Towards an Understanding of Mirror Mechanism, Between Phenomenology and Natural Sciences

Naturalizing phenomenology or phenomenologizing neurosciences? This is the provocative and stimulating question that Gallese asks himself/us (taken from Enciclopedia Treccani, 2009) to try to better understand the explanatory significance of the mirror mechanism. The attempt to make neurosciences and phenomenology interact originally took shape as a project for the naturalization of phenomenological research to which, in recent decades, Francisco Varela has contributed (Autopoiesis and Cognition, 1980). Like classical cognitivism, cognitive neuroscience, until not many years ago, favored a model according to which functions such as sensation, perception and motor control would be “localized” in different cortical areas. The experimental data acquired over the last twenty years, however, give us a completely different picture. The motor cortex of the frontal lobe, as well as the posterior parietal cortex, are made up of a mosaic of distinct areas on the anatomical-functional level that contract reciprocally connection relationships to form distinct cortico-cortical circuits (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). Both things and objects acquire full signification only insofar as they constitute one of the poles of a dynamic relationship with the acting subject, which constitutes the second pole of this relationship. This type of approach allows us to redefine the triad perception, action and cognition in a new perspective, and, above all, in a perspective compatible with an “embodied” meaning. Instead, A. Attanasio and A. Oliverio propose a Darwinian reading mirror mechanism, centered on a “social-embodied-emotional mind”, rooted in the “reason-instinct” of D. Hume and in the “emotional revolution” of W James. Mirror mechanism does not make any logical-mental inference: the action is the result of a motor simulation. Furthermore, this audio-visual mirror mechanism, also present among non-linguistic species, confirms that the understanding of sounds, images, motor acts are inserted within “a simpler level of semantic reference.” In his Ecology of the brain. The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind, 2017 T. Fuchs focuses his arguing on the concept of embodiment. The basic self-awareness is something that emerges from the whole body in interaction with the brain, of course, and the brain is necessary to integrate bodily afferences and bodily states, but it is in constant interaction with the body and only through this homeostatic regulation our embodied self-awareness emerges. So, if we are conscious beings, we are already embodied conscious beings. The other major dimension is the sensorimotor dimension. Here we transcend our organic body to interact with the environment by the limbs, by connecting ourselves with objects, by transcending the body when we deal with objects or by transcending the body when we deal with other subjects. Finally, I believe that the naturalistic phenomenology of Varela and Maturana is closer to the philosophy of complexity, to Bateson’s ecological approach and to an evolutionary approach, supported, for example, by the psychobiologist A. Oliverio, in agreement with which I believe it is better the essential adaptive, social and communicative role of the mirror mechanism at a species-specific level can be explained. I think that Fuchs’ idea of the ecology of brain, the body as a living whole and the organism as not just composed of parts, but as a self-reproducing autopoietic whole which is the basis of my embodied experience, might be a good explicative meeting point for phenomenology and natural sciences, in the direction of a holistic and comprehensive view for mirror mechanism in human being.