How did this start? I honestly can't remember now. Something about structuralism and Piaget? Oh, yeah Sokal vs. Pomo
Let me put some personal background in here. I worked for about three years with a biophysicist in a plant cell physiology lab. The lab concentrated on imaging techniques in vivo (live cells) monitoring various metabolic processes involving calcium. The project I was on (as a lowly tech/comp data, library goffer/reader/writer slob) was investigating gravitropic responses at the cellular level (as opposed to molecular or genetic levels).
So, the point. We were always looking for some hint of structure, some process, some location, some physiological feature that would reveal how the plant roots mount a response to a change of position. If you move a plant into a horizontal position, both the roots and stem will respond to 'right' themselves. How do they do this? The deeper you go into this response the more difficult, complex, mysterious, and intractable it becomes, i.e. we failed.
So, my argument was that there was no structure, no localized organelle, no special gravity sensing system. I mean if you can't find something, maybe it isn't there! Anyway, we had great fun arguing these problems, following biology into philosophical and metaphysical levels on the nature of knowledge, science, our conception of life, evolution, and so forth--all at government expense! To no avail. No result, no grant, no job.
In the process of these discussions I was reminded of my father-in-law, a botanist (old school, evolution and field taxonomy) who eventually focused on the co-evolution of the chemistry of nectar and the nutritional needs of pollinators. This work amounted to showing a mutual reciprocity between flowers and insects, in which the flowers evolve to feed its pollinator. The proof was that related plant species with different pollinators had a differing nectar chemistry. The core piece in this puzzle was the kinds of fats and proteins that different insects need and the fact that certain flowers they pollinate, produce exactly those kinds of fats and proteins in addition to the more well known sugars.
I decided that this work in nectars/pollinators amounted to a dialectical process and provided at least in my mind a general dynamic model or at least a strong hint for just about anything that could not be reduced to a simple physiological structure, metabolic pathway, or specific gene locus. The essential trick is to define the partners in this reciprocal relationship, in this dialectic. The difference between a cause-effect relation and a dialectical relation is that the former is unidirectional and the latter is bidirectional.
Okay, back to gravitropism. Locating a sense organ, in some part of a specialized cell type in the root tip is what we looked for and didn't find. So, what is the alternative? That there is no need for such an organ, since the plant root can respond to touch or any sort of external force through differential growth rates keyed to releaving or minimizing the internal stresses on the effected cells. Since gravity provides a constant directed force, all that is required is a generalized dynamic response system without any special structure. The problem with this argument is it is untestable, i.e. you can't show what isn't there. That is, it may not be a gravitropic response at all, but merely a generalized and adaptable growth-response system.
Now, it seems to me that the various problems with locating specific organs, even virtual ones in the brain and identifying these with language or symbolic-linguistic functions maybe similar to our inability to find the gravitropic sense organ. That is the general comprehension of the two problems seems similar.
Well, that is part of my motivation to discover more complexity in language and social structure and less in our brains. It is obvious that social context, symbolic activity and human development, including its neurophysiology all co-evolved together--not as mere cause-effect, but as a dialectic. It isn't just a matter of a capacity for language, but rather a requirement that such a symbolic system is actively present as a psycho-social gestalt in order to reproduce the nescient human mind. Let me add, that I don't think of this engaged reciprocity as mere learning, but more akin to a forming or formatting process.
There are some implications to this idea of transferring attention to a reciprocal relationship rather than the two localized objects or poles. One of those is a kind of dissolution or de-emphasis of the individual mind. The way to restore at least a similitude of individual identity is to recall that the dynamic formation of the mind through language/society is always a unique sequence of events, a history. So that this history, this contingency of events provides the required individuality. This idea of history has the advantage of eliminating some hidden essence or soul which is almost always concieved in terms of an 'individuality'.
Chuck Grimes
Paul Rosenberg must be howling, since he has heard much of this before on another list. How are you doing Paul?