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

Anger is a good example of a negative emotion whose benefits have been diminishing in evolution.

Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems. That partnership is responsible for the emergence of conscious, feeling minds that are, in turn, responsible for what is most distinctive about humanity: cultures and civilizations. Feelings are at the center of the book, but they draw their powers from homeostasis.

The sciences alone cannot illuminate the entirety of human experience without the light that comes from the arts and humanities.

stress, which impairs memory, reduces neurogenesis.

The aspect of mind that dominates our existence, or so it seems, concerns the world around us, actual or recalled from memory, with its objects and events, human and not, as represented by myriad images of every sensory stripe, often translated in verbal languages and structured in narratives. And yet, a remarkable yet, there is a parallel mental world that accompanies all those images, often so subtle that it does not demand any attention for itself but occasionally so significant that it alters the course of the dominant part of the mind, sometimes arrestingly so. That is the parallel world of affect, a world in which we find feelings traveling alongside the usually more salient images of our minds.

To say that simple life-forms without nervous systems have pain is unnecessary and probably not correct. They certainly have some of the elements required to construct feelings of pain, but it is reasonable to hypothesize that for pain itself to emerge, as a mental experience, the organism needed to have a mind and that for that to pass, the organism needed a nervous system capable of mapping structures and events. In other words, I suspect that life-forms without nervous systems or minds had and have elaborate emotive processes, defensive and adaptive action programs, but not feelings. Once nervous systems entered the scene, the path for feelings was open. That is why even humble nervous systems probably allow some measure of feeling.5 It is often asked, not unreasonably, why feelings should feel like anything at all, pleasant or unpleasant, tolerably quiet or like an uncontainable storm. The reason should now be clear: when the full constellation of physiological events that constitutes feelings began to appear in evolution and provided mental experiences, it made a difference. Feelings made lives better. They prolonged and saved lives. Feelings conformed to the goals of the homeostatic imperative and helped implement them by making them matter mentally to their owner as, for example, the phenomenon of conditioned place aversion appears to demonstrate.6 The presence of feelings is closely related to another development: consciousness and, more specifically, subjectivity.

In the scenario I currently favor, life was regulated at first without feelings of any sort. There was no mind and no consciousness. There was a set of homeostatic mechanisms blindly making the choices that would turn out to be more conducive to survival. The arrival of nervous systems, capable of mapping and image making, opened the way for simple minds to enter the scene. During the Cambrian explosion, after numerous mutations, certain creatures with nervous systems would have generated not just images of the world around them but also an imagetic counterpart to the busy process of life regulation that was going on underneath. This would have been the ground for a corresponding mental state, the thematic content of which would have been valenced in tune with the condition of life, at that moment, in that body. The quality of the ongoing life state would have been felt.

As pinturas, e muito mais tarde, os textos serviram de marcos e de pausas para reflexão, alertas, divertimento e prazer. Ajudaram a clarificar o que deveriam ter sido confrontos confusos com a realidade. Ajudaram a deslindar e a organizar o conhecimento. Proporcionaram um caminho para a compreensão do que significam as coisas.

the individual mind had to create a mental perspective for the whole organism relative to those two sets of representations—

When do nervous systems enter the evolutionary march? One good estimate is the Precambrian period, which ended 540 to 600 million years ago, an old vintage for certain but not that old when we compare it with the age of first life. Life, even multicellular life, managed quite well without nervous systems for about 3 billion years. We should reflect on this time line before we decide when perception, intelligence, sociality, and emotions made their first appearance on the world stage.

The astonishing wealth of our mental processes hinges on images based on contributions from these worlds but assembled by different structures and processes. The exterior world contributes images that describe the perceived structure of the universe that surrounds us within the limits of our sensory devices. The old interior is the main contributor of the images we otherwise know as feelings. The new interior brings to the mind images of the overall, more or less global structure of the organism and contributes additional feelings. Accounts of mental life that fail to take these facts into consideration are likely to fall short of the mark.

This is not to say that human feelings are not more complex and layered and elaborate than those of animals. How could they not be? But as I see it, the distinction in humans has to do with the web of associations that feeling states establish with all sorts of ideas and especially with the interpretations we can make of our present moment and of our anticipated future.

This finding means that while the neurons themselves work to convey peripheral signals to the central nervous system, they do not do so alone. On the contrary, they are assisted; they are modulated directly by molecules circulating in the blood. The signals that, for example, help generate the pain from a wound are conveyed to precisely such dorsal root ganglia.20 Given the arrangement I just described, the signals are thus not “purely” neural. The body has its say on the process, directly, via influential chemical molecules circulating in the blood. The same influence can be exerted higher up in the system, at the level of the brain stem and the cerebral cortices. The denuding of the blood-brain barrier is one mechanism for blending body and brain. In fact, permeability may turn out to be a fairly general feature of peripheral ganglia.21 These facts need to be factored in the scholarship of feelings.

It has long been known that interoceptive signals are largely conveyed to the central nervous system either by neurons whose axons are devoid of myelin, the C fibers, or by neurons whose axons are very lightly myelinated, the A delta fibers.

Examples include the patterns of muscular activation of the face. They are so closely associated with certain emotional states that their deployment in our faces can rapidly conjure up feelings such as joy and surprise. We do not need to look in the mirror to know that we are experiencing such states. In sum, feelings are experiences of certain aspects of the state of life within an organism. Those experiences are not mere decoration. They accomplish something extraordinary: a moment-to-moment report on the state of life in the interior of an organism. It is tempting to translate the notion of a report into pages of an online file that can be swiped, one at a time, telling us about one part or another of the body. But digitized pages, neat, lifeless, and indifferent, are not acceptable metaphors for feelings, given the valence component we just discussed. Feelings provide important information about the state of life, but feelings are not mere “information” in the strict computational sense. Basic feelings are not abstractions. They are experiences of life based on multidimensional representations of configurations of the life process. As noted, feelings can be intellectualized. We can translate feelings into ideas and words that describe the original physiology. It is possible, and not infrequent, to refer to a particular feeling without necessarily experiencing that feeling or simply experiencing a paler version of the original

1. that the emergence of the nervous system was an indispensable enabler of life in elaborate multicellular organisms; the nervous system has been a servant of whole-organism homeostasis, although its cells also depend on that same homeostasis process for its own survival; this integrated mutuality is most often overlooked in discussions of behavior and cognition; 2. that the nervous system is part of the organism it serves, specifically a part of its body, and that it holds close interactions with that body; that these interactions are of an entirely different nature from those that the nervous system holds with the environment that surrounds the organism; the particularity of this privileged relationship also tends to be overlooked; I will say more on this critical issue in part II; 3. that the extraordinary emergence of the nervous system opened the way for neurally mediated homeostasis—an addition to the chemical/visceral variety; later, after the development of conscious minds capable of feeling and creative intelligence, the way was open for the creation, in the social and cultural space, of complex responses whose existence began as homeostatically inspired but later transcended homeostatic needs and gained considerable autonomy; therein the beginning but not the middle or the end of our cultural lives; even at the highest levels of sociocultural creation, there are vestiges of simple life-related processes present in the most humble exemplars of living organisms, namely, bacteria; 4. that several complex functions of the higher nervous system have their functional roots in simpler operations of the lower devices of the system itself; for this reason, for example, it has not been productive to first look for the grounding of feeling and consciousness in the operations of the cerebral cortex; instead, as discussed in part II, the operation of brain-stem nuclei and of the peripheral nervous system offers better opportunities to identify precursors to feeling and consciousness.

We often end up learning that an emotion is happening not as the triggering situation unfolds but because the processing of the situation causes feelings; that is, it causes conscious mental experiences of the emotional event. After the feeling begins we may (or may not) realize why we are feeling a certain way.

e seres humanos que inventam flautas, escrevem poesia, acreditam eu Deus, conquistam o Planeta e o espaço em seu redor, combatem doenças para atenuar o sofrimento, mas também não hesitam em destruir outros seres humanos para seu ganho pessoal, inventam a internet, descobrem maneiras de a transformar num instrumento de progresso e de catástrofe e, ainda por cima, se interrogam sobre as bactérias, formigas, abelhas - e si próprios.

But the extraordinary complexity of a living organism, the human variety being the best example, could only have come to be with the help of the supporting, coordinating, and controlling devices of the nervous system. All these systems are entirely part of the body that they serve. In and of themselves, they, too, are made up of living cells, like all the rest. Their cells also require regular nourishment to preserve their integrity, and they, too, are at risk of disease and death, just like any other cell in the body.

To understand the origin and construction of feelings, and to appreciate the contribution they make to the human mind, we need to set them in the panorama of homeostasis. The alignment of pleasant and unpleasant feelings with, respectively, positive and negative ranges of homeostasis is a verified fact. Homeostasis in good or even optimal ranges expresses itself as well-being and even joy, while the happiness caused by love and friendship contributes to more efficient homeostasis and promotes health. The negative examples are just as clear. The stress associated with sadness is caused by calling into action the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland and by releasing molecules whose consequence is reducing homeostasis and actually damaging countless body parts such as blood vessels and muscular structures. Interestingly, the homeostatic burden of physical disease can activate the same hypothalamic-pituitary axis and cause release of dynorphin, a molecule that induces dysphoria.

The new world of communication is a blessing for the citizens of the world trained to think critically and knowledgeable about history. But what about citizens who have been seduced by the world of life as entertainment and commerce? They have been educated, in good part, by a world in which negative emotional provocation is the rule rather than the exception and where the best solutions for a problem have to do primarily with short-term self-interests. Can they really be blamed?

Now consider this. A small number of invertebrate species, a mere 2 percent of all species of insects, is capable of social behaviors that do rival in complexity many human social achievements. Ants, bees, wasps, and termites are the prominent examples.10 Their genetically set and inflexible routines enable the survival of the group. They divide labor intelligently within the group to deal with the problems of finding energy sources, transform them into products useful for their lives, and manage the flow of those products. They do so to the point of changing the number of workers assigned to specific jobs depending on the energy sources available. They act in a seemingly altruistic manner whenever sacrifice is needed. In their colonies, they build nests that constitute remarkable urban architectural projects and provide efficient shelter, traffic patterns, and even systems of ventilation and waste removal, not to mention a security guard for the queen. One almost expects them to have harnessed fire and invented the wheel. Their zeal and discipline put to shame, any day, the governments of our leading democracies. These creatures acquired their complex social behaviors from their biology, not from Montessori schools or Ivy League colleges. But in spite of having come by these astounding abilities as early as 100 million years ago, ants and bees, individually or as colonies, do not grieve for the loss of their mates when they disappear and do not ask themselves about their place in the universe. They do not inquire about their origin, let alone their destiny. Their seemingly responsible, socially successful behavior is not guided by a sense of responsibility, to themselves or to others, or by a corpus of philosophical reflections on the condition of being an insect. It is guided by the gravitational pull of their life regulation needs as it acts on their nervous systems and produces certain repertoires of behavior selected over numerous evolving generations, under the control of their fine-tuned genomes. Members of a colony do not think as much as they act, by which I mean that upon registering a particular need—theirs, or the group’s, or the queen’s—they do not ponder alternatives for how to fulfill such a need in any way comparable to ours. They simply fulfill it. Their repertoire of actions is limited, and in many instances it is confined to one option. The general schema of their elaborate sociality does resemble that of human cultures, but it is a fixed schema. E. O. Wilson

The codes represent, in non-explicit form, the actual content of images and their sequences and are stored in both cerebral hemispheres, in association cortices of the occipital, temporal, parietal, and frontal regions. These regions are interconnected, via two-way hierarchical circuits of neural cables, with the collection of “early sensory cortices” where the explicit images are first assembled. During the process of recall, we end up reconstructing a more or less faithful approximation of the original image, using reverse neural pathways, which operate from code-holding regions and produce effects within the explicit image-making regions, essentially where the images were first assembled. We have called this process retroactivation.7

Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures.

Herpes simplex encephalitis used to be a prominent cause of such a disabling loss, but Alzheimer’s disease has now become the most frequent culprit. Specific cells within the hippocampal circuitry and its gateway, the entorhinal cortex, are compromised by Alzheimer’s disease. The gradual disruption no longer permits effective learning or recall of integrated events. The result is a progressive loss of spatial and temporal orientation. Unique people, events, and objects can no longer be recalled or recognized. No new ones can be learned. It is now clear that the hippocampus is an important site for neurogenesis, the process of generating new neurons that become incorporated in the local circuitry. New memory formation partly depends on neurogenesis. Interestingly, it is known that stress, which impairs memory, reduces neurogenesis.

First, using images made from the oldest components of the organism’s interior—the processes of metabolic chemistry largely carried out in viscera and in the blood circulation and the movements they generated—nature gradually fashioned feelings. Second, using images from a less ancient component of the interior—the skeletal frame and the muscles attached to it—nature generated a representation of the encasement of each life, a literal representation of the house inhabited by each life. The eventual combination of these two sets of representations opened the way for consciousness. Third, using the same image-making devices and an inherent power of images—the power to stand for and symbolize something else—nature developed verbal languages.

As nervous systems developed, they acquired an elaborate network of peripheral probes—the peripheral nerves that are distributed to every parcel of the body’s interior and to its entire surface, as well as to specialized sensory devices that enable seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Nervous systems also acquired an elaborate collection of aggregated central processors in the central nervous system, conventionally called the brain.10 The latter includes (1) the spinal cord; (2) the brain stem and the closely related hypothalamus; (3) the cerebellum; (4) a number of large nuclei located above brain-stem level—in the thalamus, basal ganglia, and basal forebrain; and (5) the cerebral cortex, the most modern and sophisticated component of the system. These central processors manage learning and memory storage of signals of every possible sort and also manage the integration of these signals; they coordinate the execution of complex responses to inner states and incoming stimuli—a critical operation that includes drives, motivations, and emotions proper; and they manage the process of image manipulation that we otherwise know as thinking, imagining, reasoning, and decision making. Last, they manage the conversion of images and of their sequences into symbols and eventually into languages—coded sounds and gestures whose combinations can signify any object, quality, or action, and whose linkage is governed by a set of rules called grammar. Equipped with language, organisms can generate continuous translations of nonverbal to verbal items and build dual-track narratives of such items.

We humans do ponder alternatives for our behavior, do mourn the loss of others, do want to do something about our losses and about maximizing our gains, and do ask questions about our origin and destiny and propose answers, and we are so disorderly in our bubbling and conflicting creativities that we are often a mess. We do not know exactly when humans began grieving, reacting to losses and gains, commenting on their condition, and asking inconvenient questions about the wherefrom and whereto of their lives. We know for certain, based on artifacts from the burial sites and caves that have been explored to date, that 50,000 years ago some of these processes were well established. But note how, amazingly, this is a mere evolutionary instant when we compare, say, 50 thousand years of humanity to 100 million years of the lives of social insects, not to mention a few billion years of history for bacteria.

Hypothetically, if you would reduce the feeling “tracks” of your mind, you would be left with desiccated chains of sensory images of the exterior world in all the familiar varieties—sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, more or less concrete or abstract, translated or not in some symbolic form, namely, verbal, arising from actual perception or recalled from memory. Worse, if you had been born without the feeling tracks, the rest of the images would have traveled in your mind unaffected and unqualified

Our complex, infinitely rich minds are, as is so often the case in the long history of life, the result of cooperative combinations of simple elements. In the case of minds, it is not a matter of cells assembled to form tissues and organs or of genes instructing amino acids to assemble myriad proteins. The basic unit for minds is the image, the image of a thing or of what a thing does, or what the thing causes you to feel; or the image of what you think of the thing; or the images of the words that translate any and all of the above.