"Mr P.A. Van Heusden" wrote:
> We seem to be talking past each other today.
Probably. Let me note that as far as I can tell, rememberinf past threads on this and other lists, any political differences between you and me are very definitely of the "contradictions among the people" sort. This post does bring us a bit closer on this thread.
> 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.
Provisionally, Yes. Provisionally because there may be some slippage in the sense of "real" in the third proposition.
> 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?
You individualize social relations here by making your example one of *direct* relations, while under capitalism our most important social relations are indirect and invisible. Also I would call your "*affect* [emphasis added] . . . the way I behave now" itself a rather mechanical conception of causality. We are not *affected* by our relations: we *are* (as humans and not mere physiologies) our relations. (Perhaps Ollman would call these "internal relations," but I'm not familiar enough with his work to cite him explicitly.)
> 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
Some moments are more momentary than other moments I suppose. The brain seems to have been pretty unchanged (physiologically) over the last 100,000 years or so. Anything we might say about human brains now would be equally applicable to human brains 100,000 years ago. *Some* of the things we can say about snail brains and human brains are identical (not just similar) and will apply to all brains (not just human brains). The neurotransmitter serotonin triggers some quite similar (not identical) activities and responses in dogs and humans.
Some very important things we can say about social relations go back at least 10,000 years or so (to the earliest divisions of mental and manual labor brought about by neolithic and bronze age societies). (We may or may not be able to define a moment in social relations that goes back 100,000 or 2 million years -- I have only a very amateurish knowledge of anthropology.)
A very important complex of social relations go back not much further (in any developed form) than 4 or 5 hundred years -- those which might be very abstractly defined as a shift of reality from the past to the future. (A long, torturous and often most acriminous debate on this has occupied Pen-L for several weeks now.)
>
> (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.
I agree that this is a very good way to describe what we mean by "The Mind." But I don't think it makes sense to speak of the "laws of motion" of that moment. I would say that *anything* that may be said about that moment when you read this sentence in comparison to the moment in which I wrote it would have to be expressed wholly in political (historical, social) and/or neurological terms. Any proposition not so expressable would be unique not only to you or to me but to that *very* moment in your life or in mine. There is nothing systematic (I prefer "systematic" to "scientific": it avoids metaphysical brawling) -- nothing systematic that can be said about those moments in abstraction from history and neurology.
Carrol