Antonio Damasio, "The Strange Order of Things"에서

 

 

 

Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life,

Feeling, and the making of Cultures (2018)

 

 

 

The idea, in essence, is that cultural activity began and remains deeply embedded in feeling. The favorable and unfavorable interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition. (p 5)

 

Connecting cultures to feeling and homeostasis strengthens their links to nature and deepens the humanization of the cultural process. (p 6)

 

Why so much derailed homeostasis and so much suffering over human history? A preliminary answer ... is that cultural instruments first developed in relation to the homeostatic needs of individuals and groups as small as nuclear families and tribes. The extension to wider human circles was not and could not have been contemplated.... We might venture that the ultimate success of cultural homeostasis depends on a fragile civilizational effort aimed at reconciling different regulation goals. (p 32)

 

In Spinoza's own words, "Each thing, as far as it can be its own power, strives to persevere in its being," and "The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing." (p 36)

 

Specific cells within the hippocampal circuitry and its gateway, the entorhinal cortex, are compromised by Alzheimer's disease. The gradual disruption no longer permits effective learning or recall of integrated events. The result is a progressive loss of spatial and temporal orientation. Unique people, events, and objects can no longer be recalled or recognized. (p 95)

 

New memory formation partly depends on neurogenesis. Interestingly, it is known that stress, which impairs memory, reduces neurogenesis. (p 95)

 

Hypothetically, if you would reduce the feeling "tracks" of your mind, you would be left with desiccated chains of sensory images of exterior world. (p 101)

 

In sum, feelings are experiences of certain aspects of the state of life in an organism.... They accomplish something extraordinary: a moment-to-moment report on the state of life in the interior of an organism. (p 104)

 

The alignment of pleasant and unpleasant feelings with, respectively, positive and negative ranges of homeostasis is a verified fact. Homeostasis in good or even optimal ranges expresses itself as well-being and even joy, while the happiness caused by love and friendship contributes to more efficient homeostasis and promotes health. The negative examples are just as clear. (p 117)

 

The roots for the alignment between life processes and quality of feeling can be traced to the workings of homeostasis within the common ancestors to endocrine systems, immune systems, and nervous systems. (p 118)

 

One thing is for certain: the abundantly positive feeling that accompanies the recollection is nor part of the material being recollected. The feeing is newly and freshly minted as a result of the strong emotive responses that the remembrance engender. (p 141)

 

The mental experiences that constitute consciousness thus depend on the presence of mental images and on the process of subjectivity that makes such images as ours. Subjectivity requires a perspective stance on the making of images and the pervasive feelings[? or my typing error?] that accompanies image processing, both of which come straight from the body proper. (p 153)

 

Consciousness in the full sense of the term is a particular state of mind in which mental images are imbued with subjectivity and experienced in a more or less extensive integrated display. (p 154)

 

 

[E]xperience is itself partly generated from feelings, and so it is not really a matter of accompaniment. Feelings are the result of operations necessary for homeostasis in organisms such as ours. They are integrally present, made from the same cloth as other aspects of mind. (p 160)