Aristotelian Neuroscience
Aristotelian Neuroscience
Aristotelian Neuroscience
Action-Oriented View of Human Nature and Brain
(Aristotle, Marx, and Michael Anderson)
Farid Saberi
Think about virtue ethics. For Aristotle, virtue is a trained and established psychological disposition to react to certain situations of life, based on a true and deep understanding of the situation and also in a way that leads to the flourishment and well-being of you and those around you. When one is being brave (not reckless or scared) he is engaging in a meaningful action in a specific cultural context. This is an ethical action because it comes from a virtuous person engaged in the long-term goal of life. It is totally absurd to think about ethical actions (embedded in cultural contexts and socially shaped ideas of goals in life) as if these actions are merely a performance and externalization of mental competence. One can think of this mental competence as a Cartesian-Kantian set of general principles that do or should apply to moral scenarios or as an evolved mental module that computes based on moral grammar (as moral Chomskyans or High Church evolutionary psychology think about it). It does not matter, in both cases, moral action as externalization of mental rules is the most insane and absurd way of thinking about morality.
Let me unpack that. Concepts embedded in our cultural atmosphere, our understanding of reality, our embodied actions, and our psychological dispositions are all sidelined to construct this weird notion of mental module or application of general rules. This Cartesian view builds a castle in the human brain and makes performance, culturally embedded behaviors, psychological disposition, and long-term habits a negligible detail. This is insanity.
Ask Aristotle, he would not even think of ethics as something mainly concerned with general rules or mental activity. For him, ethics and virtues cannot even be conceptualized without behavior and behavior engaged with the real world.
Serious scientific theories of the evolution of brains and evolutionary neurosciences emphasize that the "brain evolved to guide action" (Micheal Anderson 2017). That is mental activities are not the result of the activation of mental modules or computing mechanisms implemented in a network of co-activated brain areas. In contrast, animal and human brains are a set of transient neural assemblies that are shaped for specific behavioral tasks and can be reshaped and reformed based on plastic brain development. The brain is not computing, it is responding to stimuli, and it is doing sensory-motor reflexes. Now, in complex brains like the human brain, we have higher cognitive capacities (like mathematics) that are reused of the lower action-oriented brain activities. As Anderson has argued in his After Phrenology (2014), this does not make these higher capacities computational mechanisms or mental modules. This only makes them what I call "extended reflexes." Namely, they are task-sensitive neural assemblies responding to stimuli through linguistic and conceptual practices. Language as action and performance. Our brains have not evolved to write novels and compute numbers. They have evolved to coordinate behavior in an environment.
Now, when we are writing novels and computing big numbers we are showing the effects of our bio-cultural evolution. Our bio-cultural evolution has made our brains very sensitive to certain experiential exposure and learning during development. Our bio-cultural evolution has shaped us to rely on cultural learning for so many things. There are general and universal constraints that make human cultures similar. After all, one species with the same genetic composition on the same planet and with the same ecological factors for survival should in principle have cultures with universal and similar features. Now, we are not born with a human nature. We are born with a specialized capacity to learn certain cultural inputs. We form our human nature in the course of our learning. It is just a good fortune that all human cultures share a concept of empathy and justice. It seems to me (and here I am just guessing) that human language is the secret bridge between lower and higher brain activities.
This action-oriented view of human nature is evident in Aristotle's virtue ethics (Maybe not as much in his views intellectual part of the human soul in his metaphysics and psychology). It is well-emphasized in Marx's practice-oriented view of human nature and his materialist view of human cultures, their change, and human history. Finally, we can find strong neuroscientific evidence to support this action-oriented view of human nature and the brain in the theory of neural reuse as developed by neuroscientists like Mike Anderson.
I can think of a couple of reasons for dropping this healthy and meaningful paradigm (or heuristic) of thinking about human nature, the brain, and evolution and replacing it with the Cartesian view of sidelining action-performance in favor of an inflated notion of the mental life.
1- Probably the establishment of religious doctrines after the fall of Ancient Greece and the rise of neo-Platonist philosophies (re-interpreting Aristotle in idealist ways) shaped the intellectual tradition for the longest time. The concepts of soul, spirit, and afterlife deeply distorted the Aristotelian ways of thinking about human action, virtue, and psychology. We just ended up inflating a notion of human life in which our ultimate reality lies in our mind and the behaviors are negligible details. These deeply rooted and culturally inherited ideas shape the given common sense and socially conditioned institutions. This makes the action-oriented view of human nature somehow counter-intuitive.
2- the division between mental and manual labor and disregard for the latter both in antiquity and also in capitalist societies could have shaped our folk understanding of human behavior and its relation to the human brain.
3-Cartesian revolution with a mechanistic view human body inflating the human mind and establishing mind-body duality shaped the philosophical common sense of philosophers and psychologists for years (this influence became much more widespread with a Kantian view of mechanism, of human free will and mind-body dualism).
4- Bourgeoise or capitalist society shapes property relationships in which individuals are treated as atomized units rewarded and held responsible through economic and legal institutions. In this socially shaped view of individuality, your virtues, habits, and psychological dispositions do not matter anymore. The deontological responsibilities are what matters. The concept of virtue is eradicated as much as the concept of the naturalistic self shaped by nature and environment. The legal construct of self is supposed to be rational and held accountable in a way that capitalist societies and organizations need individuals to act.
Finally, our moral actions and judgments are not mental and modular. Rather, they are culturally shaped behaviors in the space of coordinative structures of agents (animals) and environment. Moral rules or laws are not the best way to capture human life. Primarily, moral laws or instincts do not exist, virtuous humans and their behavior, habits, and personalities exist. This way of looking at humans and their behavior (especially their moral behavior) now is counterintuitive but it is almost a liberating way of looking at human behavior and human life. Not that many people, throughout human history, have had the chance to enjoy this liberating way of looking at human life, brain, and nature. Among these "not many," one could probably include Aristotle and Marx and people like my supervisor (Mike Anderson). It is just a treat to be among these not many. To experience this Gestalt shift. To have this counter-intuitive understanding. Enjoy the scene.
This action-oriented view of human nature is evident in Aristotle's virtue ethics (Maybe not as much in his views intellectual part of the human soul in his metaphysics and psychology). It is well-emphasized in Marx's practice-oriented view of human nature and his materialist view of human cultures, their change, and human history. Finally, we can find strong neuroscientific evidence to support this action-oriented view of human nature and the brain in the theory of neural reuse as developed by neuroscientists like Mike Anderson.
I can think of a couple of reasons for dropping this healthy and meaningful paradigm (or heuristic) of thinking about human nature, the brain, and evolution and replacing it with the Cartesian view of sidelining action-performance in favor of an inflated notion of the mental life.
1- Probably the establishment of religious doctrines after the fall of Ancient Greece and the rise of neo-Platonist philosophies (re-interpreting Aristotle in idealist ways) shaped the intellectual tradition for the longest time. The concepts of soul, spirit, and afterlife deeply distorted the Aristotelian ways of thinking about human action, virtue, and psychology. We just ended up inflating a notion of human life in which our ultimate reality lies in our mind and the behaviors are negligible details. These deeply rooted and culturally inherited ideas shape the given common sense and socially conditioned institutions. This makes the action-oriented view of human nature somehow counter-intuitive.
2- the division between mental and manual labor and disregard for the latter both in antiquity and also in capitalist societies could have shaped our folk understanding of human behavior and its relation to the human brain.
3-Cartesian revolution with a mechanistic view human body inflating the human mind and establishing mind-body duality shaped the philosophical common sense of philosophers and psychologists for years (this influence became much more widespread with a Kantian view of mechanism, of human free will and mind-body dualism).
4- Bourgeoise or capitalist society shapes property relationships in which individuals are treated as atomized units rewarded and held responsible through economic and legal institutions. In this socially shaped view of individuality, your virtues, habits, and psychological dispositions do not matter anymore. The deontological responsibilities are what matters. The concept of virtue is eradicated as much as the concept of the naturalistic self shaped by nature and environment. The legal construct of self is supposed to be rational and held accountable in a way that capitalist societies and organizations need individuals to act.
Finally, our moral actions and judgments are not mental and modular. Rather, they are culturally shaped behaviors in the space of coordinative structures of agents (animals) and environment. Moral rules or laws are not the best way to capture human life. Primarily, moral laws or instincts do not exist, virtuous humans and their behavior, habits, and personalities exist. This way of looking at humans and their behavior (especially their moral behavior) now is counterintuitive but it is almost a liberating way of looking at human behavior and human life. Not that many people, throughout human history, have had the chance to enjoy this liberating way of looking at human life, brain, and nature. Among these "not many," one could probably include Aristotle and Marx and people like my supervisor (Mike Anderson). It is just a treat to be among these not many. To experience this Gestalt shift. To have this counter-intuitive understanding. Enjoy the scene.
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