Pleasure and pain
By Leonardo da Vinci

I have said little about pleasure. Pain and pleasure are not twins or mirror images of each other, at least not as far as their roles in leveraging survival. Somehow, more often than not, it is the pain-related signal that steers us away from impending trouble, both at the moment and in the anticipated future. It is difficult to imagine that individuals and societies governed by the seeking of pleasure, as much as or more than by the avoidance of pain, can survive at all. Some current social developments in increasingly hedonistic cultures offer support for this opinion.

— Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio

A genre of philosophical fantasy

And Descartes' Error

Knowing about the relevance of feelings in the processes of reason does not suggest that reason is less important than feelings, that it should take a backseat to them or that it should be less cultivated. On the contrary, taking stock of the pervasive role of feelings may give us a chance of enhancing their positive effects and reducing their potential harm. Specifically, without diminishing the orienting value of normal feelings, one would want to protect reason from the weakness that abnormal feelings or the manipulation of normal feelings can introduce in the process of planning and deciding.

— Descartes' Error

In other words, nothing in my formulation urges acceptance of things as they are. I must emphasize this point, since the mention of feelings often conjures up an image of self-oriented concern, of disregard for the world around, and of tolerance for relaxed standards of intellectual performance. That is, in effect, the very opposite of my view, and one less worry for those who, like the molecular biologist Gunther Stent, have been concerned, justly, that the overvaluing of feelings might result in less determination to uphold the Faustian contract that has brought progress to humanity.

— Descartes' Error

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What worries me is the acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their complex biological and sociocultural machinery. The best example of this attitude can be  found in the attempt to explain bruised feelings or irrational behavior by appealing to surface social causes or the action of neurotransmitters, two explanations that pervade the social discourse as presented in the visual and printed media; and in the attempt to correct personal and social problems with medical and nonmedical drugs. It is precisely this lack of understanding of the nature of feelings and reason (one of the hallmarks of the “culture of complaint”) that is cause for alarm.

— Descartes' Error

This is Descartes’ error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism.

— Antonio Damasio

The Cartesian idea of a disembodied mind may well have been the source, by the middle of the twentieth century, for the metaphor of mind as software program. In fact, if mind can be separated from body, perhaps one can try to understand it without any appeal to neurobiology, without any need to be influenced by knowledge of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurochemistry. Interestingly and paradoxically, many cognitive scientists who believe they can investigate the mind without recourse to neurobiology would not consider themselves dualists.

— Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio

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The 21st century makes romantic moods unaffordable. The fatherland is reduced to a rumor; religion and culture to by-products of the technological horizon. Worse, The family has thinned into a cold contract. Calculation reigns supreme. It's austere and irrefutable. One feels the cold not upon the skin, but in the marrow.