Descartes' Error

decision-making.

There's this great work by Damasio called Descartes' Error, because Descartes was all about rational thinking.

And what they find is that human beings that have some kind of brain injury where they don't experience emotion in the same way, they can't actually make critical decisions.

They don't have the intuition, and so much of our decision-making is intuition.

in explaining and describing so much that there's just this inbuilt optimism that it will one day explain this extra thing called consciousness.

Now, of course, Philip Goff's contention in Galileo's Error is that the reason why science has been successful is precisely because it has excluded any kind of first-person, uh-

Yeah

... aspect of the world.

And, um, most of our science until very recently has just assumed that consciousness, because it's such a exalted human achievement, must arise in the part of the brain that is the newest, most human part, which is the neocortex, right? The s- the site of decision making, executive function, and, and, uh, rational thought.

And, um, that was a v- very kind of anthropocentric or cerebro-centric way to, to, to think about it.

And, um, beginning in the '90s when you have the science of emotion and, um, sort of taking off, uh, Antonio Damasio wrote a really interesting book called Descartes' Error.

It wasn't really about consciousness, it was about decision making, and he was showing that, um, decisions are shaped by feelings to a much greater-

Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist, a professor, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

He has received many honors throughout his career and has written several books that I have right here on my shelf, including Descartes' Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and The Strange Order of Things.

I'm quite obsessed with his new book, which is called Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness.

In it, he presents a really beautiful explanation of consciousness and how it is run by the body, by a certain kind of sensation that tells us what it's like to be alive, how our life is going, and what we need to do about it.

And that really was the shift in emphasis from thinking about consciousness as a cortical phenomenon, a product of the newest and most supposedly human part of the brain, the outer covering, seat of rational thought, logic, decision-making, all these things, Surely consciousness had to emerge from there because it's such an advanced, uniquely human, so we thought, facility.

But thanks to someone we were just discussing, Antonio Damasio, in a wonderful book called Descartes' Error, he shifted the conversation to let's look at feelings.

as perhaps more important.

And that consciousness may begin with the bodies speaking to the mind and that therefore we shouldn't be looking at the cortex, we should be looking at the upper brainstem for that because the brain's job, remember, is to keep the body alive, not the other way around.

So in order to kind of represent that, we've said, let's call it the body-mind, which is the body viewed from the perspective of how well are these comms systems working? Because we know that, you know, to make good all-around decisions, you have to be in touch with what's going on in your guts, with your tummy, the work of Antonio Damasio.

who wrote a very influential book called Descartes' Error, which was exactly about this connection.

People who have brain damage, what it's left them with is a disconnection between their emotions and their intellect.

So their intellect becomes unguided or untethered by the sort of, you know, our emotions are what tells us what's valuable, what's significant, what's threatening, what's important in our environment.

So, and you can read a book about this.

It's called Descartes' Error.

It was written by a neuroscientist in, like, 2012 or something.

And so we've known this for a long time.

Derek will be looking at the first two in segment two through the lens of Paul Bloom's work.

But given a recent book by Lebanese-born Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad, which Matthew is going to cover in segment three, we thought we'd look at how empathy is being used and potentially distorted in modern society, or, as I'll get into next, how it's being weaponized on social media by Christian nationalists.

[upbeat music] Last year saw a wave of anti-empathy content across the Christian nationalist, independent, and social media sphere, which is, sounds like an odd sentence [laughs] at first glance.

According to this discourse, it turns out that the real problem in America is not deepening financial inequality, it's not lack of access to healthcare, it's not the most corrupt presidency in our history, or the checks and balances of democracy and rule of law being deliberately deconstructed.

It's not masked ICE thugs abducting people without warrants and killing protesters.

No, no, no. It's Christians, especially Christian women, being too susceptible to what reformed evangelical Joe Rigney calls the sin of empathy, which is the title of his book published in February of 2025.

The subtitle, Compassion and Its Counterfeits.

But let's back up a little and get some first principles about men and women from this guy, who, by the way, is an associate pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.

Antonio Damasio is professor of neuroscience and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

His books include Descartes' Error and The Feeling of What Happens.

His new book is Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness.

This episode was edited and produced by our executive producer, Graham Shed, with help from our associate producer, Jean Shumay.