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

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Hi Peter:
>> >     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?

I don't disagree with you on most of the above, but when you ask, "So where
is hunger?  In brain, or in mind?", I'd have to answer: in brains _and_
ensembles of social relations (and 'mind' is an unfortunate name with lots
of baggage to capture an aspect of both).

Yoshie