FROM NEURONS TO A SOCIAL MIND. A DARWINIAN POINT OF VIEW OF THE "MIRROR NEURON SYSTEM"

The integration of neuroscience and philosophy is essential to understanding the complex phenomena of the mind, consciousness, a moral sense, empathy and social cognition. Even if the results of neuroscience have been largely analyzed from a Darwinian perspective, so far the Mirror Neuron System has been interpreted only from a phenomenological point of view. The key principles of the mirror system, when compared with the key principles of Husserl’s phenomenology, are indeed incompatible with phenomenology. From the very beginning, the latter has been critical of any form of naturalism and empirical science, as well as any form of naturalization of consciousness. In the phenomenological interpretation, the embodied cognition of the mirror system becomes a mere intellectual structure, neither corporeal nor active, as required by the mirror system. Intersubjectivity, if lived intellectualistically within a trascendental ego, like a monad, becomes extraneousness. In the same way empathy, the roots of which lie in the embodied simulation, in the phenomenological interpretation has no space and time, it is beyond the world, like an eternal and immutable relationship. If a Heideggerian perspective is added to the phenomenological interpretation of the mirror system, a phenomenological approach to neuroscience becomes totally implausible since Heidegger is the most critical philosopher of scientific thinking. An alternative view, proposed here, is a Darwinian social-embodied-emotional mind which is in accordance with neuroscience and the mirror system, philosophically rooted in Hume’s empiricism and James’s pragmatism.