Synthesis



My talk is divided into two parts.

In the first part I take into consideration the history of the mirror neurons discovery from the staff of neurologists led by the Parma team of Rizzolatti, Jacoboni, Gallese, etc. in the 90s (the official announcement of the discovery dates back to 1996) and its fundamental interpretations, making use of the book of G. Rizzolatti & C. Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain. How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, Oxford University Press, 2008, from the original one in Italian, by Raffaello Cortina Editor, Milan 2006. These fundamental interpretations are: 1) motor and cognitive processes are non separated but very tied because they are activated by some common groups of bimodal neurons which fire both when we act and observe an action (“neural embodied simulation”); 2) mirror neurons system would permit an immediate understanding of the intentions in the actions of other individuals (“affordance understanding”); 3) our imitative and communicative capacity through a gesture and verbal language would be the result of an evolutionary process in which mirror neurons system had and has a crucial role; 4) the immediate (non cognitive) understanding of the basic emotions of others (such as disgust, fear, happiness, etc.), already well observed by C. Darwin in animals, would arise from our mirror neurons system and would be the necessary prerequisite for that “empathic behaviour” which underlies much of our inter-relationships.

In the second part I try to clarify the theoretical concordance which I find between this discovery and a reductive theory of mind, and namely the supervenience reductive theory of mind claimed by Jaegwon Kim (1993, 1998, 2005).

Indeed, it seems to me that the way in which the so-called “mirror system” works is theoretically compatible with some crucial concepts and principles in the metaphysics of mind by Kim. Notably, they are: 1) the concept of reductive psychophysical supervenience, according to which a mental property is realized by a species-specific physical/neural property, making use of a functional model of reduction; 2) the pre-emption of a physical cause on a mental cause and the redundancy and unintelligibility of mental causation; 3) the principle of physical causal closure, according to which there are causes in a genuine sense only in the physical domain; 4) the multi-layered metaphysical model of the world, which distinguishes between ontological “levels” (micro/macro properties) and theoretical/conceptual “orders” (physical, mental, social, etc.).