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Phantom Limbs and the First-Person Perspective: An Embodied-Materialist Response

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Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction

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Abstract

In the interest of articulating a materialist theory of self in which self and brain are ‘correlates’ in the broad sense that they form part of a meaningful, integrated whole, I take the case of phantom limb syndrome. When considered in a philosophical light, such phenomena might seem to imply the necessity of the first-person perspective, a key insight of the phenomenological tradition, in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in particular. But it is possible to formulate a materialist response to this first-person challenge. For this response to be effective, it will have to take integrate a notion of embodiment. However, in order to not to reinvest brain or body with the mysterious character that the materialist approach has stripped from the ‘first person’, the vision of the brain here must also be an embedded vision, as Andy Clark calls it, that is, locating brain not just in an embodied context but also in the social world, in the network of symbolic relations (what I call, following Lev Vygotsky, the “social brain”). A self which is the product of the brain, a brain which is intentional and embodied, and both as correlates of a materialist theory of self: this is what I attempt to sketch out, taking as a particular case, phantom limb syndrome.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    La Mettrie (1748/1960), 165. La Mettrie adds that the soul as a whole can be reduced to the workings of the imagination.

  2. 2.

    See Feinberg and Roane (1997) and Hirstein (2005) (an important work which addresses several of the concerns in the present chapter). For a different perspective on phantom limb syndrome and the problem of subjectivity, see Gaukroger (2014).

  3. 3.

    Ramachandran et al. (1996); Ramachandran and Hirstein (1998); see also Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran (2000).

  4. 4.

    Dennett was actually referring to being a reductionist materialist philosopher at a meeting on quantum physics and consciousness; but he added that he wanted to be like a “good cop” (Dennett 1998, 97).

  5. 5.

    See Feinberg and Roane (1997).

  6. 6.

    As quoted in Ramachandran and Hirstein (1998), 1604.

  7. 7.

    On the union see Hutchins (2015) and Simmons (2013), and on the ‘sailor in the ship’ image see here Chapter 4.

  8. 8.

    Merleau-Ponty (1963), 208–209 (trans. modified).

  9. 9.

    See the references to early modern automata and the problem of organic life in Chapter 4.

  10. 10.

    See Clark, passim, and on the philosophical implications of an ‘embodied robotics’, see Symons and Calvo (2014).

  11. 11.

    Kelly (2002), Jeannerod (2006), and for a recent review, Delafield-Butt and Gangopadhyay (2013).

  12. 12.

    Dennett (1990), 96.

  13. 13.

    Clark (2002), 100.

  14. 14.

    Borrowing this formulation from Chris Frith.

  15. 15.

    Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998), 62.

  16. 16.

    Ibid.

  17. 17.

    Dennett (1990), ch. 13, esp. 426–427; Dennett (1992); Damasio (1999), ch. 7.

  18. 18.

    McDermott (1992), 217.

  19. 19.

    Hayles (2002), 319.

  20. 20.

    Dennett (1984), 40, n. 23, referring to Gazzaniga and Ledoux (1978). See also, inter alia, Gazzaniga (1998).

  21. 21.

    See Goldstein (1995 [1934]). In modern neuroscience Goldstein’s role as predecessor of more recent split-brain studies was noted by Geschwind (1965). For a good overview see Ferrario and Corsi (2013).

  22. 22.

    See Humphrey (1992), 171–176, here, 172.

  23. 23.

    See Descartes to Plempius for Fromondus, 3 October 1637, AT I, 420, quoted in Gaukroger (2006), 332, n. 18.

  24. 24.

    For more on the ‘embodiment’ paradigm in cognitive science, see Varela et al. (1991), Clark (1997), Chemero (2009), Shapiro (2010).

  25. 25.

    P.S. Churchland (1986), 406.

  26. 26.

    Dennett (1988).

  27. 27.

    Lycan (1990), 126.

  28. 28.

    “Rêve, s. m. (Métaphysique)” (Enc. XIV, 228).

  29. 29.

    P.S. Churchland (1988), 282.

  30. 30.

    P.M. Churchland (1995), 198.

  31. 31.

    D.M. Armstrong, in Armstrong and Malcolm (1984), 112. See Armstrong (1968), 100–115, for the materialist’s reconstruction of introspection.

  32. 32.

    Lycan (1990), 110, 116.

  33. 33.

    Spinoza, Ethics, II, prop. 7. For more on such a ‘relational ontology’ see Morfino (2006) and my discussion in Chapter 5.

  34. 34.

    Smart (2000) and Armstrong, in Armstrong and Malcolm (1984), 110–112. Admittedly, most of the cognitive science discussions of proprioception seem to miss its philosophical implications, too. Clark (1997) simply says that proprioception is “the inner sense that tells you how your body is located in space” (22) and leaves it at that. Quite stimulating but without any connection to contemporary cognitive science is Heller-Roazen’s historico-conceptual study of the ‘inner touch’ (Heller-Roazen 2007).

  35. 35.

    Olson (1961–1962), in Olson (1997), 181, 182. Thanks to Homa Shojaie for helping me locate this text.

  36. 36.

    Freeman (1991, 1999) and for a new discussion of the ‘doors of perception’ from a philosophical standpoint, Wilson (2015).

  37. 37.

    Lycan (1990), 117.

  38. 38.

    Straus (1989), 183.

  39. 39.

    Deleuze-Guattari (1991), 197–198.

  40. 40.

    For explicit mystical statements about ‘Flesh’ see e.g. Merleau-Ponty (1962), 212: “Just as the sacrament not only symbolizes … an operation of Grace, but is also the real presence of God … in the same way the sensible has not only a motor and vital significance but is a way of being in the world … sensation is literally a form of communion.” I discuss this further in Chapter 4 above.

  41. 41.

    “Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude,” in Negri (2008), 118. Thanks to Katja Diefenbach for first pointing this out to me.

  42. 42.

    On the Baldwin effect see Depew and Weber eds. (2003); on the idea of the social brain, see Virno (2001) and Wolfe (2010b); some of the recent interest in Gilbert Simondon touches upon this.

  43. 43.

    Spinoza, Ethics, III prop. 2 scholium.

  44. 44.

    Clark (2002), 11, 43. Clark intersects here with a good deal of recent cultural, literary and media theory (when it concerns itself with the relation between fiction, embodiment and technological forms) – see in particular Haraway’s “cyborgs” (Haraway 1991) and Hayles’ “posthuman” subjects (Hayles 1993, 1999, 2002). But Clark is unique in that he speaks from within cognitive science – which also entails that there is no utopian dimension to his theory (see also Clark 2008b).

  45. 45.

    Clark (1997), 45.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 21, 87.

  47. 47.

    Ramachandran et al. (1996), 34.

  48. 48.

    Clark (2002), 86.

  49. 49.

    Hayles (2002), 300.

  50. 50.

    Deleuze (1995), 26.

  51. 51.

    Contrast Steven Quartz & Terry Sejnowski’s “neural constructivism” (essentially a kind of ‘hyper-plasticity’) with Gazzaniga’s insistence that we actually have less plasticity than is currently thought. Further, consider the ‘new innatist’ point that phantom limbs imply the existence of internal representations of our body which we are born with (e.g., the fetus which knows how to put its thumb in its mouth without ‘putting out its eye’). Another, more cautionary response to invocations of plasticity is to point out that cortical remapping is not always a good thing! For an historical overview of neuronal plasticity see Berlucchi and Buchtel (2009), and Huttenlocher (2002) for the contemporary discussions.

  52. 52.

    On the ‘cultured brain’ see Neidich (2003). A ‘Deleuzean approach’ to the brain is a significant component of Neidich’s analysis; for a helpful discussion of Deleuze on the brain see Rajchman (2000), 133 f., 136–138.

  53. 53.

    Negri (2000), § 16b.

  54. 54.

    Ibid.

  55. 55.

    Luria (1967/1978), 279/Luria (2002), 22. Iriki’s research can be seen as a recent illustration of this.

  56. 56.

    Vygotsky, Pedologija Podrotska (1929), quoted in van der Veer and Valsiner (1991), 320. Further discussion in Wolfe (2010b).

  57. 57.

    Hardt and Negri (2000), 362. For more on Negri’s notion of “constitutive ontology,” see Wolfe 2007 and Wolfe 2010.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Sarton Centre for History of Science Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

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Wolfe, C.T. (2016). Phantom Limbs and the First-Person Perspective: An Embodied-Materialist Response. In: Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24820-2_8

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