"A study of 10 volunteers with the condition - mirror-touch synaesthesia - shows they are also especially sensitive to other people's emotions. "They all scored higher in standard questionnaires to measure emotional empathy, which means they had better gut instincts for what others feel," says Michael Banissy of University College London."
The critical turn here is that Banissy concludes these 10 volunteers had "better" "gut" "instincts"--those concepts alone are extraordinarily problematic and undefined here--and then concludes (with absolutely no reasoning or explanation) that "[the volunteers] had better gut instincts for what others feel." There is, perhaps, correlation here, a very weak one, but no evidence of causation, that is, no evidence that touch is indeed crucial for empathy. I think this is one of the dangers of affective neuroscience being applied to phenomenology (this trend starts with Merleau-Ponty); first, affective neuroscience has a bad habit of drawing hasty conclusions about causality (due to a "mind as computer meme that won't go away") that, at the most, indicate correlation; second, utilizing tests to evaluate experience as it were--phenomenological experience--presents its own significant challenge to the methodology of phenomenology itself (that is, I think Husserl's philosophy rejects this whole idea that there is any kind of applicability between "test results" and what "is," moreover, I suspect that, even outside Hussserl's framework, rigorous phenomenological methods would have to come to the same conclusion: that phenomenology's conclusions and discoveries have to come from phenomenology and phenomenologically-directed science. This is Husserl's whole point in the "Crisis." Nonetheless, an interesting article, because it brings to light these important talking points for the intersections of neuroscience and phenomenology--and invokes the "Crisis."
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Quoting from the article:
"A study of 10 volunteers with the condition - mirror-touch synaesthesia - shows they are also especially sensitive to other people's emotions. "They all scored higher in standard questionnaires to measure emotional empathy, which means they had better gut instincts for what others feel," says Michael Banissy of University College London."
The critical turn here is that Banissy concludes these 10 volunteers had "better" "gut" "instincts"--those concepts alone are extraordinarily problematic and undefined here--and then concludes (with absolutely no reasoning or explanation) that "[the volunteers] had better gut instincts for what others feel."
There is, perhaps, correlation here, a very weak one, but no evidence of causation, that is, no evidence that touch is indeed crucial for empathy.
I think this is one of the dangers of affective neuroscience being applied to phenomenology (this trend starts with Merleau-Ponty); first, affective neuroscience has a bad habit of drawing hasty conclusions about causality (due to a "mind as computer meme that won't go away") that, at the most, indicate correlation; second, utilizing tests to evaluate experience as it were--phenomenological experience--presents its own significant challenge to the methodology of phenomenology itself (that is, I think Husserl's philosophy rejects this whole idea that there is any kind of applicability between "test results" and what "is," moreover, I suspect that, even outside Hussserl's framework, rigorous phenomenological methods would have to come to the same conclusion: that phenomenology's conclusions and discoveries have to come from phenomenology and phenomenologically-directed science.
This is Husserl's whole point in the "Crisis."
Nonetheless, an interesting article, because it brings to light these important talking points for the intersections of neuroscience and phenomenology--and invokes the "Crisis."
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