>
>
> "Mr P.A. Van Heusden" wrote:
>
> > And I'm sorry, but Carrol's 'brain vs. mind' dichotomy just doesn't cut it
> > for me - it sounds mechanical.
>
> If you check again you will see I didn't set up that dichotomy. I did deny
> that there could be an independent science of psychology -- independent
> of *either* politics or neuroscience. Try it from the other end. Tell me
> what "The Mind" is. I know social relations exist -- wherever and
> whenever we (either the individual or the species) find ourselves we
> are always already enmeshed in a web of social relations. I know the
> brain exists. Observations on the brain have applicabiltiy to all brains.
> Observations on social relations have applicability to all who are
> constituted by those social relations. Observations on psychology
> don't bear on anything. They are merely data to be explained.
> "The Mind" is just another name for the soul of Christianity or the
> abstract individual of bourgeois society.
We seem to be talking past each other today.
I don't seem to figure in your description of me, if I can put it that way. You say "observations on psychology don't bear on anything. They are merely data to be explained."
That sounds to me like you're saying:
1) The physiology of the brain is real.
2) Social relations are real.
3) The mind isn't real.
Which sounds like a mechanical dichotomy between the biological and the social which leaves no space for the psychological. So where do 'mental phenomena' fit? Why does a relationship which I had with my father 10 years ago still affect (in ways which I can dimly perceive) the way I behave now?
To put it another way - where are social relations when I'm alone? You could say they are in the brain - the nightmare of history encoded as states of neuro-physiology. But that describes exactly nothing.
I would instead argue that there is a 'moment' in the relation between the biological and the social (to use maybe awkward terms) which I can usefully label 'the mind', since it seems to have properties of its own (just as 'organism' is not merely chemistry, nor merely environment). A study of that moment, of its properties and its laws of motion, is, I think, a useful thing for people dealing in politics.
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.