FROM COUNTERREVOLUTION TO CHARTER REVOLUTION

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ne deficiency of much neuroscience is its neglect of the social dimen-sions of the brain. This problem is no doubt in part methodological. It is easier, after all, to study an individual brain with an fMRI apparatus or to attach an electrode to a single cell—not that the technology of either pro-cedure is simple—than to map the interactions of a network of brains. As Patricia Churchland notes, “Social life is stunningly complex, as is the brain that supports our social lives.”¹ Philosophical assumptions are also certainly to blame, especially the legacy of the Cartesian focus on the consciousness of the single, self-reflecting individual. As the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni points out, “Philosophical and ideological individualistic positions especially dominant in our Western culture have made us blind to the fundamentally intersubjective nature of our own brains.”² No brain is an island, however.

Evan Thompson reminds us that “stripped of culture, we simply would not have the cognitive capacities that make us human.”³

We would not, for one thing, be able to read. The neuronal recycling through which education transforms the brain into an apparatus for reading, generation after generation, as a culture of literacy preserves and extends itself, is a prime example of how the neurobiology of our cognitive functions is inextricably intertwined with social interactions that shape and are shaped by them. The evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald observes that “cul-ture effectively wires up functional subsystems in the brain that would not otherwise exist.”⁴ This is the case not only with reading but also with a wide range of cognitive, emotional, and even motor functions that develop, or fail to, depending on the contingent, variable interactions of the brain with its environment of significant others, starting with parents but extending to the far reaches of culture and society.

There are three dominant approaches to understanding the social life of

the brain, and the emerging consensus is that none alone can account for the complicated, messy work whereby the self and others meaningfully inter-act. One approach, known as theory of mind (ToM) or theory theory (TT), fo-cuses on our capacity to attribute mental states to others—to engage in mind reading, through which we theorize about the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others, which we recognize may differ from our own. Adherents of this approach regard as a key moment in cognitive development the ability of children at age four or five to pass “false belief” tests, in which they must understand that another child (who doesn’t know, for example, that a marble has been moved from box A to box B) will think differently about things than they do (and will look for the marble in A instead of B).⁵ Critics of theory theory point out that children have meaningful relations with others before they can understand “false beliefs” (otherwise they couldn’t take the tests they fail be-fore age four). “The mind is not a book,” Iacoboni argues, and we do not have

“to be scientists, like Einstein, analyzing every person around us” with “theo-ries” about their mental states in order to understand “the simple, everyday actions of our fellow humans” (73).

A more plausible view, according to simulation theory (ST), is that we inter-pret others by using our own thoughts and feelings as a model for what others must be experiencing and run “simulation routines,” which put us in their shoes. Such imitation can occur right from birth, with more or less conscious awareness, more or less deliberately or automatically, and does not require the ability to “theorize” or “mentalize.”⁶ Critics of ST object, however, that it begs the question it claims to answer because it assumes that “the simulator already has some idea of what’s going on with the other person,” which is “the very thing we are trying to explain.”⁷ In any case, as Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola sensibly point out, “social cognitions range from the intuitive examples studied by the simulationists to the reflective ones used by ToM investigators,” and an adequate theory of the social brain must account for both.⁸

A third approach may provide the needed bridging mechanism, although there is still some controversy about the experimental evidence underlying it. In the early 1990s a team of neuroscientists in Parma led by Giacomo Riz-zolatti discovered mirror neurons (MNs) in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey that fired not only when the animal performed a specific action but also when it observed the same action by another monkey or an experi-menter.⁹ This finding almost immediately led to speculation about whether

The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego 133 similar mirroring mechanisms at the neuronal level might underlie such key social behaviors as imitation, learning, and communication. A few years later, Vittorio Gallese, a member of the Parma team, offered the “conjecture . . . that MNs represent a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylog-eny, of a simulation heuristic that might underlie mind-reading,” a proposal he followed up with thoughtful papers about how such a mechanism might work.¹⁰

The mirror-neuron bandwagon has picked up considerable steam since then, as is evident in the excitement with which the neuroscientist V. S. Ram-achandran declares, “These neurons . . . were for all intents and purposes reading the other monkey’s mind, figuring out what it was up to. . . . It is as if mirror neurons are nature’s own virtual-reality simulations of the intentions of other beings.”¹¹ This enthusiasm has been matched by equal doses of skep-ticism about whether humans have mirror neurons and, even if they do exist, whether they can bear all the explanatory weight they have been asked to carry.¹² The claim that mirror neurons are, in the words of the UCLA neuro-scientist Marco Iacoboni (previously of Parma), “the biological roots of inter-subjectivity” (152) is important and intriguing and deserves careful, critical attention, which this chapter attempts to provide (with the caveat that some of the issues have to do with experimental methods and techniques of statisti-cal analysis on which I am not competent to pronounce). It is probably safe to say that the brain’s social capacities are much too complex to be explained by a single neuron, but the salutary effect of the mirror-neuron debate is that it has once and for all taken the brain out of the vat and situated it in the social world.¹³

Whatever approach (or, more likely, combination of approaches) eventu-ally emerges from these controversies, the challenge to the neurobiology of social skills is to account for what phenomenology calls “the paradox of the alter ego.”¹⁴ The paradox is that these relations are simultaneously both inter-subjective and solipsistic—inherently, inextricably, foundationally. As Hus-serl explains, “I experience the world . . . as an intersubjective world, actually there for everyone. . . . And yet each has his experiences,” irreducibly differ-ent from others’, varying according to the perceiver’s particular perspective.¹⁵ As Merleau-Ponty points out, “The social is already there when we come to know or judge it” (362) because the intersubjectivity of experience is primor-dially given with our perception of a common world. Human existence is characterized by a kind of primary intersubjectivity because we exist in a world

with other subjects whose different perspectives on the objects we have in common is a guarantee of their independence and completeness even if we only have these objects partially, in aspects, with sides and dimensions be-yond our horizons.¹⁶ And yet, Merleau-Ponty goes on, “there is . . . a solipsism rooted in living experience and quite insurmountable” (358) for the very rea-son that the ego can never have the self-experience of the alter ego without collapsing the difference between them. I am destined never to experience the presence of another person to him- or herself, and my self-for-others is also necessarily a mystery to me.

Husserl consequently asks: “[Are] these two primordial spheres not sepa-rated by an abyss I cannot actually cross, since crossing it would mean, after all, that I acquired an original . . . experience of someone else?” (121). Behind this question lurks a paradox, however, because, in Merleau-Ponty’s words,

“my experience must in some way present me with other people, since oth-erwise I should have no occasion to speak of solitude, and could not begin to pronounce other people inaccessible” (359). Solipsism is a problem only for an intersubjective self who already perceives the other as a coequal subject in a world they share.

These paradoxes are evident in some of the contradictions that afflict the-ory thethe-ory and simulation thethe-ory, contradictions that only seem like prob-lems until we recognize their roots in the paradox of the alter ego, at which point they become evidence of the enigmatic combination of intersubjectiv-ity and solipsism that characterizes social relations and must have correlates in the neurobiology of our social skills. There is a need for a theory of mind and mind-reading skills only because of the unsurpassable solipsism that makes it impossible for me to experience another’s self-presence. But the ac-cusation that this ability is secondary to a prior understanding of the other on which it builds is in turn evidence of our primary intersubjectivity, an origi-nal sense of the other’s commoorigi-nality with me, without which I would have no basis for theorizing about his or her inner states. Simulation theory assumes that we find in the alter ego an analogue of ourselves, but this is paradoxical and mysterious in ways its critics point out only because ego and alter ego are intrinsically, simultaneously, both similar and different. As Husserl observes:

“The other is a ‘mirroring’ of my own self and yet not a mirroring proper, an analogue of my own self and yet again not an analogue in the usual sense”

(94). How to capture this mysterious, paradoxical, and yet lived, ordinary, and everyday experience of the alterity of an ego who is both “like” and as

The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego 135 such “not-like” me (because “like” is not “same”)—that is the challenge for an adequate account of the relation of self and other.

Such an account must recognize that mirroring and analogizing are du-plicative acts—doublings of “me” and “not-me,” “like” and “not-like”—that human beings routinely, automatically, and unreflectively engage in as they negotiate their way in a paradoxically intersubjective and solipsistic world.

As Husserl explains, “Ego and alter ego are always and necessarily given in an original ‘pairing’ ” (112). This pairing of me and not-me makes mirroring and analogizing paradoxical processes of doubling—“das Gleich-setzen des Nicht-Gleichen,” to recall Nietzsche’s useful phrase, the setting equivalent of what is (as an equivalence) not identical.¹⁷ The capacity of human beings to engage in doubling of this kind is based on bodily, neuronal, and cortical functions that constitute the neurobiological foundation of our social skills.

Processes of doubling underlie theory theory, simulation theory, and the ac-tivity of mirror neurons.

Reading also is an experience of doubling. The paradox of reading, ac-cording to Georges Poulet’s classic description, is that I think the thoughts of another, but I think them as if they were my very own: “Because of the strange invasion of my person by the thoughts of another, I am a self who is granted the experience of thinking thoughts foreign to him. I am the subject of thoughts other than my own. My consciousness behaves as though it were the consciousness of another.”¹⁸ Reading is a peculiarly solipsistic and inter-subjective experience that simultaneously enacts and overcomes the paradox of the alter ego. As Iser points out, reading is on the one hand an experience of solitude and isolation in which one does not immediately encounter one’s interlocutor: “with reading there is no face-to-face situation.”¹⁹ And yet, on the other hand, this private experience allows us to feel and know from the inside the presence of others to themselves and to see the world through the eyes of others as we cannot in real life. The grand illusion of literary art, ac-cording to Henry James, is that it “makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life—that we have had a miraculous enlargement of ex-perience.”²⁰ This other world exists, however, only because we bring it to life through our own acts. As Jean-Paul Sartre observes, “The literary object has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity; Raskolnikov’s waiting is my waiting which I lend to him. . . . His hatred of the police magistrate who ques-tions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs.”²¹ If we identify with characters like Dostoevsky’s anguished

protago-nist in Crime and Punishment, this is not simply a transcendence of the bound-aries between self and other but a doubling of me and not-me, through which my acts paradoxically involve me intimately in another world that both is and is not my own and that I animate with my own powers of meaning creation.

Reading entails a paradoxical duplication of consciousness. As Iser ex-plains, “Every work we read carves a different boundary within our personal-ity”: “In thinking the thoughts of another, [the reader’s] own individuality temporarily recedes into the background, since it is supplanted by these alien thoughts, which now become the theme on which his [or her] attention is focused. As we read, there occurs an artificial division in our personality, because we take as a theme for ourselves something that we are not.”²² Our self does not disappear, since only by its exercising its powers does the other world emerge. Instead, according to Iser, reading produces a duplication of selves, an interplay of the “alien me,” whose thoughts I re-create and inhabit, and “the real, virtual ‘me,’ ” whose horizons are temporarily changed by the experience (hence the sense of “strangeness” of the “invasion” of our con-sciousness by the concon-sciousness of another that Poulet reports).

This doubling can take different forms, and have different consequences, with different literary works and different readers. It may make possible an immersion in another world whose illusion carries us away for a time from our customary sense of things, or it may confront us with alien ways of think-ing, feelthink-ing, and perceiving whose foreignness calls into question character-istics of our customary understanding of the world that we had perhaps not noticed until their boundaries were exposed by this juxtaposition. Reading can be such a variable experience with different texts and for different read-ers because it can enact the paradoxical doubling of self and other in an un-predictable variety of ways.

This makes reading an excellent experience through which to study the paradox of the alter ego. Asking about the brain’s capacity to read can provide insight into its social skills. The neurobiological explanations of our ability to understand others should make sense of the paradoxes of reading, and the paradoxes of reading are in turn a good test of the claims made by competing theories of the social brain. What does the experience of reading reveal about the neurobiology of intersubjectivity, and what does the brain’s capacity to

“double” self and other tell us about how we read?

A process of doubling, or pairing, is evident in the workings of mirror neu-rons. The initial experiments showed that about 20 percent of the neurons in

The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego 137

the motor cortex of the macaque monkey fired not only when the animal per-formed an action like grasping a piece of food but also when it observed the same action (see fig. 5.1).²³ Further experiments indicated that these neurons were responding not to the general shapes of motion but to particular, goal-directed actions. Some neurons were strictly congruent, responding only to a very specific action (twisting a raisin in one direction but not another). Other mirror neurons were broadly congruent, reacting with equal strength to ac-Figure 5.1. Visual and motor responses of a mirror neuron. Comparison of the elec- trical signals recorded from a mirror neuron when observing an action (A) and when performing the same action (B). Reproduced by permission from G. di Pellegrino et al., “Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study,” Experimental Brain Research 91 (1992): 178 (fig. 2).

tions within a range defining a particular motor category (grasping with the whole hand, for example, as well as with a precision grip). Some mirror neu-rons were multimodal, responding to sounds as well as to visual cues (hearing or seeing a peanut being broken). Further, the monkey’s mirror neurons only fired in response to actions within its motor repertoire, not, for example, to an action performed by a tool, although it reacted when a human or animal hand performed the act (macaque monkeys don’t use tools). Similarly, the monkey’s mirror neurons were indifferent to mimicked actions (macaques don’t pantomime) that they responded to when they were actually performed.

These findings led Rizzolatti to propose a theory of “action understanding,”

which posits a primary, intuitive relation between self and other: “mirror neu-rons allow our brain to match the movements we observe to the movements we ourselves can perform, and so to appreciate their meaning” (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia xii). This “direct-matching hypothesis,” as he calls it, claims that action understanding occurs “immediately on the basis of our motor com-petencies alone, without the need of any kind of reasoning” (xii): “an action is understood when its observation causes the motor system of the observer to ‘resonate.’ ”²⁴ Instead of actions being the object of inter pretive processes that indirectly construe their meaning, the “resonance” between observation and action provides an immediate connection between self and other. Not requiring a theory or a simulation, this resonance is bodily, unreflective, and automatic. It is the biological equivalent of primary intersubjectivity.²⁵ As the paradoxical phrase direct matching suggests, however, this is not an identity but a pairing (a “match” can only occur, after all, between two entities that aren’t the same). The difference between self and other is replicated—

only a subset of the monkey’s cortical motor neurons fire, which is not what would happen if it were acting—even as it is overcome. This difference is also evident in the very generality of the mirror neurons’ responsiveness. The distinction between strict congruence and broad congruence suggests a range of recognition rather than a simple identity of action and observation. That the resonance only happens with actions within the observer’s motor repertoire (and not with tools or pantomime for the macaque monkey) is further evi-dence of the self-other difference that the mirroring process can sometimes (but not always, and never completely) transcend. Mirror neurons create an immediate bond, then, that is evidence of primary intersubjectivity, even as the very process of mirroring and matching entails a doubling of ego and alter ego.

The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego 139

The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego 139

In document Europe’s American Dream? (página 23-26)