Brain research and the social self in a technological culture

Abstract

The paper does not claim to be a novel contribution to any field. It simply opposes claims by philosophers of consciousness--I take Daniel Dennett as an example (though no more than that) that non-conscious robot-like neurons (Dennett's phrase) can, taken together, add up to an explanation of (even the illusion of) consciousness. To this I oppose G. H. Mead's so-called social behaviorism. My argument, such as it is, proceeds in well-defined stages: 1. I first introduce the history of anti-reductionism among philosophers, including those of the analytical persuasion, especially among North American philosophers; 2. the "new archaeology" of hominid prehistory is then introduced to show how some eminent archeologists oppose the reductionist view that large brains--deduced from finds of larger and larger skulls--constitute the best explanation we have for the advent of Homo sapiens; 3. the heart of my paper is then a reference to--not a proper summary of--Terence Deacon's masterful book, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain--where the idea of co-evolution of human communication and brain development (along with other physiological traits such as a proper voice box) is put forward as a better--as co-evolutionary--explanation of human symbolic behavior than the standard ones (including Dennett's); 4. I then make equally brief summaries of confirming evidence of such co-evolution; 5. this is followed by similar summaries of the alleged science of historical linguistics--none of it explaining the beginning, but only the development of human languages in non-reductionist terms; 6. I then introduce Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality to make a central claim: that even reductionist science--whether genetic reductionism or brain-studies-based reductionism--is and must be socially constructed; and 7. I conclude with a preference for a Meadian (similar to a Deweyan) social responsibility activism. One note relative to item number 1: I make no claim here to discuss Merleau-Ponty or any other well-known anti-reductionist; this is in answer to one referee of the paper.