Descartes' Error

The first indication of the relationship of the mind and body was the bizarre penetration of a railway worker's skull in 1848. The worker lived, but the damage to his brain left him with severe personality changes. The case opened the door to research leading to mapping areas of the brain that reflected various personality traits. Damasio recounts the incident, matching it with numerous clinical studies of his own. Additional work, some of it strongly innovative led Damasio and his colleagues to a reformulation of how the mind and body interact.

He reminds us that the brain is much more than a collection of electrically interacting cells. The body is sending information to the brain almost continuously, with the brain replying or initiating communication. These signals are both electrical and chemical. More importantly, Damasio reflects on the evolutionary origins of these conditions. For him, it is inevitable that the mind and body interact intimately. His proposed appellation for Emotions aren't separated from our reasoning processes, but are an integral part of them. The attempts by parents and educators to "train out" emotions in children are thus doomed to fail.

Damasio's thesis hinges on what he calls "somatic markers." The markers are areas of the brain which continuously interact with the body, particularly those areas we associate with emotions. If confronted with emotionally charged choices, the stomach "knots," the face may "flush" warmly, and perspiration may increase markedly. These body/brain functions begin developing early in the embryo. Indeed, they have a long evolutionary history, which firmly establishes their roots. In humans, the brain not only controls/reacts with the body in addressing stressful circumstances, but retains some level of memory of the events causing the reactions. Hence, even thinking about such circumstances can lead to bodily reactions associated with them. You need not be confronting an emotional situation to be able to express the feelings associated with it. This, of course, is most notably seen in actors or other performers. Damasio offers the excellent example of orchestra conductor Herbert von Karajan, whose pulse rate was higher while conducting than when confronted with an emergency situation in an airplane. To Damasio, "Descartes' error" was that he placed all these controls in a central location of the "mind" where, in fact, they are scattered over much of the brain.

The implications from this book will be far reaching. Besides impacting academic courses on behaviour, there will be changes in how we parent, how we deal with education, and even in the realm of law. Binding reason and emotion will revise uncountable long-standing ideas about how the mind deals with our surroundings. It is a work addressing fundamental questions about what make us human. Read it with care, aware that many preconceptions are likely to be challenged. The rewards for this effort will be great in years to come. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This quote, more than any one I could think of, sums up my view on Dr. Antonio R. Damasio's "Descartes' Error." In preparation for a graduate seminar on the philosophy of mind (which kicked off by reading Descartes, by the way) I picked up this book so that I may glean a neurophysiologist's take on the mind-body problem. To say that this book was an amazingly unhelpful tool for this purpose would be the understatement of the century. While I don't agree (with another reviewer) that "a degree" is required to do philosophy (but one can help but admit that the vast majority of good philosophy is produced by those who hold at least two of them), at least some grasp of the philosophical topic is prudent prior to writing a book even remotely advertising itself as having something to do with it. This is where Damasio falls short, and not by a little.

Because so many reviewers have summarized this book's substantive content, for the sake of avoiding duplicity, I decided to scour other reviews for the more egregious claims about this book. First of all, one common theme is that this book is stimulating philosophically, and that it is a "must read" for philosophers interested in the mind (see the NY Times Book Review above). In case it isn't obvious at this point, I don't think anything could be further from the truth. If you are a philosopher, don't waste your time or money with this book unless you've literally read everything else and want nothing but the science. Nowhere does Damasio mention any of the interesting paradoxes intertwined in this fantastically fascinating area of philosophy, other than occasional name dropping, not including the 5+ pages he devotes to actually discussing Descartes' "Error" (247-52). The only problem here, though, is that Damasio, while not getting Descartes entirely wrong, entirely misses the substantive point of Descartes' "dualism" and the point of the dream argument. Damasio repeats the cogito a couple times, and then moves on to dismiss the scientific inaccurracies of Descartes' philosophy (i.e., "errors" entirely beside the point of the current debate about dualism and the existence of phenomenal properties).

Damasio severely, severely underestimates the weight of Descartes' dualism, as well as naively assumes that all forms of it died with the dawn of science. The point isn't that Descartes was so wrong to assume that the mind/soul/spirit could survive the body - or that brains can't really exist in a vat (Damasio explains how this is impossible given current science - I'm serious) - the point is the epistemic value of inconceivability and the role of direct acquaintance of conscious, thinking experience. All of this is completely and utterly missed by Damasio, which is likely due, I'm afraid, to a severe underestimation and underappreciation for the relevant philosophical texts and the people who wrote them. We all know "that mind comes from the brain," the problem is explaining the connection in an unproblematic, coherent way.

Another common misconception about this book is its "readability." Here is one paragraph (that's right, paragraph) as a sample: "The minimal neural device capable of producing subjectivity thus requires early sensory cortices (including the somatosensory), sensory and motor cortical association regions, and subcortical nuclei (especially thalamus and basal ganglia) with convergence properties capable of acting as third-party ensembles." Now, if this is your idea of "readable," then by all means, go for it. The book is absolutely chalk-full of neurophysiological terminology to the point of reading like a text book (see Searle's quote above). I consider myself a very active reader (in the sense that I virtually always have a dictionary nearby and virtually never skip over words I don't understand the meaning of), but this book was just crazy-loaded with technical jargon. The writing itself is above average to average.

Damasio's effort should be commended, which is why I give this book two stars, based entirely on the book's scientific value alone. The mischaracterization of Descartes, as well as Damasio's own philosophical shortcomings, are, in my own opinion, errors far more egregious than any Descartes ever made.

"To write a book about Philosophy or related issues one MUST HAVE a degree in Philosophy, in the same way if somebody decides to write about Neurology he/she needs to have the proper qulifications to do so."

That's the typical authoritarian speech of people who hide behind their jobs, their qualifications, their deegrees, etc. Not exactly the right quote, but it describes the context: "Holier Than Thou". Yes, recognition by the expert authorities is a key to being heard, but I ask: when were these high authorities the driving force within ANY thought revolution? Maybe because someone DOESN'T have a deegree on a particular subject, he can express views which aren't tainted by the "academia's" notion of what is correct and incorrect. Most of the radical developments in human thought came without the approval of the "status quo". Ironically, the "status quo" absorves the knowledge of such revolutions when they have been tamed down or when the revolutionaries themselves have become the "status quo".

You, the reviewer, might even be right about Damasio... but you used a VERY lousy argument...