Hello!
I’m working to strengthen and deepen democratic systems to act at the level of feeling, because I believe this is the best way to enable needed solutions to our collective challenges to emerge.
For background see below
A biological understanding of feeling is not a technological solution to the challenges we face, nor is it an engineering solution, or a policy solution. It is a conceptual solution. It offers a new way of seeing and understanding the first principles of human experience and action, and it outlines a new framework for how to advancing the flourishing and resilience of complex living systems.
A biological understanding of feeling is a historically novel clarification of an age old question. It simply tells us that feelings mentally express the homeostatic condition of our life and indicate our needs. This is intuitive but it hasn’t been scientifically knowable until recently. In fact, feelings have been thought to be outside the realm of science since Ancient Greece.
Why does it matter? A biological understanding of feeling fills in a long-invisible gap in our frameworks for thought and action. For centuries we have taken for granted that feeling and reason are competing, mutually exclusive modes of processing. Now, neurobiology research suggests that they are not competing but nested and interdependent processes with the common goal of ensuring our survival and flourishing. Feelings, and their underlying processes of homeostatic life regulation guide the rational decision-making process toward conditions beneficial for life, individually and together.
A biological understanding of feeling can help us identify and unravel costly mistakes that have been made in the development of modern society. Our discounting of feeling has limited our understanding of the fundamental prosocial orientation of human behavior, and has made it difficult to counter the widespread belief that human nature is primarily power-hungry, anarchic, selfish, and aggressive.
A biological understanding of feeling can be the basis of a new first-principles and needs-based framework for human experience and action. It can help us understand the cooperative and prosocial bent of human nature more clearly than ever before in human history; it can inform efforts to build a more resilient and effective democracy, and find previously invisible paths toward solving “impossible” problems.
Democracy and Governance
After five years studying the neurobiology and evolution of feeling and social behavior with Dr. Damasio, I entered a masters program in Democracy and Governance at Georgetown University to bring my background to bear on democratic strengthening.
Two years of studying and working in the current state of democracy theory and practice later, I have a better idea of what it looks like to apply the research on feeling toward securing democracy against the threats it currently faces.
The field of democracy assistance has a tendency to focus on the structural elements of democracy, while overlooking the experiences and drives and motivations of individual citizens. This is a problem, because the structures must be animated by human energy and engagement. To date this fact remains largely dismissed.
Individuals must experience the ability to pursue their needs through the democratic system. They must experience their frustrations to have a constructive outlet through engagement, real, active engagement, with local government. They must experience a sense of belonging in the present, and legacy for the future. These experiences can build an identification of citizens with the democratic system. When we identify with democracy as a means to meet our needs and pursue our hopes, we are more engaged in constructive civic action, and we are protected to a degree against the provocation to anti democratic sentiment and action.
There are already examples of initiatives which go in this direction. They include deliberative democracy, citizen assemblies, processes of coproduction of public services between citizens and local governments. They all include a focus on reengaging citizens in the process of self governance.
However, while these approaches are promising and indicate a recognition of need for more participation, they are still largely top down, which weakens their effect. By allowing these processes to be driven by citizen needs and motives, a new level of democratic resilience can be built.
These insights can inform the development of a new class of civic engagement program which can act at the level of affect to strengthen democratic attitudes and identification, and increase the adaptability and dynamism of the democratic system as a whole.
Now it’s time to build!
The Neuroscience of Feeling
This journey started in earnest when I began working as a neuroscientist in USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute with Dr. Antonio Damasio. Here I encountered a set of ideas which would transform my worldview and redirect my life.
I’m referring to Damasio’s work on the nature of feeling.
Working framework:
A blindspot in our world-view
Prevailing conceptions of human nature include an ancient philosophical error.
Worldviews built upon the ideas of the Enlightenment Period are so culturally engrained that we rarely consider that they may be incomplete. However, recent advances in neurobiology and neuroimaging research suggest that they may have a big gap.
The relatively recent development of the field of affective neuroscience has revealed a longstanding neglect by the sciences of subjective phenomena like feeling and emotion and the deeper questions of the human experience, considering them incompatible with the search for objective truth.
It is impossible to account comprehensively for the many problems which confront us in the modern world without including an accounting of this critical oversight.
A biological understanding of feeling
Feeling is the mental expression of the unfolding condition of life, and it guides rational decision-making toward survival and flourishing.
It used to be thought that feelings were constructed in the most recent parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, and that they were human-only phenomena. We also thought that reason and feeling were incompatible. That to make effective rational decisions we needed to be as unfeeling as possible.
Now we know that feelings are constructed in the oldest parts of the brain, the brainstem. We also know that making effective rational decisions requires the good function of affect-processing brain regions. Reason is grounded in feeling, and feeling is grounded in biological processes of life regulation.
Feelings are the mental expression of biological processes occurring within the experiencing organism for the purpose of survival and flourishing.
A new framework for human thought and action
Reconnecting with ancient wisdom through the dynamic and self-correcting language of science.
Several familiar ideas emerge from a biological understanding of feeling: (1) the existence of a fundamental common ground at the level of feeling which runs deeper than any cultural or racial differences — different feelings feel the same in different people, although they may be experienced in different situations; (2) an intrinsic orientation toward the common good — self-interest is simultaneously an interest in the wellbeing of the broader living system of which we are part and depend on for survival; (4) an inherent preference on metabolic grounds for cooperation over violence, that is mentally expressed as the pleasant feeling which in general accompanies cooperation and the unpleasant feeling which accompanies conflict; and (3) a unique and inherent value and belonging for each individual within the common effort of collective problem solving.
These are not new ideas, but when they have appeared in the past they have been justified either through moral intuition or philosophy alone. Now, for the first time in human history, we can justify belief in the potential for outgroup empathy, our intrinsic motive to do good, and the value and belonging of the individual, in terms of our biological nature and not in spite of it, in the progressive and evolving language of science.
The integration of a biological understanding of feeling into existing worldviews/frameworks for thought and action promises a unique opportunity.
A biological understanding of feeling can inform the development of effective positive change efforts (practices, programs, policies), and offers a framework to coordinate and evaluate these efforts that is safeguarded by the self-correcting nature of the scientific method.
This involves, among other things: (1) Research, writing and publishing to promote the diffusion of this work, and (2) developing and implementing programs and policies which support bottom-up information flow within communities, organizations, and governance institutions.