'd be hungry again you'd be you'd want sex again and they some respite if you saw a great piece of art of great LIF you listen to a great piece of music perhaps and where as Nietzsche said there is an escape if you immerse yourself if you become an artist but you'll never escape the world of power but you know it's it's good to to think a little bit about the way in which those terms are used such as the term in enlightenment because you know when you when you go to the well even at the end of the French Revolution the French Revolution ends up with the period of the terror and the terror is a direct product tree enlightenment - it's not that the Enlightenment just now is about cleansing it was about getting rid of all the people that just could be in India janux in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a result of a beautiful project of science which is Darwin's project it you know it's a serious problem and of course becomes even more serious in the 20th century because I create utopias exactly so you you need to keep that in - and the other thing - that is interesting since we're talking about all these people from from the past sometimes people change if you take it a figure like also or Nietzsche for that matter early who saw in late who saw our different people and early Nietzsche and late nature are completely different people Nietzsche for example starts out with a great devotion to Wagner and it was a musician as well and interest in the music and then he gets the solution with the vigor and all that comes with a lot of sense because Wagner was an anti-semite right a few other bad things yeah and but then he actually gets sick because Nietzsche dies with syphilis and in very very sick and demented and and in whatever he was pronouncing in the last couple of years of his life I can perfectly well do without because it's unlikely to be a very reasonable thing yeah but yeah yeah yeah and I think that's a very interesting thing we forget people change absolute who you are as a young man is so different from who you are as a 50 year old yeah it's just amazing and it's interesting too because sometimes you you you get you get with a certain idea of a certain opinion and you have to be very careful especially when for example in science when you're quoting a calling of a thinker you have to be very careful if that really is representative and if the because the person may have said something early on and then revise it it's a good thing I mean we change yeah also I mean sometimes what happens in science is that people get pegged successfully with an idea early on and then they can't let go of it except because that's their whole dignity that's their whole being that's their whole shtick yeah and and you and you have to keep on defending it and and changing things so that it still holds yeah you know when I started this interview I said that your book is very ambitious because you really do take on everything from consciousness to image making to I mean everything if hope and love and all the things that you because my rebuttal would always be designed to say I always say things like listen there's a role for religion I'm not a very religious person but inspiration it creates inspiration and cause us to if it's self-sacrifice to martyr ourselves and you know our heroes go beyond our biology and and we hold those people up in such high regard but you do take on all of those ideas and all those sort of in in this notion of homeostasis and yeah and you see I project the notion of MU stasis into the making of cultures because in fact that's what making of cultures is is an attempt at homeostasis it the the principle is the same you know these things generally work by simple principles and then of course you create many complicated things out of the use of the principle but what what are things like science and technology or governance but means for our mestizos yeah you need to even get there and that's why you use the the I thought the title of the book the strange order of things yeah was great it still leaves us with a bit of a mystery and and that is that there is order and and I suppose we'll never answer why but do you as somebody who took on this this insane task I mean it really honestly the amount of mental energy and frankly even courage to buckle down on this idea and it's a very very compelling idea I mean you know it honestly is so you write this great book and again okay you know Damacio does it again if you read the reviews it's pretty cool man I mean you write Descartes there and you come back and you've got all this notoriety you're here and you of course you're obviously a very restless soul and you say there's more work to be done I'm going to solve this I'm gonna take on this problem what has left you still wondering what are the MIS where's the mystery for you Oh tremendous number I mean the mistress galore for example in the you know in the the book is you know is in three parts and that middle part that talks about image making and the construction of emotions and feelings and consciousness is there because in order to move from the creatures without Minds into the creatures that can actually make culture deliberately by their own volition you need to understand that there's a mind so I had this middle part of the book which is out about the fundamental characteristics and tools to making a mind now in there there are immense problems to be to be solved actions very interesting I finished writing this book probably two years ago and then you you go through a period in which you show it to colleagues and ask people what they think and then there's the the period of editing so by the time the book comes out you actually if you're lucky and if your mind is working well you're well beyond the book which is exactly my situation I like the book I think there are some very good ideas there but there are two or three points in which I'm already beyond it and one of them is consciousness another has to do with this fundamental idea that the brain doesn't make Minds alone makes Minds in cooperation with the body and I had enough data there to stick my neck out and say that but now I'm well beyond that because we've done lots of research in the meantime yeah so sometimes I catch myself answering a question with knowledge that I have today but I didn't have to and three years ago and that is not even is about new science that's exactly because in that's the fun of it so when you ask me what I knew what are things that you still want to do a lot of them yeah well that the book I I know you mean you probably you're done with the book on to the next you know I mean in a way I am although I've developed a certain real like of the book largely from people like you because they tell me they like it and if they like it now I'm gonna like it more all of this by the way is not done with reason it's done with feelings I have a guy from Sweden you know I'm a stand-up comic and I had a guy from Sweden he lets me in a bar the other day and he said done I I have you on my screensaver and he started reciting my jokes I mean come on I've thrown those away of course now I felt like I said I said I said I forgot about that joke that's a great joke let's go for it and you probably don't have a point of view on this or maybe you do you know when you hear about the great Tibetan monks who meditate and they expand their consciousness when their reach enlightenment yeah yeah I wonder now is that has another use of the word inlet it is I wonder if I read your book it's maybe they just learned how to maintain homeostasis even if the temperature is too cold or hot and even if there isn't enough food in their belly they've learned to sort of like bypass all of those apathetic needs I don't know you're quite right the the great part of the control that happens there is a control of your physiology and you can learn to do it you know I wish I could master it is any of you a great meditator deep I mean of course not you you guys are too much fun for them yeah I always I always remember Nietzsche said turn your life into a circus come on pride just means self-esteem you know what's wrong with lust it drives a man but you know there is a way of controlling what you what you attempt to it's basically from what I understand of the process and I have several friends that are deep meditators and tell me these great stories it's a way of not really paying attention to desire in shutting down desire so that you so that you can go along with a certain degree of I don't know equanimity or indifference well I realize desires an illusion it is true that we are we are always driven by desire yeah and we're all I mean it's it's the it's the cruel master you're not getting away from it we all want more yeah and if we've an end to to try to convince people to do things on the basis of rationality alone is it's a lost project because I mean you can very interesting even very rational people that say no no no we're going to do this because that's the right thing okay but how do you get people to do the right thing just by imposition of Reason if we could do that we would have a wonderful world and all the problem I think you used the crucial word there in position in position is always what I find with these rational thinkers is that what's being really said is I know what's best for you I figured out the rules you should behave as I want and the point is the right people often have even and we had that is Russell on historian and he's always said that truth has always been the great tool of the authoritarian yeah yeah yeah and and it's very interesting because from a point of view of human behavior we resist and we resist all the more things that we are being imposed to do so if if I go and tell no no you should not believe that you should believe X and I'll give you all the reasons and even if you accept the reasons you're going to resist the reasons that you're going to resist changing it really retrenching to your and your your your home position and you don't want to give to give in and of course that again temperaments with different temperaments people may be more flexible and more open to change but but temperament is you know what temperament is temporal temperament is about the way we deploy emotions in relation to situations of the day to day when people talk about the temperament well but people say well so and so does not have the temperament of a leader but that what that means is that that person is probably you know fires off very easily once provoked and responds to much at an emotional level where some people may have a temperament that allows them to be calmer and not have a threshold of response that that is higher but the entire thing is permeated by by emotion and of course why shouldn't it be you just look at our situation we have about a say four billion years of life on Earth how many of those years have creatures have have creatures head nervous systems about 500 million years it's really a pittance there's a little bit of time in which creatures have been operating with the coordinating system you obviously don't believe in the Garden of Eden somebody's going to hell he might somebody's going to help me Brian is gonna be leading the charge initially you know it's it's interrupted you with my silly it was only for the last 500 million years of organisms had nervous and nervous system and therefore systems really have a good cause and the cause is coordination see if you have a system that is very small and you have all of these different things operating in it they can be coordinated easily because it's small you know you have a cell you have a membrane it can work but if you have a system like us or even you know simpler than us with different organs different components different tissues and you have things like an endocrine system and immune system you have circulation because you need to deliver energy to different points and do it rapidly and you need to collect wastes very rapidly as well is what I call the combination of the the Amazon and the garbage collection the circulation is an absolutely amazing system but to coordinate all this you need another agency that's the nervous system but the nervous system begins its days as a coordinator of operations of a body is a servant to the body and this is what people don't get people want the nervous system to be in this pedestal and the nervous system runs things well to a certain extent it runs things because now we have the mind and all of this beautiful new novelties but in the end the the reason for the nervous system is coordination yeah is allowing the factor of the symphony is the conductor of the symphony exactly and in that way is a servant to the show yeah and you know it's so funny that you talk this way because even in mythology there is a there's a conductor there's a central nervous system to the Greek gods I mean it's fate and in the opener shots it's Atman in a way there's always a governor there's always a governing even with quantum physicists like our friend Spiros Mia lock us out of Caltech you know he salt halls theorem is that what he solved yeah well something specific thing but the idea that that because electrons can speak to each other even though they're light-years away ah then they behave and they communicate some other must be there must be a conductor there must be even in in inert matter or not in ER whatever the word is you know organic matter there is there seems to be a mathematical way to prove that there's some kind of edge conductor yeah it's really a coordinator that can can look at multiple functions at the same time and bring them sort of aligned them but it's so that that stuff always then I have to keep extrapolating I have to keep saying there's what the hell is really going on here who the hell is looking down on all of this I'm not talking about God I'm talking about I don't know what it is I mean there's got to be a higher intelligence there is a strange order to things well it's the order must have some purpose so you you if you read carefully very discretely in a couple of points in the book I make clear that I say actually I think towards a modicum numerology right now dr. nasir the Kabbalah Kabalah so what if you read carefully so if you read carefully which you did you'll find that I'm trying to be modest and I am actually very modest because you you know when you look at the complexity that you're dealing with and when you when you look at what we can reasonably explain it's actually pretty small you know it depends again the issue of temperament is the glass half full or half empty it's huge when you think that you can you can now have a certain account of things from the Big Bang to the the current moment and when you when you think you can go into caves and do with with genetics you can date markie illogical artifacts and so forth it's terrific we do we're doing great in many respects but at the same time okay what what's before the Big Bang and and what's after all the things that we are achieving and we really don't have a very good theory of everything and we don't have a very good theory of where all of this fits and you know there's a as a colleague of mine who I'm actually likes my work and says you know you just don't get it well all of this is being run by a program that is exterior to ourselves and it's making it all tick and by the way is not a creationist is not thinking about a God that is doing that it's thinking about a program and whether the program come from well from another galaxy in the end of course it's an intriguing story mmm it's not a story that I buy easily but there's no reason why it shouldn't yeah the problem is that it's very hard for us to we just don't have any measurable proof exactly and isn't that the challenge and I think specifically of the human mind which is that is just such a meaning making machine that we are constantly trying to make sense of whatever data we have and confabulate some sort of story about how this all works and people would you look at the the great beauty of of Legends going to the past of humanity you have all that confabulation having that that making of stories that produce meaning that produce a certain degree of joy and producing you know sort of rebalance things so so let me turn this on hunter if if you add to and I want to ask you if your your answer to this of course but if I said to you what what how would you concisely in a couple of sentences or in one sentence describe what the strange order of things is about and what do you think people should take away from it with I think that there is an emergent order in the universe and it has been emerging for a very long time and that ultimately much of what we think of as distinctly human originally emerged from our emotional and effective life terrific and then you can then you can full-stop paragraph and by the way all of this is rooted in homeostasis which comes goes back even further to the very beginning of life and I think the the second paragraph is shorter than the first no and I won an A+ so I want to append that to my answer and then resubmit a second but the thing that I kept on like there there's there's all this interesting science like the strange order of things I don't know if you've read say czar Hidalgo's why information grows Adrian Bay John's the physics of life but there is all this work that is that is and what I love about your work and what I've loved about your work for a very long time is that you erase imaginary lines the imaginary line between thinking and feeling the imaginary line between the mind and the body and the imaginary line between humans and animals and what what is starting to emerge are these more and more of these sort of large visions that see all of this is a large cohesive process and that is uncovering all the interactions and trying to understand how this emergent order all clicks together right I'm glad you see it that way because that's exactly how I think / feel we thank you for your time it's terrific you you you you guys are the best yeah well you know you are and the amount of work that just it's it's very admirable can I ask you one last question sure so one thing that I think is so interesting is is that you are from Portugal yeah and coming from Portugal into the culture of academia it seems that you saw things that maybe people who you know didn't grow up in Portugal like the emphasis on the mind in the body being connected the importance of thinking and feeling these are very sort of Mediterranean perspectives I feel um I think you may have a point there no of course I I came to this country which I admired profoundly very early you know I make my first first of all I was I had great contact with American culture since you know I was a kid everybody does in Europe in in the in the more advanced part of Europe everybody as especially through movies and literature that there's a huge imprint of American culture but I came here when I was 21 the first time and in essence I never left so most of my life I have spent more time as an American citizen and as a Portuguese citizen but I'm still very Portuguese which really means I'm still very European in the central the sense of the term and in my culture is very much also a French culture and that means therefore connections to Spain and to Italy into into England you know that was my culture growing up the thing that probably influences me the most is actually Portuguese poetry Portuguese poetry is is spectacular and extremely rich away at a certain point you were talking about all the the expressions that we create for example sayings in order to give meaning you know you I I can one day I'm gonna write a book about Portuguese sayings the wisdom that is captured in in a little saying that they're sayings for everything there's no situation that may not evil as saying and somebody will will will tell you you know as all of a sudden something just came to my mind that is a long Portuguese saying that exemplifies that and that has an influence and there's a sort of the the wisdom of certain poets but have you ever heard of him poet called Fernando Pessoa no ah you have to know about it so uh pessoa but so I bother is very funny because that's his real name another person person exactly and so Fernando Pessoa was an amazing Portuguese poet there is a as a kid he learned Portuguese and English his father was a Portuguese consul in Durban and so he actually grew up after maybe aged nine or so in an English culture in South Africa and he started writing very early and he started writing under aliases so he imagined this beautiful situation the guy was writing s from the saw but was inventing people that would write in a particular manner and all throughout his adolescence he wrote in English and Portuguese all of this amazing stuff using different characters and when when I think we did something like 30 different aliases in his life probably more Wow it is absolutely spectacular and he you read that poetry and it sort of encapsulates philosophy it encapsulates the history of theatre I mean we have Shakespeare is all there and it is really quite quite remarkable and I think that that probably had an influence I never I never again such a deep intellect in any like poetry but I have to say poetry changed my life it's why I became an actor and it's because I was I'd never been moved by words like that I was like what and I just was was there any specific poet well believe it was Springsteen yeah I don't know and yeah and I he spoke to me though man I I I just listened to I'd never had anybody put words together like that you know I can talk about great poets and and great writers you know but in great prose but but but Springsteen was able to put these tell these stories in this sort of rhyming verse and then they would sing them but it wasn't the music it was the words that blew me away I mean they they really they hit me they radically changed me yeah I had to be part of it somehow I had to let's figure out how to touch or get closer to that thing that overwhelmed me it's an overwhelming feeling right exactly it's a feeling and it actually is the what you're doing is a great defense of the arts in general it feels like a deep truth yeah absolutely you know that's really the definition of great art it's the only measure you can use that does it really lead to something deeper in terms of the appreciation of what human life is yeah if it's about that and by the way Indian you can do that with poetry you can you can do that with with theater it creates great compassion in you it's way like I in music good music can do the same thing yes yes and it's a way it's a way of bringing out the the best qualities that you have it in and it's a great way of establishing Society because you establish you know you don't want to have that alone on the contrary when you are going through those exceptional feelings and great quality what you do you know you it pushes you into fellowship it it doesn't you into connection with others it does it's multiple levels original self-expression does two things I think and and Emerson talked about this a little bit it not only does it surprise and shock you in a beautiful way but it also brings back something that you remember even if it's in your imagination a date I think he is the word and you kind of recognize it as an alienated majesty but something to you you know it's from self-reliance but it's very true there are two things going on one is I felt that way about life this whole time and I didn't know it you know there are two things going on that can be rather shocking but it is a deeper truth like you know you're you're sitting in traffic you hate humanity and then I hear Andra day come on and I'm like even terrorists have Mother's why can't we just why can't I love everyone you know and it's it it takes you outside of the appetites it makes you forget for a second that you're a biological creature with those needs I think your question about about European culture is very interesting because I think actually one of the great beauties of a diverse world is having the possibility of reaching into these different ways of looking at what the universe is and what what people are and and there is probably something about still something about European culture it is certainly for people of my generation but I think even today that that still exists and there's something there's a for example there's a great tolerance of abstraction I think in tolerance of obstructs abstraction abstraction I think people in Europe are much more tolerant of thoughts that are not made immediately explicit and connected with that with a with a use here people insist very much okay well what does that mean well what people want to have it or they don't one that's a nuance is terrifying to Americans we tend to want well you know they we tend its intention only without nuance and yeah give me the lowdown yes we want to distill fans also duction Richard Nisbett who wrote the geography of thought and studied the difference between the atomistic and holistic mindsets you know one of the interesting points that he makes in that book is is that all the grand theories came from continental Europeans because Americans had no tolerance for anything that large abstract and cohesive so you end up with you know the American mind comes up with things like behaviorism it's very simple you know there's cause and effect you know yeah and so it's in and you create camps you either believe that the genders are exactly equal or that there's some biological differences but you better believe they're exactly equal and there are biological differences we're not going to talk about those maybe that you know men are more aggressive in general but why talk about it why bring it up you're getting in the way and by the way women make nine dollars less than men do it's not it's not a surprise to me that somebody with you know even you know my father also left Europe at a very young age but many of those habits of thought and those possibilities stayed on stayed on and I mean I've never heard that yeah and I think the sort of button all of that up like what art does is it disturbs homeostasis that's what artists have always done you tell a story you sing a song you write a poem you make a painting and the order of things it stays up ended I see it brings you into deep homeostasis like well do but it it's not after a while after a while but you know the I think hunter is right so when you when you all the emotion disturbs on your stasis and in and then you need to you see you have you have two levels of a feeling you have a feeling that is very direct and that looks at the state of your body and that's what I call spontaneous or homeostatic feeling so pain well-being suffering things of that sort by the way thirst hunger desire sexual desire all of those are fundamental um aesthetic feelings and then you have this layer that is emotive so you do something that makes me laugh and I feel well why do I feel well you've just destroyed jittered my own aesthetic state and and then it gets disturbed in a good direction and in fact you could say that you elevate the level of um your stasis for a while and then it settles all of these things that are like waves so I'd like to say that emotional feelings right on the waves of fundamental spontaneous feelings but but it and and so you constantly have this process of disturbance and then quieting down and by the way music ends up being such a good analogy for what goes on in the emotional and feeling states precisely because you have for a certain period you have these waves of sound with certain features that can in fact represent em emotive and feeling States and this one is a great language because of course you have we have lyrics which is something comes from from the Greeks and then reappears in in opera in in Florence and Venice but by and large music can be played without lyrics can be played without words and it does the job perfectly fine with with one instrument like the human voice or many like in an orchestra I love it okay what a great what a great interview what a great time you are always welcome back you've welcome to dinner with us sometime well Britt will surround you with a bunch of comics it'll probably make you laugh but you won't learn a goddamn thing I hope that's alright but I I'm delighted to know about you so you're also fairly welcome back thank you I was noticing how quiet it is in this room that says you're with the Marlon Brando of science as a Mick Jagger neuroscience yeah he's right in front of us you really shine when you play the piano yeah badly don't ask please be merciful Smart's thank you sir thank you open a window buddy Gotham ill put a zit patreon you guys have actually been giving money that's something you set up no idea never looked at the page I understand we're making enough money to break even so I'm not losing money anymore that's kind of good after 300 episodes I'm actually not losing money we're actually breaking even so give even more it doesn't matter and every little bit helps a thousand dollars and six thousand dollars even ten thousand dollars and if you don't well you're you're cheap by the way we want to get rich so give us money and make you more content yes well we'll do it anyway yeah we'll do it anyway even if you don't get money get money man because we want to pay our engineers like read nice wonder and other people who are dedicating their time I feel I'm amazed that so many people are willing to work for free but I want to pay them I'm not gonna take into their money what am I gonna do by another Tesla [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mixed Mental Arts

Views: 7,358

Rating: 4.85567 out of 5

Keywords: antonio damasio, strange order of things, hunter maats, bryan callen, neuroscience, usc, sam harris, free will, descartes error, brain, consciousness, spinoza, homeostasis, homeodynamics, math, physics, music, poetry, culture, wellbeing, feelings, art, philosophy, emotion, thinking, The Feeling of What Happens, Looking for Spinoza, Self Comes to Mind

Id: nJl-2J4Q3eA

Length: 71min 54sec (4314 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018