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Rationally Speaking: November 2004
This column can be posted for free on any appropriate web site and reprinted
in hard copy by permission. If you are interested in receiving the html
code or the text, please send an email.
I, robot
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No, this column is not about Isaac Asimov’s famous science fiction
novels concerning the interaction between robots and humans (and even
less about the recent movie by the same title, very loosely based on
said novels). Rather, this month’s essay has been inspired by the
reading of Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza, the third in a series
of books by this neurobiologist that attempts to unravel the mysteries
of consciousness (the other two are Descartes’ Error and The Feeling of
What Happens).
One of the most recurring instances of anti-naturalistic prejudice is
the refusal to admit that the mind is a result of the activity of the
body; no ectoplasm needed, as philosophers of mind put it. Few today
would reject the notion that the body itself is very much like a
machine. I was reminded of this rather obvious conclusion during a
recent trip to the dentist: listening to a mechanical tool working its
way through my teeth in order to fix the problem (I was having a root
canal operation) it occurred to me that there was little difference
between my predicament and a mechanic working on my car. This is a
rather novel conception of the human body: before the work of
philosopher-scientist Rene` Descartes in the 17th century it would have
been inconceivable even for most scientists to think of the body as a
machine.
But the mind, still most people say today, is an entirely different
matter. After all, Descartes himself stopped short of extending his
reductionist analysis to human thought (though it isn’t at all clear
weather he did so out of genuine conviction or as an attempt to avoid
the fate of his contemporary Galileo). Yet, consider the following
instance, reported by Damasio in Looking for Spinoza. A group of
neurosurgeons at a hospital in Paris was conducting a farly routine
operation on a patient affected by Parkinson’s disease. The idea was
that, since the woman wasn’t responding to drug treatment anymore, the
medical equipe would go straight into her brain and stimulate via
electrodes specific regions of the brain stem. The procedure usually
yields stunning results, which completely erase the symptoms of the
disease, greatly improving the patient’s quality of life, at least
temporarily.
In this particular instance, however, something went wrong. When one of
the electrodes was activated, the patient suddenly stopped talking,
began looking very sad and started crying uncontrollably, eventually
explaining how her life was meaningless and she wished to die. It is
important to note that the individual in question had never shown
symptoms of depression before the implantation of the electrode. Even
more stunningly, the talk of suicide, the crying, and the sad
expression all decreased and then disappeared minutes after the
electrode was removed by the medical scientists! If this doesn’t sound
like a machine being turned on and off at will by a simple electrical
stimulation, I don’t know what will convince you.
A crucial reason why Damasio is interested in cases like the one of the
French woman affected by Parkinson’s lies in the exact sequence of
events and what it tells us about the nature of human thought. Notice
that the facial signs of sadness appeared first, followed by the
crying, and only significantly later by the articulation of the feeling
of emptiness and despair. The same sequence has been found in other
experiments and it suggests that feelings are generated by the brain’s
thinking about, or perceiving, the body’s emotions. That is, emotions
are simpler physical phenomena, while feelings are more complex,
second-order, mental events.
Still not convinced that we are very sophisticated biological machines,
in both body and mind? Then consider another fascinating example from
Damasio’s book. One of his own patients was affected by a bizarre and
rather disturbing condition, which provides a stunning insight into the
mind-body connection. The man in question suffered occasional episodes
during which he would begin to loose the feeling of the lower parts of
his body, as if under local anesthesia. The loss of feeling continued
gradually upwards throughout the body, until it reached the throat, at
which point the man passed out. A similar condition affecting a female
patient did not cause her to loose consciousness, despite the
frightening experience of no longer feeling her limbs and trunk.
Tellingly, this second patient retained a sensation of her internal
organs. Damasio suggests the intriguing possibility, based on these and
similar cases, that we have a mind only until we have a body sensation
of some sort (even highly incomplete, as in the case of the second
patient). However, no body immediately means no mind. What more
compelling evidence could there be that dualism is dead in its tracks?
Damasio goes further, and in his book he builds a convincing, if
circumstantial, case for the radical idea that the mind actually is a
monitoring system of the internal and external state of our body. The
mind, then, is not a thing, but a process (of the brain, and hence the
body) by which certain animals with complex brains keep track of and
control what their bodies are doing. We seem to be well on our way to
truly explain consciousness as a biological phenomenon. All of this, of
course, is no reason to think that we are “just” robots in the
demeaning sense of being “mere” machines having no intrinsic value.
There is nothing trivial or simple about the working of the human body
and mind. Moreover, human life has value for other humans, and
scientific evidence of the kind I discussed here is meant to help us
understand how we generate, literally, our selves, not to tell us how
much we should value those selves from an ethical perspective.
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Massimo's other ramblings can be found at his Skeptic
Web.
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