tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post5562397370133365729..comments2024-03-23T04:01:39.348-04:00Comments on Understanding Society: The moral sentimentsDan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-75755123523981229062010-03-22T00:08:57.235-04:002010-03-22T00:08:57.235-04:00Hi-
I would propose mirror neurons as a probably ...Hi-<br /><br />I would propose mirror neurons as a probably mechanism for how this subject is embedded in the central nervous system. I would point to http://www2.unipr.it/~gallese/Gallese%202001.pdf in particular, as an exposition of the idea.<br /><br />Thanks for posting. This is one of the more challenging blogs I read intellectually, and I appreciate it.Alatohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17679209474557120068noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-4756398648658878902010-03-14T08:37:41.190-04:002010-03-14T08:37:41.190-04:00I think the issue for evolutionary explanation is ...I think the issue for evolutionary explanation is often wrongly posed. As Adam Smith noted, we are extraordinarily social ("altrustic" in evolutionary terms). The question is not whether we are here, but how did we get here. Natural selection is a process, not a rule - it makes some places hard to reach, and others easier. Our very rarity as an over-brained, talking, hyper-social animal suggests ours was a hard place to reach. yet here we are nonetheless.<br /><br />Renfrew - and many others - ignore the evidence from Australia when looking at the emergence of modern traits. People came here at least 50,000 years ago, with art, language and all the rest. Since they left Africa at least 75,000 years ago, and it's hard to see how a genetic change could propagate backwards from Tasmania to South Africa in the few tens of thousands of years before some populations were isolated by sea rise, it follows that we left Africa with all the paraphernalia of the modern mind. Bits of archelogical evidence are now turning up to confirm this (eg recent finds of decorated ostrich shells in South Africa). But it prety much had to be the case. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, my history teachers used to say.Peter Thttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13289172253358199028noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-34039856921613563222010-03-13T08:03:03.062-05:002010-03-13T08:03:03.062-05:00In my pile of things to reread (because I haven...In my pile of things to reread (because I haven't really absorbed them) is a John Searle essay - Social ontology: some basic principles and Colin Renfrew's Prehistory - Making of the Human Mind.<br /><br />While reading this post I remembered that Searle(and his earlier book it is an appraisal of - The construction of social reality) relies very much on the idea that language or at least a system of symbols is a pre-requisite for institutions with deontological power i.e. morality.<br /><br />Renfrew start from looking at archaeological and other fossil data posits what he calls the sentient paradox - our genetics doesn't seem to have changed significantly from carbon dating records for some 60 000 years while the archaeological record shows no signs of human culture (or sentience or things to act as shared symbols as in language) before 40 000 years ago or even less so he raises the question if that is the case what is it that we think of as being our psychology? What was happening to our genetics which gave it propensities to have deontological symbolic systems of social understanding long before it seems to have made any use of them?<br /><br />This presumably indicates that there is another line of reasoning here even in a post Darwinian context - genes are not for something, or at least not necessarily so, when they are they usually have accidental effects, of which our linguistic/symbolic capacities including deontological social behaviour might be an example. I think this line is developed by Stephen J Gould, at least the accidental gene thing. <br /><br />So here there is a line of research which asks, if the sentient paradox is placed beyond question (I have no idea if it is or not) what causes the expression of these latent capacities? What Renfrew suggests (this is going on hazy memory) is that it arises from the development of technology. This is socially mediated and acts as a symbolic basis for the development of ever greater possibilities for human action, greater abstraction etc, and by extension (using Searle's idea) morality as a result.Stevennoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-47328224928933861302010-03-12T21:53:52.339-05:002010-03-12T21:53:52.339-05:00Really nice review of a fascinating and important ...Really nice review of a fascinating and important area of research. Thanks Dan!Jason S.noreply@blogger.com