C4CC(9): Our Asophic society (2)
Note: I now think there are important ways in which Damasio’s take is misleading (that is, I think PMS Hacker has important things to say on this) but I haven’t properly studied the matter yet - that’s next year’s research!
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In the late nineteenth century there was an obscure rail-road foreman by the name of Phineas Gage (I take my description here from the wonderful book Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio). Gage was working in the Vermont area clearing land for the building of a new rail road when he had a rather dramatic accident – a tamping rod (used in the controlled explosions) was propelled up through his head, entering at the eye and leaving through the top of his skull. Those who were with him thought it must have been a fatal accident, but Gage survived. That is, the physical form of Gage survived, for following the accident his personality seemed to be completely different. Whereas previously he had been sober and responsible, now he could not hold down a job and was delinquent and uncouth. He ended up being part of PT Barnum's travelling circus, where he was exhibited – with the tamping rod – as a modern miracle.
According to Damasio's reconstruction, what had happened to Gage was that his capacity to exercise judgement, his ability to judge – any capacity he had for phronesis was removed. Consider what happens in a game of chess. There are a vast number of moves that are possible at any one point in the game and a competent player will immediately discount most of those moves as being ones likely to cause a defeat. In contrast with a computer, a human player very rarely does this on the basis of a full analysis of all the permutations that might follow (human brains are not that efficient); rather it is done on the basis of a judgement about what constitutes good and bad moves.
In the same way, in order to function in our normal, daily human lives we have to exercise judgement regularly, from when we get up in the morning, through all our daily interactions and deciding when to go to bed. Without that capacity to judge and decide we relinquish something essential. Damasio describes dealing with a patient, suffering from anasognosia, and trying to establish a time for a next appointment. The patient deliberated for over half an hour about the various different options and only concluded the analysis when Damasio himself expressed a clear preference for one date.
Imagine a map that represents our understanding of the world, with different areas of the map corresponding to different areas of our lives, with some areas are given more space than others – so that our immediate families get more space than distant relatives and acquaintances. That might be a “normal” map. Now imagine that someone who is really, really interested in castles is forming their map, and on their map there is a tremendous area given over to castles. If we were able to compare maps, this map would stick out because it had so much space given over to this one element, emphasised well beyond a true proportion. Such a map is distorted – this person understands reality differently, as if they were wearing lenses that blurred their vision. This distortion can then be seen through the choices and judgements that the person makes.
The particular area of the brain that was damaged in Gage, and in patients suffering from anasognosia, relates to the ability of the brain to process information from the body, especially the viscera – our emotional reactions. Damasio writes that, 'it makes no sense to exclude emotions from our conception of the mind'. In neuroscientific circles today there is a return to the classical understanding of human cognition – that our emotions are an essential part of the process, that our emotions are the means by which we evaluate information and make decisions. In other words, in order to make judgements, we depend upon our emotions. Compare these two statements: (a) your spouse is a teacher; (b) your spouse is an adulterer. Most normal people would react differently to these two statements, because one is more 'value laden' than the other. We care about some things more than other things.
There is a Greek word apatheia which has come down to us as the word apathy. It means being uncommitted or uninvolved emotionally – an emotional distancing, a 'not caring'. This happens in science because the scientist is pursuing the truth about the world. What they are trying to attend to is what the world is actually like – not what they want the world to be like. So a true scientist will put their own desires to one side and submit to the process of scientific method in order to pursue the truth. This requires a discipline – you have to be trained in how to investigate, in the attitudes of science, you have to learn what I call the apathistic stance. This is what you do in order to ensure that your own biases, your own emotional desires, are put to one side. This process is a way of learning more about the world, of learning in particular more about the physical and natural world, because the physical and natural world does not depend upon our emotional reaction to it. As with all tools, however, we need to learn how to use them properly – and this has not happened with regard to science. This process of emotionally disengaging from what we are trying to discover in order to discern more truth, putting our own desires to one side, is a tool, and we need to learn how to use the tool, how to put it into a broader framework. In other words, after gaining true information from employing the apathistic stance, we need to adopt a different stance in order to process that true information properly. We need to integrate it with our wider knowledge and understanding. This is an emotional process: what does this new information mean? How does it affect all those people that I care about? This truth was obscured by the Enlightenment perspective that reason and emotion are necessarily opposed, and that the path to Enlightenment lay in repressing and controlling our emotions wherever possible. What Phineas Gage teaches us is that emotions are cognitive. We learn things about the world through our emotional reactions, and our emotional reactions can teach us.