Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
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Psychology, Neuro-science, Mental Health
by: Antonio Damasio
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Author Damasio refutes the Cartesian idea that the human mind is separate from bodily processes; thr author draws on neuroscience to support his claim that emotions play a central role in human decision making.
Reviews:
This book is another in a long trend of works that try to deal with consciousness by dismissing it via some variant of eliminativism (e.g., "mind" is an epiphenomenon of "brain"). That is, Dimasio virtually ignores consciousness -- the currently-vogue, pseudo-scientific position.
This author's book received much attention in the philosophy of emotions literature; however, the argument presented is very weak. Damasio presents himself as the "sensible scientist" and defends a biological theory of emotions "the somatic-marker hypothesis." Where the book is novel, it relies on speculative scientific theories (primarily from neuro-science); where the book is correct, it is trivial. The worst part is the final chapter, where the author engages in a polemic against what he calls "Descartes' Error." The view that Damasio attacks is mind-body dualism, a view which is presented very uncharitably (some may argue that it's questionable whether Descartes' himself would endorse the view of him that Damasio outlines) and in a way that no reasonable person would adopt it. Overall, the book is philosophically and scientifically weak. It gains its "force" with ad hominem arguments and fanciful story telling. This volume may be useful for a lower-level undergraduate university course or for fun reading; however, it is inappropriate for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course. For the latter, there are much better philosophical books available, e.g., by Panksepp, Griffiths, Nussbaum
The author brings some interesting cases to bear on one of the oldest problems in philosophy and psychology. This is an important subject. It would be a mistake, however, to think that "Descartes' error" was just now being pointed out. In fact, practically no contemporary philosopher subscribes to the Cartesian two-substance theory of body and mind. In 1949 Gilbert Ryle in his _The Concept of Mind_ argued that Descartes' view was fatally flawed (and he wasn't really the first to point this out, either), and called it the "ghost in the machine" view of the body/mind relationship. If you get right down to it, Descartes himself would agree with Damasio that the emotions are not radically different kinds of things from the reasoning faculties, since he believed that experiencing an emotion was simply another mode of thought, just as drawing an inference is a mode of thought. But Descartes must be used to being a scapegoat by now, 350 years after his death; and the historical perspective aside, Damasio's book is a good contribution to scholarship on the effects of emotion on rationality.
Topics include: early visual cortices, dispositional representations, brain sectors, early sensory cortices, basic biological regulation, neurotransmitter nuclei, current body states, frontally damaged patients, topographically organized representations, ventromedial sector, primordial representations, ventromedial prefrontal cortices, somatic markers, prefrontal damage, somatosensory cortices, skin conductance responses, brain core, neural terms, somatic state, secondary emotions, background feeling, basic attention, neural machinery, body landscape
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