Andy,
I think that there is an incredibly important assumption here in your
comment that has been side-stepped by other responses thus far
You wrote:
"leaving aside surgical intervention, neurons only react to other
neurons by direct electrochemical interaction."
If this were true, we would never be able to make any contact with the
world "outside" of our brains - neurons would just be talking to
neurons and they would have no connection with the "world out there"
(or any world for that matter!), and in which case, we would not be
able to see, hear, touch, smell, feel, balance, etc.
But we can do all these things. Thus, there must be a process of
moving from one to the other - from light striking the retina to
neurons firing in the retina and on down the brain (but where is
"seeing"?). So "mirror neurons" aren't necessarily impossible
(although it may still be incomplete or wrong for other reasons).
[and I hope you'll notice a parallel here between the concern
articulated in this email and my previous response to the division
that you introduced in an XMCA post some time ago between the dollar
in your pocket and the dollar in your head. As if the WORD and the
THING are in fundamentally different realms - never to meet one another]
But I think that there is an intuition in your comment about neurons
that nicely "lights up" one of the central problematics of Western
science: how do you get from physical stuff to mental stuff?
I suspect that this question-as-problem arises from a confused
understanding of what we mean by both "physical" and "mental". On the
one hand, we neglect the semiotic, information-based properties of the
physical (and Gregory Bateson is a great place to look for a better
understanding here). And similarly, on the other hand, we neglect the
physical aspects of what we understand to be "mental" (and here,
perhaps Charles Peirce is a good place to look here).
And a bigger problem within which both of these troubles sit is our
tendency of our understanding towards entification rather than seeking
the relational and processual nature of both the so-called "physical"
and the so-called "mental." And that's a whole other problem altogether.
But I've said a lot (too much?) already.
-greg
On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 6:15 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Robert, if I were to suggest that "mirror neurons" are a
metaphyical belief which have no more basis in existence than
phlogiston or ether, would that actually change anything? Have you
ever been misled by the mistaken observation of "mirror neuron"
activity, or has observation of a mirror neuron ever explained
some otherwise inexplicable event? So far as I know, leaving aside
surgical intervention, neurons only react to other neurons by
direct electrochemical interaction.
Andy
Robert Lake wrote:
Hi everyone,
I am a relative newcomer to CHAT research, so this (mostly
rhetorical) question is probably
old hat to many of you. It concerns Holodynski's article as it
may or may not relate to the notion of mirror neurons as
described by Ramachandran.
http://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.html
If I understand this correctly, in Holodynski's view, a
caregiver mirrors back to the child, his or her own emotions
through gesture and facial expressions. What if the child's
emotions/expressions fall into the range of autism spectrum
disorders? Can ZPD's be created that in turn help create and
develop "empathy" neurons in us regardless of our age level?
Are there some cultures that are more emotionally and perhaps
empathically evolved?
Thank-you MCA team and Professor Holodynski for this article.
I think it represents the a key component for the future of
cultural/historical research.
Fascinated and curious,
Robert Lake
On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 10:59 PM, Andy Blunden
<ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>> wrote:
The article for discussion is now available at:
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Journal/pdfs/20-1-holodynski.pdf
Andy
mike cole wrote:
We will make available Manfred Holodynski's article - The
Internalization
Theory of Emotions: A Cultural Historical Approach to the
Development of Emotions - available
for discussion as soon as possible. Then let the
discussion begin!
mike
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Social Foundations of Education
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Georgia Southern University
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/Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and
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/-/John Dewey.
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