Defeated by Density

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, neuroscience, homeostasis

Never before have I stopped reading a book because I just could not read it! Antonio Damasio, in The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, clearly has something important to say, but I cannot discern more than the barest outline of what that might be. And I may have missed his point entirely.

I extracted this, I think, from reading the first half of the book: What drives life, evolution, growth, even motivation, and the development of culture, is the seeking for homeostasis. Definitions of homeostasis:

the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes. (the definition proffered by Google)

the tendency of a system, especially the physiological system of higher animals, to maintain internal stability, owing to the coordinated response of its parts to any situation or stimulus that would tend to disturb its normal condition or function. (Dictionary.com)

I gathered two of several definitions. I discern that the core meaning of homeostasis is "a seeking for at least local equilibrium in a dynamic system." Consider this: most feelings are detectors of non-equilibrium.

For example, hunger indicates that bodily fuel supplies are running low. The sensors in the body whose signals are gathered and combined into "hunger" detect the level of sugar in the blood, the distension (or lack of it) of the stomach, and several other items. If we eat "just enough", at an appropriate pace (most of us eat too fast), the sensation "hunger" subsides, and at best, we feel nothing. If we overeat, the distension sensors (no doubt aided by a few other kinds of sensor) send signals that make us feel "too full" or even "upset stomach".

In the early chapters of the book, the author explains the origin of life as the result of homeostasis-seeking by variously-enclosed "bags" of chemicals. The most successful of these eventually developed into prokaryotic cells (bacteria or archaea, we're not sure which came first).

Fast-forward to about a quarter of the way through the book: brains, and animal bodies to carry them around and act as their interface with everything "out there", developed as improved homeostatic controllers. The human brain may be the best so far, though that is debatable. Note that the portion of our brain of which we are most proud, the cerebrum and cerebral cortex, comprises 85% of the brain's mass, and contains about 20% of the total number of neurons in the brain. Whatever our consciousness is (Damasio has a chapter on that), it is in this portion, with strong support by the "limbic system", another percent or two at most. What of the rest? About 80% of the brain's neurons are found in the cerebellum ("little brain"), which weighs just 14% of the total. But the cerebellum and the rest of the hindbrain control and measure everything going on in our bodies.

Side note: though much is made of Artificial Intelligence, all such efforts and products to date seek to mimic or duplicate functions of the cerebrum. Until we know more about the cerebellum, so that AI can be properly embodied, all our AI products will be very fragile and prone to gross errors.

The chapter "Consciousness" occurs about 45% of the way through the book (p. 143). This is clearly not the author's goal, but a waystation as he approaches his subject, Culture. I didn't get much farther before I bogged down. In the first few chapters, I found reading it rough going, but I persevered. By the time I got to page 180, it became too tiring for me to extract meaning from the author's text.

I "Fogged" a few portions of the book, and compared to other texts. The "Fog Index" of Robert Gunning is one among many methods for determining the reading level of some text. It has the virtue of being calculable manually. The number so produced is roughly equal to the grade level in American schools of the 1940's. Thus a Fog Index (FI) of 12 indicates that one must graduate high school to have the skills to comfortably read the text. Sad to say, the average high school graduate of 2019 AD would struggle to read text with FI greater than 9. This underlies the low subscription rates of Scientific American, to which I have subscribed since the age of 14. Articles in this journal typically have FI of 12-13.

A "good" Fog Index requires about 100 words, or at least 80. I selected four paragraphs to "Fog", two (Fogged separately) on page 25, and one each on pages 145 and 224. The results? In order:

19.1, 16.4, 13.6, and 16.8

for an average of 16.

For comparison I chose two paragraphs chosen at random from the August 2019 issue of Scientific American, and two from the book Superfreakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. In order:

15.1 and 13.7, averaging 14.4
10.9 and 14.3, averaging 12.7

Whether these are all properly done (they all seem a bit high to me, by about +2), they are comparative. They show that the reading level of Strange Order is quite high, and is sometimes very high! However, this is not the whole story. I decline to give examples, but the writing is often clumsy, which distracts a reader from the point.

The fact that it has been 20 days since my last book review in only due 50% to these reading difficulties. From August 1-11 I was away and did not take the book. When I laid down the book on July 31, I was at page 175. Seven days of reading typically gets me about twice that far in any book. After my return two days ago, I managed five more pages before giving up.

I have this to say by way of conclusion: Dr. Damasio clearly has something significant to say, though I am not sure I fully agree with his thesis. He'd have done better to collaborate with someone who knows how to render text into greater readability. As to his thesis, I get an impression best summarized in the adage, "To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Homeostasis is significant, and can provide a unifying paradigm, but I think this author overdoes it.