I found this a very enjoyable book, raising questions about the relationship between mind and body. He looks into what he considers to be (at least one of) Decarte's major error that deeply impacts modern society: the Dualistic perception of the separation of mind and body. The author makes his case for a wholistic view in which the mind and body are one, deeply integrated system. This system admitedly has various sub-systems of which that which we talk of as mind and body are two, but which feed, support and deeply influence each other. The author admits that he is putting forth a hypothosis and there are many areas that need research to validate, but his perspective seems entirely realistic to me.

Towards the end of the book, he looks a little into what this separation between mind and body means for how we understand ourselves and how our medical techology has grown and evolved, suggesting that for all it's successes, the (imaginary?) gulf between the mind and body sets a limit to the successes of modern medicine, and to our ability to truely understand who and what we are as humans.

Damasio recalls that he grew up “accustomed to thinking that the mechanisms for reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude.” yet his experience with patients like" phineas Gage "convinced him that normal human reasoning is inextricably linked to emotion

Pure reason, reason uninfluenced by emotion, seems to occur only in pathological states that are characterized by impairment of day-to-day decision-making and social interaction. Says Damasio, “Certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality.” To think otherwise was Descartes’ error. “(The error was) the abyssal separation between body and mind, the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgement, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of the mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism.”

Too much data. Too much to digest. Not an easy read.

In a word, tedious. The argument was tortuous and ultimately simple. Much of the book is taken up wading through poorly structured discussions of brain structures. Veering wildly between anecdotes and detailed neurology, the book never settles to a comfortable mid ground, which would have generally aided readability.

Disappointingly boring. I'm still unclear as to how (neuroscientifically) emotion and reason interact to create "better" decision-making than reason alone. Damasio may have explained it adequately, but I was so bored I might have slept through it. The story of Phineas Gage was fascinating though.

This gets an unequivocal Hell Yeah from me, which is all the more humbling and gratifying because I started and subsequently gave up on this book close to a year ago after the hundred pages of Phineas Gage business that make up its first third. The reason for this frustration is that I was reading the book from the perspective of a theoretical humanities scholar in the year 2019, a reader of affect theory and an Oliver Sacks enthusiast—that is, many of Damasio’s extremely carefully constructed claims about the material basis of consciousness and the neurological inseparability of rationality and emotion were not just old news but deeply held philosophical commitments. I, the choir, did not need preaching to.

Revisiting this text as part of a larger project juxtaposing neurology and the Heidegerrian critique of Western metaphysics, I cannot help but marvel at Damasio’s restraint and circumspection as he builds his argument across 250 pages. He is a very different type of thinker from Oliver Sacks, who has an unbelievable ability to coax out the poetic/literary/religious/philosophical significance from a short neurological or psychiatric narrative like an orchestra conductor or a snake charmer. Damasio needs to show you the specific empirical basis of each small claim that slowly builds the case for his theory of cognition (the somatic marker hypothesis) and his model of selfhood (continually reactivated representations of the body) at the book’s conclusion.

What is most remarkable is his self-assurance when he finally arrives—Damasio quite literally does not tell us what Descartes’ error was until the last ten pages of the book. That error, dualism itself, is really a whole hatful of errors which includes the cogito as well as the notion that any rationality can be wholly distinguished from the body. By demonstrably disproving the existence of “pure reason” (and he does in fact use this phrase), Damasio is in fact critiquing the whole subjectivist tradition of Western metaphysics that stretches from Descartes to Locke to Kant. But this is not a simple refutation of dualism on the basis that “materialism is better” (because, like, duh); rather, Damasio wants to uproot the deep-seated and deeply appealing intuition that undergirds cogito ergo sum, the intuition that my experience of my own mind is really special and irreducible. To that point, Damasio offers the explanation that Descartes and Kant and the like, lacking the understanding that experiencing one’s own consciousness is not demonstrably unlike experiencing one’s own body, simply mistook awareness of thinking for thinking itself.

To all of which there’s little I can say but “get his ass, sir.”