"The brain is a servant of the body" - Antonio Damasio about feelings as the origin of brain

the title of your new book is at first there was the feeling so how is do feelings influence the biological development of human culture can you explain this to out to me yes so it's a very interesting story feelings are sort of the the nearby beginning of cultures in the sense that it is feelings that motivate us to build to invent and to create all the artifacts and instruments of culture and it doesn't make any difference where you look whether you look at art visual art or music or moral systems or governance justice or whether you look at science and technology although all of those spectacular developments of humanity are in fact due to our invention to our creativity to the fact that we have knowledge and reasoning none of that would happen if we would not have been motivated to do those things and people very often forget that there is that motivation that there is the need to do certain things one of the things that I want to do with this book is call attention to feelings as the motivators the monitors and the negotiators of all our processes of culture whether they occur in the arts they in literature or whether they occur in the social and political space that's the interesting point and how does it correspond and with a brain because feelings also are produced in our brain aren't they yeah feelings are in fact produced in our brain but not only by the brain they're produced in our brain in interaction with the body that's another thing that in this book probably more than before I have done it before in articles and other books but now I'm doing it much more clearly I'm saying look feelings are not the exact production only of the brain they're that they're produced by a cooperation between the brain and the body the brain is in the end a servant of the body not the body a servant of the brain we very often have the relationship wrong you also mentioned very often your reflection is in the homeostasis so could you please explain this state of balance yes so what happens with the mostess is this is that it is the sort of governance of life a good synonym of your state is regulation of life so in order to keep alive whether it's one cell or ten or a whole organism which is made of millions and millions of cells you need to keep each cell and the whole organism within very tight parameters they need to be if you go a little bit this way or a little bit that way you're gonna die you're gonna get sick and you're gonna die you know keeping alive and having homeostasis is a little bit like the work of a song lab that is trying to keep the balls up in the air and all it needs is a little mistake and one of the balls false feelings are an expression of this so feel you have to see feelings as the expression the representation it's like a painting in fact it's very much like a painting and a musical score the feelings are representing what goes on in your body and if something is going wrong you're going to have a bad feeling you're going to have discomfort malaise you're going to feeling like you're getting sick so that is the representation so you have to imagine it as if you are literally painting and drawing having a musical score that represents the organs that are not working right the chemistry that is not right that's what what is the feeling and so the relation is between feelings and homeostasis and homeostasis is the regulation of life it's what's at the bottom so human being is much more than an algorithm and can't be copied from a computer some in fact this absolutely and you know it's not in the end it's not so funny because there are people that are totally convinced that minds are nothing but computer programs in that minds or even whole organisms are captured by algorithms there are some people that actually say we are nothing but algorithms now of course if you think that you're not going to be very worried about killing the algorithm because in fact the algorithm is out of life and this has very important consequences for what we think is proper moral behavior in relation to creatures if you think that we are just made of algorithms and we can be substituted then there is no end to what you can do to a human being dream of being immortal but isn't this also a sort of nightmare if it comes out I think the complete nightmare but there are many people that don't think that that many people that think that in fact they can download their minds into a computer system and become immortal now of course I have no idea what it would be like to download of mind and the people that say that obviously have no idea what a mind is given the fact that a mind is the result of the interaction of a brain and the body that is absolutely impossible they don't know it but it is impossible so the only the only reason why I'm not worried about it is that that's a sort of dream that will not go anywhere it's just it's a thing convenient because the people that are thinking about it do not know enough to realize that what they're saying doesn't make any sense but it is a bit troubling and I think if you would have to live forever then you will also have to revise your culture completely because our culture is actually built because of feelings on the fear of mortality it's the fear of the feeling of fear of your own death of your own mortality the end of the mortality of those that you love and that love you that is one of the controls of our culture you repeatedly emphasized the meaning of small organisms special bacteria and I read this in the book and listen to lectures so this is remarkable what is so special about this and I have these small organisms so special real yeah well they they have this special road because at the beginning even before there were many cells and there were nervous systems they already with that kind of life and the mandate to stay alive and to continue they were using strategies of behavior that included cooperation that included competition and fight and that included mo tivity so for example you can poke a bacterium with a small sort of pin and the bacterium will go like this process the same thing that if I were now threatened you would wince and retract there is basically motiva T you know the the the most basic forms of emotion that we have our emotions of joy or startle you know get frightened by something bacteria already show the beginnings of that kind of behavior so when we when we think about our emotions and our feelings we may have the false idea that this is coming with us and that we're the sort of champions of this thing and we are pushing forward with these novelties that's not true the novelties have been there for billions of years and they are there because of life and then one day there will come nervous systems and guess what they appropriate those strategies and they do more things with it and that's how you develop feelings and consciousness and so forth and eventually our intellect but the story needs to be told by going back into the origins of life in trying to make sense of the evolution of these things and that's why the original title of the book is the strange order of things just to make people realize that you know it's a little bit I I expected it to have expected to have just those very complex behaviors come with big brains and smart people and guess what they come with very humble beginnings your science is a relatively young science so what do you think on which point are we and do you have a special puzzle or problem you want to solve on the next time yeah well yes and and and it's true that neuroscience is a young science but it's advancing very well it's a science with a great pedigree because when people ask me so who is the great cognitive scientists are the great psychologists for that matter that that you admire in history many people have expected me to say somebody in the past 50 or 100 years and I say Shakespeare Shakespeare did the best for us because if you look at Shakespeare if you go through the place you have representations of all the big dramas of humanity all the big comedies of humanity and they are analyzed in terms of their motivations and you they follow through the end but there again if you look at Hamlet or at Othello or at Macbeth or for that matter at one of the comedies or the the history place the the machinery of the motivation of those creatures is this constant negotiation between an emotion and the feeling and the intellect that goes there poor Hamlet ends up doing what he does because he has extremely complicated feelings in relation to the death of his father the parent is a patient of the place of his father by the uncle and the mother that may not be behaving as well as he wanted her to and then his reasoning is influenced by that and and there all the a cetacean that he goes through it's not something that you can explain in intellectual terms alone nor can you I mean go to Othello and you cannot explain it intellectually you need to explain it because of this tremendous jealousy that hiago plays you know like like a puppet master so I'll give you a give Shakespeare as my as my hero neuroscientist psychologist but the problem that I really intend to spend the rest of my life with has to do with both consciousness and feeling because the great paradox is that you cannot understand feelings without consciousness and you cannot understand consciousness without feelings one came with the other when you say I feel pain or I feel desire you have to be conscious to say that because if you were not conscious you couldn't say that how would you know the the ability to know that comes through consciousness is what allows you to know that you have those feelings but historically in evolution feelings when they developed we're already developing a very important component of consciousness which is subjectivity so it's it's a big conundrum and that's what interests me the most right now not all is soft and not only thought at all no no no this that this hopefully in in two or three years we can have another conversation with the next chapter

Channel: Der Quernheim

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Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2017