This is a must-see! As a great contrast to my previous post on a monkey eat monkey world, here is the other side: what makes us social. And what makes us social is that we learn from imitation (monkey see, monkey do), and that intersubjectivity might be the result of our projection of ourselves to our perception of others.
I have long puzzled over what exactly it is that makes human beings live vicariously through others. Why do so many beer-guzzling, fat, unathletic men get their sense of personal identity from some sports team to which they could never possibly belong? Why do so many people yell at the movie screen when something is about to happen, as if they could somehow change the outcome? Why do so many women become so emotionally invested in soap operas or romance novels when they know that what they are watching/reading is fictitious, and that no one is actually suffering or going through any kind of personal drama? Why do we love video games and porn so much?
My personal answer has always been: because we're monkeys, and not only do we look like them, we act like them too. And although I've been pretty sure this answer is correct, it's never seemed good enough since it doesn't actually explain the mechanism that would have evolved to produce these phenomena.
Actually, my real hypothesis was that there is some cognitive mechanism, which was adaptive in our ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). This mechanism would have been useful, since we were dealing with other actual beings. Modern technology, however, manages to fool this system by activating the same cognitive response with respect to two-dimensional characters on a screen. In other words, although on some abstract level we may realize that what we are watching is actually not real people, whatever mental module is being activated in our brain, below the level of conscious awareness, it gets activated because we never had the need to evolve a mechanism that would distinguish fiction from reality: back then, it was all reality. So, the mechanism is the same, but the environment has changed.
In any case, all my speculation, as correct as I believe it is, could not explain how the mechanism itself would work. But that mechanism seems to have finally been found: hello mirror neurons!
It should be noted that Darwin himself understood something of the relationship between action and feeling as a two-way street. For instance, if you force a person to imitate the muscular contractions of smiling, say, by putting a pencil across their teeth, that person is much more likely to find events funny than a person who is not so physically predisposed. That whole crappy cliche about a smile being able to make a difference turns out to be true.
I think it's also great how modern science repeatedly keeps confirming David Hume's various insights into human epistemology and phenomenology almost three hundred years after he wrote his classics. Empathy, it turns out, is just as strong a force as he thought it was.
Oh, the fascinating and awesome philosophical questions these findings raise!!!
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I don't know about everyone else, but I can control my mirror neurons--as long as I'm informed about the movie I choose. If I'm feeling a wee bit viscious, I indulge in the derivative pleasure of watching some villain get beaten to a bloody pulp. Oh, I feel the pain alright, or at least I know the villain is feeling it, but somehow it's delightful for me since the pain is 'deserved', and since 'villains' have generally caused 'us' pain by hurting those we feel, well, sympathetic toward. But that's just the movies. It's harder to think of circumstances where 'their pain' is 'my pleasure' in everyday life. Football is probably the first to come to mind, when one's team makes a ground-shaking tackle; martial arts tournaments definitely; and of course sado-masochisism, perhaps a more refined example. Witnessing pain in another is markedly different when you're the one causing it, rather than your favorite team or the phantom of poetic justice we anticipate. And the same element of agency applies to the various modes of gift-giving, affection, and good-fortune. Likewise, there is an inverse effect we experience if we resent someone's success--out of jealousy or moral conviction. It sickens me to see a fascist leader pop a champagne bottle open amid chortles of glee; the sincere joy I witness in those I resent does not cause me joy. I will never smile along with our current president's smile, unless someone humorous happens to be gouging him with insults. My mirror neurons reject Bush. Which brings me back to why I really posted this--to challenge the interpretation of these neuroscientific gems as but an extension of the mammalian nervous system. A simple one-to-one correspondence between another's sensation and one's own belies the fact that empathy is an experience which transcends mechanism in the first place. To treat mirror neurons as a simple device that 'plugs' our sensation into our community's sensation, thereby giving us the meaning of what we observe in that community, is to reverse the picture of what it means to be human in favor of a positive, 'objective' science. My neuronal activity has developed the way it has not only because of a biological determinism, but also due the meaning confronting me all my life, the relationships I've engaged with others since first being near them. I understand what it means to be in pain, physically, and can project that understanding onto others as they receive pleasure or pain. If the world didn't beckon us to understand it in this manner, I doubt mirror neurons would have ever evolved, let alone discovered. When I read that overlapping neuronal patterns are stimulated during both action and observation of the same action by another, my guess was that behavioralists would feel threatened by the spatio-temporal observation of empathy's viscerality. The mirror neuron is news not only because we're coming to understand the human body, but also how it interacts with observation itself, and in this regard it challenges the traditional objectification of the mind as mere body. Whereas expressions of empathy used to be seen as mere learned behavior, it's now given the status of 'undeniably reAl'. The behaviorists who not so long ago proclaimed consciousness as nothing but a illusory byproduct of learned interaction with our environment will need to reinvent such views in order to account for this stuff. And I think Hume would agree if he were alive... if he had had a chance to mirror my neurons.
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