The Strange Order of Things

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that feelings, ranging from pain and suffering to well-being and pleasure, have been unjustly neglected as the primary motives, monitors, and negotiators of human cultural endeavors. While conventional accounts credit verbal language, sociality, and superior intellect with driving the development of the arts, philosophy, religion, governance, and science, Damasio contends that an additional catalyst was required: the felt experience of life itself. He uses medicine as an illustrative example, noting that it began not as an intellectual exercise but as a response to the pain caused by disease. Feelings, he maintains, motivated the original invention of cultural instruments, continue to monitor their success or failure, and participate in the ongoing negotiation of adjustments over time. Affect, he writes, is one of the "unrecognized presences at the cultural conference table" (16).

To ground this claim, Damasio introduces homeostasis, the collection of regulatory processes at the core of all life. He defines homeostasis not merely as the maintenance of stable internal conditions but as a broader imperative encompassing both survival and flourishing. Feelings, he proposes, are the "mental deputies of homeostasis": positive feelings signal that life regulation is proceeding well, while negative feelings signal deficiency or danger. This functional thread, he argues, links the simplest early life-forms to the conscious, feeling minds responsible for human cultures.

Damasio traces life's origins to approximately 3.8 billion years ago, when chemical molecules assembled within membrane-enclosed cells and initiated self-perpetuating metabolic reactions. He favors a "metabolism first" account of life's emergence, in which plain chemistry and proto-metabolic operations preceded the development of genetic machinery, over a "replicator first" account in which genes initiated the process. Drawing on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza's concept of conatus, the innate striving of each being to persevere in its existence, Damasio characterizes every living cell as possessing a powerful, unthought drive to maintain itself and project into the future.

Crucially, Damasio reveals what he calls the "strange order" of the book's title: socially effective behaviors emerged in organisms far simpler and far older than those possessing complex brains. Bacteria can sense their environments, band together when resources are scarce, assess group strength through quorum sensing (a chemical process for detecting the density of surrounding bacteria), defend territory, and shun noncooperative members. Social insects such as ants and bees, dating back roughly 100 million years, divide labor, build architectural colonies, and manage energy flow. These organisms achieved such feats not through deliberation or feeling but through the blind operation of homeostasis on their chemical and genetic makeup. The order is "strange" because it contradicts the assumption that complex social behavior requires complex minds.

Damasio then traces the evolutionary developments that made minds, feelings, and consciousness possible. Nervous systems first appeared roughly 500 to 600 million years ago as servants of whole-organism homeostasis, coordinating functions too complex for chemical signaling alone. Early nerve nets could manage basic perception and locomotion but lacked the capacity to generate internal maps or images. The critical breakthrough came when nervous systems grew complex enough to produce images, internal representations of objects and events both external and internal to the organism. These images constitute the contents of minds and could guide action with greater precision even before consciousness arose. Damasio emphasizes that minds arise from the interaction of nervous systems and bodies, not from brains alone: "No body, never mind" (66).

Within this framework, Damasio distinguishes two internal worlds the nervous system maps. The "old interior world" of visceral organs, metabolic chemistry, and smooth muscles yields feelings, qualified as pleasant or unpleasant in accordance with homeostatic states. The "new interior world" of the musculoskeletal frame and sensory portals generates a representation of the organism as a whole, contributing to the perspectival stance necessary for consciousness. The expansion of minds further depends on the integration of images from multiple senses, the formation of memory, the development of symbolic thought and verbal language, and the capacity for narrative and imagination.

Damasio defines affect as a broad category encompassing all feelings and the mechanisms that produce them. He identifies three sources: spontaneous homeostatic feelings reflecting the background flow of life regulation; feelings provoked by sensory stimuli; and feelings triggered by drives, motivations, and emotions such as joy, fear, anger, and compassion. Each feeling carries valence, an inherent quality of pleasantness or unpleasantness that corresponds to whether the underlying state of life is favorable or unfavorable. Emotive responses originate in subcortical brain nuclei and are triggered automatically and nonconsciously. Damasio emphasizes that most drives and emotions are inherently social, and that sociality enters the cultural mind through affect.

A central physiological argument concerns how feelings are constructed. Damasio challenges the view that the brain simply receives body signals and fabricates feelings internally. Instead, he proposes that body and nervous system exist in a state of "continuity," interacting so intimately that they form a single functional unit. Evidence for this continuity includes unmyelinated nerve fibers open to surrounding chemical environments, dorsal root ganglia (clusters of nerve cell bodies along the spinal column) that lack the protective blood-brain barrier, and the enteric nervous system, a large network of neurons in the gastrointestinal tract that functions largely autonomously and produces most of the body's serotonin. Feelings, Damasio concludes, are hybrid processes of bodies and nervous systems interacting.

Consciousness, in Damasio's account, consists of two components: subjectivity and integrated experience. Subjectivity arises from a perspectival stance built from images of the body during the act of perceiving, combined with the continuous availability of feelings. Integrated experience requires the narrative-like ordering of images coordinated across large-scale brain networks. No single brain region produces consciousness; multiple regions participate as an ensemble in cooperation with the body.

Applying this framework to cultural domains, Damasio argues that early technologies responded to homeostatic feelings like hunger, cold, and pain; that the arts originated in reasoning about problems posed by feelings; that religious beliefs developed in response to grief and the confrontation with death; and that moral codes and governance arose from the need to reduce suffering. He notes that humans built five-hole flutes approximately 50,000 years ago, illustrating how deeply affect is woven into cultural creation. He addresses apparent contradictions, such as religious violence, by noting that nothing in his hypothesis guarantees the success of homeostatically inspired responses; success depends on conception and implementation.

Damasio critiques contemporary transhumanism and artificial intelligence, challenging the notion that organisms are reducible to algorithms. Organisms use algorithms, he grants, but they are not algorithms: they are vulnerable living tissues whose substrate matters for the production of feelings and moral values. Current artificial intelligence programs exhibit cognition without affect, meaning they cannot experience suffering, empathize, or independently ground moral judgments.

Diagnosing the current cultural crisis, Damasio argues that basic homeostasis is parochial, focused on the individual organism and extendable only with effort to larger groups. Societies function as collections of separable groups, each pursuing its own interests, making collective harmony difficult. He presents two scenarios: a pessimistic one in which periodic cultural failure is inevitable due to deeply rooted biological tendencies, and a cautiously hopeful one in which sustained effort through education and democratic governance can tame destructive impulses, as evidenced by the abolition of slavery and growing recognition of human rights. He concludes: "A life not felt would have needed no cure. A life felt but not examined would not have been curable" (233).