Ramachandran said that mirror neurons are the basis of society. This might be considered stretching the data. But let’s! (It's fun!)
So, why? We don’t really know the answer to that question (see review of Christakis & Fowler book - really worth reading).
What if neuroscience showed us a way? What if mirror neurons – or more accurately, a neurological system that both could identify others’ goals and made us imitate them when we identify with that person whether we are aware of it and whether we like it or not – could explain it?
The issue with the mirror neuron hypothesis is that as far as I understand it, I would have to see you eat or smoke in order to be able to internalize that goal. But according to this research, that does not seem to be necessary.
There has got to be a mechanism though. We just don’t know what it is yet. And without speculation, we never will!
Please tell me- how confident can we be that there is causation here? What if my nature is to smoke and be obese, and I have these obese smoking friends, and if you take these friends away from me, I still smoke and remain obese?
ReplyDeleteI love your comment, because indeed, how can we be sure of causation? In fact, I don't think that we ever can be sure of causation (for someone who has said almost exactly what I think see http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/06/04/knowledge-of-causation/). However, we can say that things when they change, seem to change according to these probabilistic rules, ie. I am more likely to start smoking if my friends do and I am more likely to quit smoking if my friends do. Doesn't actually require an assumption of causation, but I think still tells us something important about the nature of change.
ReplyDeleteConvention tells us that if we have a change, that follows a certain time course, that has an identifyable agent, that follows a dose-response relationship, etc., we can claim causation. And we may have many of those things here. That being said, I think that philosophically, it is hard to make such an argument given the number of unknown variables operating.