Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Yesterday I discussed Damasio's book Descartes' Error, and the use it made of the James-Lange theory of emotion. As I promised, I move now to Damasio's 1999 book, The Feeling of What Happens, which moves on from matters of emotion and rationality to the related but distinct issue of consciousness. Consciousness, he says, is a chain rather than a single link. It is the collective noun for a number of closely related facts, each more rare in the natural world than the one before. The following are the links in the chain: 1) non-conscious neural signalling gives rise to 2) a proto-self, which permits the development of 3) a core self, which is only here-and-now, but which when added to memory becomes 4) an autobiographical self, which finally permits something that may be distinctively human ... 5) extended consciousness, (which he also calls "consciousness post-language") and finally, 6) conscience. Damasio devotes a good deal of effort to giving separ...

Damasio is the head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. He's made something of a reputation in philosophical circles for his writings on mind/body issues, starting with Descartes' Error (1994). The title of that 1994 book suggests the thesis: that any separation of mind from body (and concomitantly, any separation of intellectual judgment from emotional reaction) is erroneous. Damasio hypothesized that rationality requires emotional input. In part this was a development of the James-Lange theory of the emotions.  That theory, you will recall, is this: our body instinctively reacts to a situation (by blushing, for example).  The emotion we feel (embarrassment) is not the reason for the blushing. A sensory stimulus of some sort is the reason for the blushing. The emotion is a consequence of the bodily reaction. Damasio said that James was "well ahead of both his time and ours" in this respect, and that he had "sei...