Malabou

 Malabou (2013) -- Chapter 6 === Damasio / Spinoza

Developing a third-person perspective [vs. the egocentric position]

Commentary on :

Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain / Antonio Damasio / 2003

Phenomena

--A woman is being treated for Parkinson’s disease -- a low-intensity electrical current is aimed at the motor nuclei -- this treatment enables the patient to move her hands without a tremor and to walk normally.  By accident the electrical charge is aimed two millimeters below the correct contact point.  The woman's expression immediately changed to one of sadness. Then she began to cry and to speak of her hopelessness, her sense of worthlessness, of disappearing down a dark hole. Then the current is shut off.  In less than two minutes her behavior returns to normal.

It was as if the symptoms of depression had simply been switched on with the charge to a particular point in her brain and switched off again just as quickly.

-- One of the more radical treatments for epilepsy is the surgical removal of a brain region that causes seizures -- a kind of lobotomy.  Before the surgery, the brain is stimulated with electricity to help identify the region to be excised.  At a point near the proper excision site, electrical stimulation of brain tissue produces uncontrollable laughter. 

-- As a result of damage to a particular bit of the brain, a patient suddenly lost the ability to feel embarrassment.  Others similar cases impacted patients’ abilities to feel compassion, fear, sociability, or to exercise self-control. 

-- Amnesiacs sometimes retain all their core biological functions but have lost their sense of individual identity -- other cases show problems with motivation, sexual arousal, or the ability to recognize voices after the onset of brain injuries. 

Question: are feelings some form of neural electricity?

Intentions?

                                    Values?

Perceptions? 

William James: every time we have an emotion we bring with it an accompanying thought and an accompanying body state.

B. Spinoza: the mind is the idea of the body (the body’s way of seeing / feeling itself)

The idea is not first -- the body state is basic -- the mental process of assigning a cause comes afterwards -- body experiences are parallel-mapped in the brain

To begin from the body and the principle of physical wellbeing -- this goes against the intellectualistic strain in our understanding of emotions (e.g. Stoicism)

Let us return to this body-centered idea

Imagine a child putting a hand in a flame. The bodily sensation of pain teaches the brain about danger. "I will not touch fire again or it will hurt," thinks the child.

Note: when the child learns the lesson, it is imagining a being that does not yet exist: it is imagining its own future self.

The brain is “mapping” a body that is still only imaginary.

From feeling comes the capacity for imagination and hence for empathy.

If we can imagine our future self, we can also imagine other selves.

self-interest and disinterest as opposite tendencies

body state -- mind -- political/social/cultural consequences

*****

Malabou 7 === Neural plasticity

The case of Phineas Gage

“His mind was radically changed” / physical state / mental state

Brain injury as a cause for absent subjectivity

Indifference, coldness, lack of concern, disaffection, neutrality --

The impact is such that brain lesions / losses / life experiences  --- are no longer available to consciousness (this produces the vacuum in subjectivity)

Anosognosia as an example (inability to recognize states occurring in one’s own body -- cf. stroke, Anton’s Syndrome, Babinsky’ disease, cortical blindness, inability to cognize visual losses

General principle of psychic impact -- what comes about sticks around -- as in F’s description of the levels of Rome as a metaphor for psychic depth -- but organic impacts can rearrange material and disrupt the principle of continuity

Brain damage can impact the ability to dream

Questions about patients who lose the ability to connect to the past -- cf. Borges

Note that injuries can be of such severity that they impact the normal human ability to take something in, deal with it, and move beyond it.  Some events cannot be processed but are purely destructive.  Examples bear this out in cases with vision, affection, wonder …

*****

Malabou / conclusion 

Hearing oneself, feeling oneself, taking note of oneself, being in touch with oneself, connecting to oneself -- this ability (call it “autoaffection,” a term from Heidegger) -- basically a way of talking about the reflectivity of subjective consciousness -- this is a capacity that seems vital to normal human processing, which we can see in cases where an injury occurs and this particular capacity is lost

Philosophers appear to disagree about the status of hetero vs. auto affections --

Derrida, Spinoza, Descartes, Damasio, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty offer rival accounts

Normal warm-bloodedness vs. cold blood

wonder seems like a kind of middle state which is at the same time a surprise that arrives from the outside and an enjoyment of the spirit that comes from inside

wonder -- as an example -- shows the fundamental process at work in normal conscious experience as both an inside and an outside

In effect: when affects occur, the I gets separated from itself -- which means that it tries to get back to itself

The protoself (Damasio) is a way of talking about the normal homeostasis that a person tries to get back to after an experience -- an affect, a trauma …

Therefore homeostasis is not simply mechanical -- nor logical -- but also emotion / affective / ‘psychological’ / involving resonances and intentions, divisions and attempts to regain unity

Question: why do we need the outside at all?

The human way of being in the world is this back and forth in and out inside and outside dynamic -- and when we look at this whole sphere we see that it is imaginary, i.e., does not exist, is a phantasm

Because it is this kind of invisible-phantasm, it appears to be indestructible, untouched by the real world -- this was F’s attitude, linked to his ideas about psychic continuity and the preservation of psychic energy 

But clearly it can be impacted by events -- e.g. injuries

Thus plasticity has both a negative and a positive connotation

Solms and Sacks present more cases … in general, we see that brain lesions are also psychic lesions

Discussion of psychic extension -- psychic spatiality -- the way in which the psyche exists in the dimensional world -- this again seemed at first merely a metaphor and a way of thinking about the feel of subjectivity -- cases e.g. with criminal psychopathy demonstrate that the extension-reach-spatiality of the psyche is not merely metaphorical but appears to consist in a kind of imagination / reception / feel oneself feeling middle state, which can be compared to a kind of map -- mind map -- inner/outer interface, within the physical structure (and the electrochemical processes) of the brain

We are inching up here towards a more materialistic vision of selfhood

Subjectivity -- links the humanities and neurobiology

Experience rests on the phantasm of the first person (this must relate to the phenomenology of time consciousness).  Malabou calls this the “originary delusion” of the first person.  Many errors in thinking from the history of philosophy seem to emerge from a failure to adopt a sufficiently materialistic perspective

Consequences of this entire line of argument --

No one ever was or had or is a self … selves are non-entities … what exist (in addition to bodies) are conscious self-models that normally cannot be recognized as models

The subjective experience of being someone occurs if the information processing data-gathering receiving-modules operate under a transparent (does not see itself) self-model

Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, you look right through it -- you don’t see it, you see through it

Normal experience -- we tend to confuse ourselves with the content of the self-model currently operating / currently activated by our brains --

This is a way of talking about the / can’t see itself / reflectivity principle inherent in the psyche -- ‘seeing through’ does not see the filters/channels it is seeing through … it just “sees”

Extremely difficult to get behind this -- Kant, Hegel, Husserl

(No performative contradiction at work in this analysis -- the opportunity to see behind the curtain comes from the neurological cases)

Philosophy still has something to learn from the sciences … (despite the prejudice for the a priori in p)

Empiricism!