Descartes' Error
"An ambitious and meticulous foray into the nature of being." -- The Boston Globe A landmark exploration of the relationship between emotion and reason Since Descartes famously proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am," science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—"one of the world’s leading neurologists" (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.
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What Hacker News says
- Author here. To clarify: when I talk about dichotomy in this context, I refer to the idea that these two systems are in opposition, and that ignoring one system (and set of data) is somehow enlightened.
There's no point in denying that both emotions and rational thought exist, and that different regions in the brain are responsible for them. I do advocate pretty explicitly that all information sources should be considered when making decisions, including emotions - as a lot of them carry actual important non-verbalized information.
Point 3 was heavily influenced by reading the book "Descartes Error", fwiw, and I recommend that book to pretty much everybody.
- > where people passionately project the term consciousness onto LLMs
They have all drunk too much AI cool-aid. I doubt these people have any meaningul education in fields such as biology, neuroscience and related life sciences.
Quite simply, we don't yet understand how consciousness arises. There are a lot of theories, but they are just that—theories.
Related reading: Antonio Damasio wrote a book in 1994 with the spicy title, Descartes' Error[1] to rebut his famous quote that you cite.
Also look up "Somatic Marker Hypothesis" by Damasio.
- Human emotions guide reasoning: that's why we need Politics.
These people should have read "Descartes' Error" with more attention than they spent on Friedman and Hayek.
- I don't know what ever became of the line of research, but there was a very interesting book I read decades ago called Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio that examined case studies of patients who had their corpus collosum severed, resulting in a split brain. You could show their left and right eyes different images and ask them what they saw and they would write and speak different answers, because speech and writing are controlled by different brain hemispheres.
This seems to suggest that any bottleneck in conscious attention is not an inherent limitation of an animal brain but rather a consensus mechanism we've developed to keep our chain of experience coherent. If we get rid of the constraint that all of our external communication channels need to present the same narrative, we can seemingly process more information even when it requires being a conscious center of attention.
- Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who's done work in the area, and has decent popsci books about this idea. I read the older ones, "Descartes' Error" and "The Feeling of What Happens", and they're fun, good reads. Apparently he's written more on the subject as well.
- Lasting and solid foundations are made by experiencing
Doing With your hands. Seeing in reality. Getting burned with the soldering iron. Smelling the flux. Hearing the signals and seeing them on the oscilloscope. We need presence, feeling, the ownership of knowledge as personal experience, not vicarious hand-me-down accounts or diagrams.
As a kid I wired up NAND gates and transistors. When it came to logic it felt like there was something tangible I could reach out and touch through tactile imagination. Building a computer from chips, wire-wrapping hundreds of connections to a 68000, RAM and EEPROM chips took a whole summer. After that I could see a data-bus and an address-bus. I know what they feel, and smell like. I got good at patching dataflow DSP because 20 years earlier I spent hours in the studio patching analogue synths.
Descartes Error is a book by Antonio Damasio [1] that talks about the weakness of purely rationalist epistemology. The foundation is laid long before we are even aware of knowing and learning. That book had an influence on me to understanding cognitive activity as embodied.
This is why we need to let kids fix bikes, fall off skateboards and climb trees. It's why giving them tablets and chromebooks instead of things that get their hands dirty is no good.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/100151-descartes-error...
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