"No body, never mind:" Defending the materialist conception of consciousness Antonio Damasio The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness NY, NY: Harcourt Inc., 1999 386 pp. pb reviewed by MC5 MIM would like to get on the bandwagon of bourgeois media organs and scientific authorities in praise of this book, which will make a great present for holidays in paperback. The book is a summary of evidence and thoughts concerning the relationship between biology and the humyn consciousness. MIM recommends it above all for extensive materialist reasoning concerning topics prone to idealist speculation. Prior to advances in modern science, perhaps most intellectuals thought of the humyn consciousness as some indirect gift from God. Most psychology and discussion of how humyn ideas form is still at such a level that Karl Marx referred to as "idealist." MIM would say it becomes more or less an exercise concerning a slippery object of study using various circular verbal tricks. Damasio has this to say about idealism, "Why should there not be bodiless persons in our midst, you know, ghosts, spirits, weightless and colorless creatures? . . . The simple fact is that such creatures do not exist now and nothing indicates that they ever did, and the sensible reason why not is that a mind, that which defines a person, requires a body, and that a body, a human body to be sure, naturally generates one mind. A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind. For any body, never more than one mind."(p. 143) Because of the unscientific nature of most discussion of psychology and spirituality, MIM called for the abolition of psychology in MT2/3. There we said, "MIM has no major quarrel with people doing research on drugs or biochemical process of the brain. Biochemistry and medical science are legitimate fields of endeavor." Damasio is a neurobiologist at the Iowa College of Medicine and his book is an example of what MIM finds acceptable on the subject of consciousness. We would tell the many who aspire to be psychologists to change majors--either to neurobiology or political economy or sociology, anything, but not psychology. Although Damasio mentions Freud and William James a few times, the value of his book does not stem from his knowledge of psychology. He merely needed an open mind on the components of consciousness. When it comes to understanding the mind, feelings, emotions etc., Damasio has found it useful to study people who have some abnormality or another. Completely healthy people and dead people are not useful for study. It is not ethical to cut open healthy people. People who have managed to injure themselves without completely killing themselves are the most useful to Damasio and science. Most people in the imperialist countries have heard of the "X Ray." When it comes to the brain there are also various scientific observation techniques that amount to photographing the brain. The real trick is to find brain damaged people, find out what parts of the brain are damaged and observe how such people behave differently. This is what Damasio has done. If too many parts of the brain are damaged or the persyn is dead, the persyn is of no use to this research, but if only one part is damaged and something is noticeably different, then Damasio and other scientists are able to advance the research. MIM's only problem with the research in the book is not the approach but the clinical nature of it--the fact that it usually relies on one, two or three patients and the clinician's observation of them as opposed to a large and statistically meaningful number of patients with the same brain damage as seen by different clinicians and research scientists. Of course, imperialism being what it is, money goes to the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and the weekend football tickets instead of tracking down brain damaged people and conducting various costly scans on their brain for research, so people like Damasio are not prodded on by a Stalin or Mao devoting sufficient alertness and resources to the question. Of course, despite fascination with the subject, many people are also threatened by the nature of the research--being afraid of finding out that thoughts come from biological causes. Here we will list some of the bizarre things Damasio has encountered and what they reveal about parts of the brain. 1. A patient with damage to both temporal lobes cannot remember anything or learn new facts, but seems otherwise completely normal.(p. 43) 2. A pianist can control her heart rate and skin conductance when she controls the flow of emotions to her body. (p. 50) 3. Patients who have bone where they should have amygdala in the brain seem to be without fear or shrewdness in their social dealings--very cheerful, friendly people. (pp. 62-3) Such patients may also be impaired in their ability to recognize fear in others. 4. Cutting a certain section of the frontal lobe can alleviate pain; although the patient is still aware of having pain. The pain is there, but it does not seem bad.(pp. 74-5) 5. A persyn in a light coma may demonstrate activation of parts of the brain that are still working in reference to pictures of familiar faces.(p. 99) 6. A womyn with a stroke and damage to the cingulate cortext seemed functional in many ways, but seemed to have nothing to say or any concern about having nothing to say when questioned.(p. 103) Profound damage in patients' consciousness resulting in coma or the like tended to be in areas of "the brain's midline."(p. 106) 7. Consciousness does not arise after language, because people with certain kinds of damage in the left cerebral hemisphere called global aphasics can be conscious but they have to communicate through signals, because they cannot execute language.(pp. 108-9) 8. People with anosognosia -- damage to the right-hemisphere -- are paralyzed in the left side of the body but they are so damaged that they do not know they are damaged and think nothing is wrong.(p. 210) (This condition has reminded many people of the fundamental difficulty of conservatives and one Satanist leader has proposed that conservatism or U.$. Christianity as the Satanist sees it, is essentially a syndrome caused by relatively moderate brain damage.) 9. Damage to the right somatosenory cortices can result in not being able to feel the body at all. (p. 213) Of course, such people would seem open to ideas of the mind or God floating above the body. 10. In locked-in syndrome, a patient can only move eyes and eyelids, nothing else. Such a patient must communicate via eye movements, up and down for yes and no. Damage to the brain-stem seems indicated in such cases.(pp. 242-3) Another interesting thing about this case is that the brain damage also seems to limit the discomfort or fear of the patient as these patients seem calm to researchers who asked the patients about their emotional conditions. 11. Another type of useful observation for neurobiologists is infants. Infant brain structures are not completely developed at birth, so what infants have and don't have would help determine what is necessary for what level of consciousness and mental operation.(p. 266) 12. Spinal cord damaged patients damage their spinal cords in different places. Damasio says that the body generates feelings, and so if the spinal cord damage is high on the spine, there is less body to send signals to the brain, but if the damage is down low, the body above the damage can still send signals to the brain.(p. 289) 13. Brain recognition occurs in different ways, conscious and nonconscious. A brain damaged patient can no longer recognize faces of friends consciously, but when shown the pictures, the patient's skin-conductance is different for friends than for strangers. Hence the brain and body unconnected with advanced consciousness still know the old friend at some level.(p. 300) Another way Damasio proceeds is to notice when damage seems to cause nothing different at all. Some areas of the brain seem much less vital than others. We hope that this review shows our readers how it is possible to go about work scientifically in this area clouded by psychology and religion in the past. The process of inferring what the brain does is the valuable part of the book. At the end, Damasio touches on some controversial subjects briefly. "The idea that subjective experiences are not scientifically accessible is nonsense."(p. 303) For the most part, we agree with Damasio's briefly stated attitudes on such questions. We Maoists are rationalists, by which we mean we believe the whole world is scientifically knowable. Whether the humyn species will achieve complete knowledge before it destroys itself is another question, but in principle, we believe the universe is completely knowable.