The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio R. Damasio (PDF)

Description

From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture. The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life.In The Strange Order of Things, Damasio gives us a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The book makes several highly original & insightful assertions, but the core thesis is :Feelings, as a feedback mechanism, have played a key role in our development. In fact, Damasio, saysWhat has motivated cultural development is affect. The feeling of hunger motivates us to eat. This mind-body concert evolved from pleasure seeking and pain avoidance to anticipating the potential for pain & the potential for pleasure; which drove the invention of new instruments & instigated new practices which we describe as “cultural”. Feelings are the key monitors of cultural processes. Whether a practice is preserved or phased out depends on how we feel about it & how well we feel it works or not (more than intellect & reason).Feelings contribute in three ways to the cultural process:1. as motives of the intellectual creationa) by prompting the detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies; b) by identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort;2. as monitors of the success or failure of cultural instruments and practices;3. as participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time.The strange order comes from the fact that “pre-cultural” behavior , such as behaving socially in cooperation or conflict, has been observed in life forms that have no nervous system. Scientists have discovered that intelligence preceeds nervous systems, brains & minds.Damasio’s observation is how brainless bacterium respond to sensory input and how you respond to sensory input is fundamentally the same: Homeostasis — an instinctual desire for equilibrium. All personal feelings about your state of being are agents acting on behalf of homeostasis. After all, feelings like hunger and fear are part of the processes that keep you alive and safe from harm. Damasio hypothesizes that it is the unification of external sensory mapping of the world + affective internal mapping of self that gave rise to consciousness. Affect — the influence of emotions on our behaviors and perceptions — This is how subjectivity evolved & in aggregate, how cultures were created.

⭐Professor Damasio takes the concept of homeostasis, a self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that optimize survival, and applies it to both the history of life and the development of culture. The pervasive influence if homeostasis can be seen in the activity of single-celled organisms, the development of nervous systems, and the creativity of human minds. Homeostasis, according to Damasio, had a pivotal role in the development of human culture. Memory, language, imagination, and reasoning, the author states, are leading participants in cultural processes but they “cannot operate without affect (feeling) and consciousness.” Homeostasis generates behavioral strategies capable of ensuring life maintenance and flourishing and the flourishing can include cultural creativity.Damasio reminds us, again, that humans are not just reasoning creatures but are repositories of feelings, and that feelings (affect) are not necessarily harmful to the reasoning process but can intuitively guide us toward optimal life-enhancing strategies. One might infer (I’m not sure he says it explicitly) that the pleasure-pain principle in human psychology emerges from homeostasis, i.e., we seek pleasure and avoid pain, and what makes us feel good helps our well-being and survival, and what makes us feel bad ordinarily will harm us, perhaps irretrievably. The author does acknowledge that masochism and substance abuse are exceptions to this rule, namely that they provide pleasure but result in “bodily destruction.” It also appears that the author takes issues with AI theorists and computational neuroscientists who believe that human beings are, essentially, algorithms, and that in a distant future scenario uploading the digitized version of your brain into a computer will not only provide a kind of immortality but would also provide a kind of consciousness resembling your human state. Damasio argues for an integrated view of body and mind, similar to his emphasis of the importance of feeling and affect, and criticizes the algorithmic view of the mind as ignoring the “substrate” used in the construction of the organism. As he states (p. 201): “The substrate of our life is a particular kind of organized chemistry, a servant of thermodynamics and the imperative of homeostasis……that substrate is essential to explain who we are.”Psychologists have used the homeostatic model to explain motivations in human behavior, e.g., hunger, but the psychologists tell us (at least the ones I’ve read) that for non-physiological motives the homeostatic model is not very predictive, particularly for complex behaviors, and behaviors that reflect a need for sensory variation, curiosity, and risk. Of course, Damasio’s conception of the pervasive influence of homeostasis appears to be a broader conception than its physiological roots and embraces how we’re feeling and not just our pulse and sweating functions. Damasio’s ideas seem speculative to me, but well thought out, and capably argued. I don’t have the background to say whether he’s on the right track, but as a reader, his thesis is quite provocative and stimulating, plus the comprehensive sweep of his narrative, in just 244 pages, was bracing. True, the book is not an easy read, but given the complexity of some of the ideas he covers, the writing is quite good. Damasio has a knack for word and phrase selection in his writing that is both descriptive and highly explanatory.

⭐A seriously important book. The idea that human emotions build on the fundamentals of thermodynamics is hugely compelling. Plus at last a counter to the bleakness of Homo Deus (which whilst also sweepingly brilliant Damasio argues is built on a false premise that human intelligence can be reduced to algorithms.I was engrossed in this book for a marvellous week.

⭐As a psychology student, I can say that the book introduced me to the world of Affect in a scientific manner. The book is really informative- includes explanation regarding the biological, evolutionary reasons for humans and other animals to have emotions. It also explains the underappreciated but the very significant role played by emotions in maintaining or disrupting the balance of our internal and external environment.

⭐This is an extraordinary evoluctionary review of feelings and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

⭐Unclear. Too much repetition. I gave up after two-thirds of it.

⭐El libro de Damasio tiene un tema interesantísimo. Habla sobre cómo han evolucionado los sentidos y los sentimientos, gran parte de los cuales son herencia de especies anteriores, desde el principio de la vida. El tema era de gran interés para mí. Pero me costó mucho mantener la concentración. Es un libro arduo de leer. No lo considero para nada como de divulgación. Tiene demasiado lenguaje técnico (al menos para mí). Aunque lo leí entero, no estoy seguro de haberle extraído lo que me hubiese gustado. Fue un esfuerzo avanzar. Quien desee encarar este esfuerzo debería ser alguien realmente interesado en el tema y con algo de conocimientos en la materia.

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