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Prosopagnosia and appropriation; signals from the central nervous system and appropriation

Note to self: prosopagnosia would serve as a good example of what I'm calling 'appropriation," I got the notion from Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's De sensu, where he points out that the common sense (koine aesthesis for Ari, sensus communis for Thomas) takes the act of the proper sense and makes it its own.  It doesn't repeat the act of sensing, say, color: instead, it perceives something about color.  Somewhere (methinks) in the Summa theologiae (and in the other Summa) Aquinas talks about the relation of the higher to the lower power in a similar manner (but while making more neo-Platonic sounding points).
It seems to me that perhaps what we know about the brain today largely corroborates all this.  There is an appropriation by one part of the brain of the act done in another part of the brain (all of these acts are acts of the ensouled body and/or the embodied soul, but never mind for now).  But it may be the case that the "higher/lower" conception might not fit: the appropriation might be more "sideways" than "higher/lower." That is, for example, thanks to the discovery of the malady prosopagnosia, we recognize that there is a part of the brain that recognizes faces.  When this part works as one would hope it does, it certainly appropriates without duplicating the perception of proper and common sensible features of the face: we don't perceive the shape and color of the face twice: rather, through the face-recognition part of the brain we perceive the shaped and colored part of the world as the face of this or that someone whom we know from the past.  There is something anti-reductive in all this, inasmuch as one power is appropriating what another has done in a way that more "semantical" than "syntactical."

Once we recognize appropriation, we can criticize much "brain-talk" as unwarrantedly mechanistic.  Think of how we might say that the visual cortex appropriates the operation of some other part of the brain.  Ultimately, we can backwards and backwards with this appropriation talk until we get to our encounter with light coming into the eye.  At that point, it's worth noting that the organism as a whole in a sense appropriates its environment.  For each animal at each moment, it has an environment in a manner analogous to how (a Husserlian would say that ) a person has a world.  And perhaps Hans Jonas would say a nescient organism appropriates its environment as well.

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