Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more