"Sophisticated knowledge" (Was: Mirror neurons at autopsy)

On 19 Dec 2012, at 07:19, Tony Balazs <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 18 Dec 2012, at 22:53, David Deutsch <david.deutsch-LR/[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On 18 Dec 2012, at 22:01, Alan Forrester  wrote:

[...]

>>> Do you think mirror neurons are a good explanation and if so why?
>> 
>> If you mean mirror neurons defined as having the above two attributes, then yes. There must be a system of neurons performing such translations in any non-human animals that are capable of imitation, or having memes, or certain other abilities. That it because (1) imitating another animal's behaviour with one's own behaviour requires sophisticated knowledge over and above that required to interpret sense data or control limbs; and (2) in non-humans, this knowledge cannot come from creativity and hence (3) it must be encoded in their genes. Moreover it is knowledge that must (4) be embodied in some information-processing system in the brain that translates from sensory to motor signals. Information processing with that degree of sophistication can only (5) be performed by neurons (and no
 t, e.g. chemicals). 
>> 
>> Hence there must be neurons performing the requisite translations and, moreover, the patterns of connections that constitute the program to do this must be genetically determined.
>> 
>> Denying any one of the above five steps leading to that conclusion would require a major overturning of other explanations that I currently consider exceedingly good (hard to vary) and hence they are themselves hard to vary and hence so is the conclusion that such neurons exist.
>> 
>> None of that needed new experiments. It should have been predicted from philosophy plus common sense only. But it wasn't. (Perhaps because not all of those five ingredients are generally deemed to be true, let alone hard to vary.) However, there are other details that could not have been predicted in that way. The main feature that only the experiments make hard to vary is that this system actually uses information from the motor-control system itself. In other words, a priori, there could have been a translation algorithm instantiated in neurons that only fire when a translation is actually being performed. But now we know that that is not how evolution did it. (Well, I say we know this -- but that explanation is not nearly as solid as the ones above. It could be that mirror neurons do
  something unrelated that no one has guessed yet, and that the actual translation system has yet to be discovered. But as far as I know, mirror neurons have so far been detected only in animals that do have imitation abilities. If they were ever discovered in an animal that doesn't, that would be a major problem for the theory that their function is to do this translation; also, it would make their actual function a mystery.
>> 
>> -- David Deutsch
>> 
> Babies can imitate once they're a few months old.  So can the young, very profoundly affected autistic children I work with.  In what sense do these individuals have "sophisticated knowledge over and above that required to interpret sense data or control limbs"?

In Popper's philosophy (which I follow), the term 'knowledge' is used both differently and more broadly than in other philosophies and everyday usage. That is because of Popper's devastating critique of the traditional conception of knowledge as 'justified, true belief'. In particular, Popper's theory does not require knowledge to have a knowing subject (since it is not a species of 'belief'), and hence it makes sense to speak, as I did, of knowledge in genes.

-- David Deutsch










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