Subjectivity and Being Somebody by Grant Gillett

Author:Grant Gillett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Neuroscience, Neuroethics, ethics, Human Nature, humanity, Personhood, metaphysics, neo-Aristotelian, reductionism, psychosurgery, neuroimplantation, cyborgs, self, multiple personality disorder, spirituality
ISBN: 9781845402853
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2011
Published: 2011-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Weiscrantz mentions neural plasticity and “indirect bodily signalling strategems”(e.g. facial expressions of approval and disapproval for lucky or misdirected choices in perceptuo-cognitive experiments) to account for this recovery but the physiological details are less important than the philosophical significance of the phenomenon. The patients as subjective beings found ways to reintegrate their fractured cognitive worlds and overcome internal disruptions in their own(ed) holistic conscious lives.

The fact that some of the split brain patients cheated on their informational tasks by using facial expressions of approval or disapproval of an “ignorant” hand is one of the “indirect body signalling stratagems” exploited to meet the demand to be somebody and it puts paid to the idea that the fragmentation of the system entails a fragmenting of the self (as some materialist philosophers and psychologists have averred). There is still a subject here who is using self-attribution and who regards him/herself as prone to certain errors. This is the only logical basis on which s/he could be motivated to overcome what s/he sees as internal discontinuities producing the errors that are occurring and it receives clear moral support from the rest of us.

Cartesian materialists ask the question “How does the brain re-integrate the cognitive world of the individual?” but this is the wrong question to ask - a human being overcomes the fracture in their brain. But cognitive neuroscientists continue to butt ther heads against this wall; “Surely even the powerful discursive forces driving reintegration need some way of doing it which is up to the informational requirements of the task!” And here the logical is a clue to the physiological (to slightly twist Wittgenstein’s words). The logical requirements of self and other ascription (as part of our human form of life) require a subjective body to meet the demands of the discursive world and to configure itself by the disciplines of narrative wholeness and perhaps it is in the (holistic) subjective body that its means of doing so can be found.

Getting it together: the subjective body with a split brain

It is plausible that, just as the body is the focus of the practices (or disciplines) which demand the unity of the subject, so it is the medium providing the means of neurocognitive reintegration. We now know that all thinking is accompanied by covert neuromuscular activity, in which the body “enacts” either the movements that would be made in the situation being thought about or a subvocal version of the relevant verbal representation. McGuigan (1997) and his team have provided persuasive evidence that cognitions involve “covert reactions”, or “components of neuromuscular circuits governed by cybernetic principles” and that “where the striated musculature is totally inactive cognitions are inactive”. The brain therefore has a massive somatic keyboard (or “screen”) upon which to play out its cognitions. Connections between the brain “above” and the body “below” are extensive, two-way (top-down and bottom-up), bilateral, and cybernetic (or looping). [16] Ordinarily the dominant traffic is between one half of the brain and the opposite side of the body despite the potential for ipsilateral information flow.

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