Re: Clarification about mirror neurons

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 9:27 PM, Alan Forrester
<alanmichaelforrester-gM/[email protected]> wrote:
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> On 2 Jan 2013, at 21:17, David Deutsch david.deutsch-LR/[email protected]> wrote:
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> >> In animals, the neurons used to do imitation may not change much since
> >> the knowledge in the animal's brain is coded for by genes and the animal
> >> creates no new knowledge. So then looking for neurons that go off when an
> >> animal does something and when it recognises another animal doing the same
> >> thing, mirror neurons, may provide a way of testing ideas about mirror
> >> algorithms. Having a term for that idea makes some sense and that seems to
> >> be David's position in BoI.
> >
> > One reason I think it's vital to take that position is that the
> > commonsense theory of how animals, especially apes, can imitate complex
> > actions is that they do it by understanding what the actions are for -- i.e.
> > the same way that humans do it. Indeed, that misconception was one of the
> > motivations for biologists to search for mirror neurons in the first place.
> >
> > It is an attractive misconception because copying even a simple action
> > does indeed require a large amount of knowledge to be present in the copying
> > animal. So the traditional misconception that knowledge requires a knowing
> > subject then leads directly to the conclusion that an ape must be a knowing
> > subject.
> >
> > To make the arguments in BoI about what humans are and how they evolved,
> > one must therefore refute those misconceptions. One thing I referred to for
> > that purpose was the excellent research of Richard Byrne, which showed that
> > apes have no idea of the purpose of their complex meme-encoded actions,
> > which are not directly copied but are composed of several copied actions put
> > together in coordinated ways. And he showed how those composite actions are
> > learned. But that learning process requires apes to be able to recognise and
> > copy the individual actions, and Byrne's research does not tell us how they
> > do that because it happens inside the ape's brain. So it is vital to explain
> > how that is possible.
> >
> > The answer, in short, is that the necessary knowledge is encoded in the
> > ape's genes, and implemented in a special-purpose computational system in
> > its brain, which translates from sensory to motor signals. But only a
> > particular class of actions, fixed once and for all in the animal's genome,
> > can be copied using that system.
> >
> > Would it not have been perverse, given that it was essential to argue
> > that such a system must exist in the brains of apes, for BoI not to mention
> > that a plausible candidate for that system has recently been discovered? Or
> > not to call that system by its conventional and perfectly reasonable name,
> > namely mirror neurons?
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> Yes. It is important to explain how animals can imitate without doing
> human level stuff and mirror neurons may help solve that problem.
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> Some people might be concerned that the mirror neuron idea might be used
> as a scientistic excuse for coercive policies. A coercive person might say
> that an autistic child has faulty mirror neurons and to fix that we have to
> force him to take medication or follow a routine or whatever. However, this
> problem only makes it more urgent the task of explaining mirror neurons
> properly, rather than abandoning an idea with some good features to coercive
> quacks.
>
> Alan
>
What about if quacks say a specialized region for language is faulty?
These are acknowledged in BoI

[reposting due to earlier format problems]