Starting at the top

The issue of core human competences was introduced by Tony Putman in an earlier comment.  One of the interesting related sidelights suggested by this idea is the concept of talents or powers.  My recollection is that Pete Ossorio referred to a talent as a competence that cannot be explained on the basis of prior experience.

There are many talents that have come under the scrutiny of neuroscience.  For example, Levitan and Tirovola (2009) have recently reviewed the neuroscience of music.  Capacities for language, music, math, spatial-perceptual skills and others are fairly circumscribed in the sense of having sufficient family resemblances to permit demarcated examination, though certainly not circumscribed in regard to their rich expression.

In contrast to talents like music, there are other “talents” that are far less circumscribed.

In much of what I’ve posted here so far, I’ve argued that modular approaches to embodiment cannot possibly be sufficient.  Tony, along related lines, has noted that a robot, and by analogy, a brain, cannot be designed from the bottom up (which he and I will probably discuss further in later posts, if only to “clear more brush.”)

The alternative “top down” organizational level at which to start seems straightforward, and has been noted many times in the DP literature (see for example, Jeffrey, 1981;  Putman, 1990).  To be a person of a certain kind is to have “a history of Deliberate Action in a dramaturgical pattern” (Ossorio, Behavior of Persons [BOP], 2006, p. 9), which incorporates, among other features, having a developmental history, personal characteristics and a place in a world of other persons.  It seems, then, that it also make sense that to be a person is an expression of the embodied talent to be a person (or capacity, defined as “the power to acquire personal characteristics,” BOP, p. 82).

I suspect this seems like a very odd way to talk.  It is odd because a “talent” is itself a personal characteristic – a type of power or capacity – so to speak of the power to be a person is to speak of the whole as also being a component of the whole.  However, I believe a case can be made for the perspective (if not the precise word), that being a person is an instance of a very fundamental power, an “Original Capacity.”  An “Original Capacity,” is one for which it can be said that “successful participation in the pattern of behavior which results in the acquisition of a PC is not accidental” (BOP, p. 85, italics added.)  Being a person may only be a state of affairs that is achieved by an individual through practice and experience in a world of other persons, but becoming and being a person are most certainly not accidental.

Once we take Person as the starting point for neurological embodiment, just as it is the starting point for designing artificial embodiment, wouldn’t many other conceptual  (though not empirical) questions in regard to the human embodiment become a little less daunting and little less odious to consider?

In BOP, Ossorio notes: “As in the case of airplanes and computers (and about anything else we can think of) there are good reasons for not confounding persons and organism, BOP, p. 9.”  In order to illustrate this point, that Person and organism are not conceptually equivalent and do not represent primary causes and effects, he then goes on to present four “definitions and distinctions” as follows: Person, Human Being, Alien Being and Robot, all of which “are straightforward because it is clear that our concept of Person allows for at least these subcategories, BOP,  p. 9.” As another application of this logic, however, it is perhaps worth considering specifically that “A Human Being is an individual who is both a Person and a specimen of Homo sapiens, p. 9.”  This is more than just a conceptual reminder.  It seems to me that it is also a reminder that by starting with Person, and all the related concepts that in one way or another explicate Person, it may be possible to develop sound conceptual approaches to the description of the human organism – which already just happens to be “doing the job” (quite nicely) of providing for the instances of persons we know.

References

Levitan, D.J. & Tirovolas, A.K. (2009). Current advances in the cognitive neuroscience of music.  Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1156, 211-231.

Jeffrey, J.  (1981). A new paradigm for artificial intelligence. Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 177-194). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Ossorio, P. G. (2006). The Behavior of Persons. The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio, Vol. V. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Putman, A.O.  (1990). Artificial persons. Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 5, pp. 81 -104). Boulder, CO: Descriptive Psychology Press.