Taste Buds & Biology (was Re: Littleton: it's Adorno's fault)

[Mr P.A. Van Heusden]

On Sat, 2 Oct 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> 
> >     This makes me curious about a general question, though.  Are theories
> >     of mind always suspect if they lack an historical element?
> 
> How about the biology of the brain, as Carrol argued, instead of theories
> of the mind?:
> >This is overtly and crudely religious. The *brain* is ahistorical (at
> >least in the relative short run of the last 100,000 years) The mind
> >doesn't "have" a history, it *is* its history. It is complex of social
> >relations grounded in the physical structure of the brain.
> 
> And for the purpose of scientific inquiry into the brain, I think it best
> to dispense with psychoanalysis, especially since psychoanalysis is
> committed to the two-sex, two-gender model (however you deconstruct it or
> nominalize it).

Ok, but we're very far from getting anywhere with the 'scientific inquiry
into the brain', at least in the sense of neuroscience. And this happens
to be one of the fields where the 'scientific method' of Cartesian
reductionism seems to get really bogged down.

And I'm sorry, but Carrol's 'brain vs. mind' dichotomy just doesn't cut it
for me - it sounds mechanical.

I know, for instance, that 'simple' phenomena like hunger are a) rooted in
biological phenomena like sugar levels (and I know that if I eat a diet
that regulates sugar, this regulates hunger) and b) rooted in 'mind' at
least to the extent that my mental state (concerns, expectations, etc)
regulates whether I feel hungry or not and c) affect my state of mind in
that even when a describable feeling of hunger is absent, my mood alters
depending on my level of nourishment. 

So where is hunger? In brain, or in mind? When I look at some non-food
object, and my mind makes a link with food, what is going on in my mind -
what associations, what links between pleasures and sources of pleasure
are going on?

Freud might have got it all wrong (I don't know enough about Freud to say,
but what I have read isn't 100% encouraging), but a retreat to the
biological is not a solution. Or should we retreat from economics because
Ricardo wrapped up his expectations in his solutions?

And, to attack another angle on this, Skinnerian 'behaviorology' smacks of
systems theory to me - an attempt to codify the inputs and the outputs,
and the relations between the two, with little respect for that which
remains absent, that which is outside your system.

The dichotomy 'historical vs. ahistorical' in this debate also troubles
me. People are neither ahistorical clones of mythical types, nor are they
constantly erased by history. Maybe a psychology which understands us in
this sense doesn't exist - but surely that is an argument for the
development of such a subject-science?

Peter
--
Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available
Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the 
chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx 

           NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.