PETIT J.L à S. Gallagher                                                                               January 19th 2006

 

Dear Shaun,

            I really enjoyed your paper and I am glad to let you know that my own opinion about simulation theory (ST) is close to your critical appraisal of the new Jeannerod-Pacherie brand of it. Hereafter are the remarks (waiting forward for another PowerPoint, “Marguerite-de-Navarre” audience friendly version of them !) that I would like to make as your discussant, next Feb. 22.

 

1°) What seems not to be duely acknowledged in some quarters, is that no theory is authorized in changing phenomenology, nor even in legislating about the correct description of our lived experience in phenomenology. Far from distorting phenomenology in order to adapt it to any presupposed “explanation”, theory has to take phenomenology at face value and try to cope with it in an explanatory satisfactory way. So, that  the insertion of mediation (i.e. representation and inference) into the phenomenon of the direct perception of the other’s intention in their gestures and actions, can only be imputed to a misguided intellectualism of blind theoreticians. No argument can counter the evidence that towards myself, my intentions, plans, decisions, etc. I  do not have the same attitude that I could have towards a tool, or any material (or mental) device. Yet, that is precisely what ST partisans are assuming : the simulating subject would be using his own pratical reasoning scheme as a model, a mental machine of sorts, as if he could detach himself, as an observer, from himself, as an agent.

 

2°) ST partisans seem to be unaware of the fact that transfering personal predicates of personal agents onto subpersonal (and so, definitively impersonal) systems in the brain is a typical homuncularist move. So far as you please, mirror neurons can “resonate” – or “echoe” or “map” or suchlike technical jargon, which usage is up to the theoretician – with other systems in the same or even in other brains. But, they cannot possibly “do as if”. [or do this “as if” something were the case]. Because one cannot attribute to brain systems the faculty of conceiving or recognizing intentions, nor of “simulating” in the non metaphorical sense of entertaining an intentionally contrary to the  factual mode of representation, without  portraying these systems  as little personal agents inside the brain. Neuroscientists (not to say philosophers) would be wise to meditate on Leibniz’  timely [or timeless ? – making a pun] good advice  : “Beware of the temptation of explaining why clocks “say the time” by postulating a time-saying faculty in the cogwheels in order for them to manoeuver the hands and put them at the right place on the face !”

 

3°) Contrary to what ST proponents seem to believe, the interpretation of the function of mirror neurons (or resonant systems) in ST terms is not the only possible one. In fact, ST is but one special line of interpreting these newly discovered, intriguing brain circuits – and a line that is dangerously exposed to overstatement and inflationary speculation. It  amounts to an attempt  to undermine a possible challenge to the standard, representational and computational model of cognition  by infiltrating into the confusing notion of “simulation” the solipsistic conception of the human mind, as a representing and computing machine disproved of body nor any necessary interaction with an environment or with other minds.

 

4°) In fact ( in contrast to the present day cognitive science litterature, which is under the sway of the aforementioned paradigm), another interpretation is conceivable. The new line is tentatively  although not in a very illuminating guise refered to under the title of “enaction”. To put it straight, we should be more radical than many among its proponents. We have to conceive brain function departing from action and from its very inception in intention, rather than from the reception of external signals at the periphery of body. It is not impossible that Berthoz’ “emulation” concept (as an alternative to simulation) points in such a direction : at least that is my personal guess. The toppling of the traditional hierarchy that used to subordinate action (prejudiced as motor limb movement) to a passive, sensory receptivity of an external information would enable neuroscience to naturalize Husserl’s intuitions. Especially the intuitions he expressed in his late theory of transcendantal, subjective and intersubjective constitution : the organism as an agent constitutes conjointly with others the common ground of their interaction and their common objects of interest and goals (and does not received them already preconstituted); so, that there is no mystery in the fact that it directly perceives actions and even intentions in a world that is above all life-world, i.e. a world of its own subjective, and intersubjective Praxis, not of an objective, absolute Theoria.