The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

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.

I found the author's argument cogent and his conclusions thought provoking. More examples or anecdotes would have been welcome as would clear definitions of unusual words or words used in unusual ways; there were times that I found myself retracing my steps to clarify my understanding of a concept.

In celebrating our humanity and distinctiveness, we have long prided ourselves on our reason intellect to the neglect of our emotionality, which brings us closer to our animality. In our current cultural milieu, with its flood of social and broadcast media barraging us continually, we now find ourselves floundering--and foundering--in a sea of emotion. As Damasio makes plain, we cannot bail ourselves out by reason and intellect alone. I hope this is not his last book, but he appears to be taking stock of our current cultural scene in light of his decades-long learning from research in neuroscience, summarized marvelously in a series of prior books.Well informed by biological science, the book gives needed space for commentary and reflection that puts the science in perspective at it pertains to our profound cultural challenges. Plainly, our human distinctiveness is a mixed blessing. But the relatively rare thesis that Damasio explicates suggests that we need to rely more on our feelings, not less. Indeed, his prior research demonstrates convincingly that we are utterly at sea and directionless when we are deprived of feeling and reliant solely on intellect. Of course, powerful feelings (especially in the anger family) can lead us into destructiveness, as our intellect also can do. But Damasio makes a major psychological contribution in this book by encouraging us to feel more at one with our bodies and to appreciate and value our feelings--the mental representations of our bodily state in relation to homeostatic conditions. Feeling more at home with our bodies through awareness of our feelings might be a pathway to feeling more kinship with the rest of nature. Driving this point home, exemplifying the "strange order" in nature that he discerns, Damasio makes the claim that our morality (and sociality) has some origins in the lives of bacteria. (Perhaps this is a good thing, inasmuch the bacteria in our bodies greatly outnumber the other cells.) While wedded to biological science, Damasio is far from being reductionistic in his thinking (and feeling); on the contrary, he is expansionistic, keen to open readers' minds (and hearts) rather than confining them to materialistic dogma. In summing up what he has learned, thought, and felt, Damasio is grappling with no less than understanding the place of humanity in the world while fully appreciating the limits of our capacity to understand where we fit in the cosmos. In this sense, although it is implicit rather than explicit, his book is in line with current trends in ecologically oriented theology. Expansionistic indeed, while remaining thoroughly grounded in science.In this book, Damasio appeals to a wide audience, writing with flair as well as erudition, in an engaging and minimally technical style. He is willing to go out on some limbs, but he certainly knows what he's talking about.

A game changer. A book on fundamentals and how over time as a civilization have not pad attention to. He knows what he is talking about. A must read.

I cannot think of another book that had more "A-ha" moments.It was hard as hell to read the first time, but my second read has been much easier. I agree with some other reviewers that this could have used a better editor...or something. I wish Damasio had come up with some new terms for his ideas instead of redefining common words like "feeling" and "image". It's so hard to go one's whole life understanding a word one way and then having to practically have a page of notes next to me so I can go down the list and remind myself of all the newly introduced aspects of Damasio's "feeling".I hope there's a professor out there somewhere using this book as a textbook for a class. Damasio has so much he introduces, it would be great to have a teacher help guide you through the process.While it is without a doubt difficult to read, I absolutely love it.

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.

Its a book

in my humble opinion, this book is interesting to read and provides good amount of intellectual stimulation, but it's very squishy and it's mostly consists of speculations and hypothesis. However, trying to find an order and meaning in this entrophy-increasing, chaotic universe seems to be a dead end in the first place, we as a species, simply survive and thrive, as an individual, we live and we give birth(some) and we perish. There is no meaning to any of this in a broader spectrum, but perhaps, we are desperate to find meanings in everything just to satisfy our needs for intellectual stimulation, and that's the very reason I bought this book.

A genuine challenge, and a pleasure - beautiful prose and truly intelligent insight into what makes us, us.

Luminoso libro del neurobiólogo Damasio.

Damasio tweaks our definition of "life" in subtle but important ways. Arguably, he charts the way to understanding how life can become "conscious" - "self-aware" in a way that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom (and from physics entirely).The reader must be alert for the way Damasio re-defines a couple of everyday concepts:- Most regard "survival" - especially "survival of the fittest" as the engine behind evolution. Damasio shows that it is "thriving", which he most often refers to as homeostasis. What he's saying is that "life" doesn't just break even, it "tries" to "make a profit". Life wants to grow, expand, take over and (above all) persist.- Damasio's use of the term "sensation" can be a bit tricky to appreciate. For him, a "sensation" is what happens in a nervous system as a result of some impact of the world on the organism. It is one step removed from the actual contact. This separation turns out to be key to the way he sees our nervous systems and our precious brains. In particular, it defines our brains (and our minds) as part of the body but in a special relationship to the body. This also puts our "minds" in relationship to themselves via "images", a crucial aspect of consciousness.I have only two quibbles with this book.It is a hard slog. Damasio never seems to find a sentence that can't be made longer. Be prepared to look up quite a few words. I was glad I had the Kindle version of the book that allows me to do this with a click.More importantly, Damasio steps back from what would seem to me to be obvious: human society is "alive" in exactly the way that other life forms are. This has sweeping implications that Damasio rejects for reasons that, to me, seem arbitrary.

لو ابغى كتاب مستخدم بشتريه مستخدم، خدمة ولا اسوأ

Excellent writer scientist and very accessible reading. Recommend everyone to read it. Fantastic and very interesting subject. Very good book