De-ontologizing the brain (from the fictional self to the social brain)
Résumé
Phenomena at the intersection of neuroscience and psychology such as phantom limb syndrome, much discussed in the wake of V.S. Ramachandran’s work, when considered in a philosophical light, might seem to imply the necessity of the first-person perspective, made popular in Anglophone philosophy by Thomas Nagel but stemming from the central insights of the phenomenological tradition (Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in particular). But it is possible to formulate a materialist response to this first-person challenge. For this response to be effective, it will have to take account of, indeed include, the theme of embodiment (as developed notably by Varela, Rosch and Thompson). However, in order to not to reinvest brain or body with the mysterious character that the materialist approach has stripped from the ‘first person’, the vision of the brain here must also be what Andy Clark has called an embedded vision, that is, locating brain not just in an embodied context but also in the social world, in the network of symbolic relations (what Lev Vygotsky and more recently Toni Negri have called the “social brain”). This is what I mean by “de-ontologizing the brain.”