The Thoughts Of Descartes Vs Systemic Functional Linguistics & Neural Darwinism

Russell (1961: 549):

This leads to a consideration of different kinds of ideas.  The commonest of errors, Descartes says, is to think that my ideas are like outside things.  (The word 'idea' includes sense-perceptions, as used by Descartes.)  Ideas seem to be of three sorts: (1) those that are innate, (2) those that are foreign and come from without, (3) those that are invented by me.  The second kind of ideas, we naturally suppose, are like outside objects … and it therefore seems reasonable to suppose that a foreign thing imprints its likeness on me. … The reasons for supposing that ideas of sense come from without are therefore inconclusive.

Blogger Comments:

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, "outside things" are meanings — phenomena — construed of experience.  This is not to deny the experience, merely to acknowledge that both "outside" and "things" are meanings construed of experience in language.

The grammar construes such phenomena as both the Agents and the Range of the perceptual mental processing of a Senser.

The view that "a foreign thing imprints its likeness on me" is known as instructionism.  According to the selectionist model of Gerald Edelman, the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, instructionism is not supported by an analysis of the data.  At the neuronal level, impacts of photons on the retina, for example, 'select' randomly neuronal groups in the visual cortex by strengthening their synaptic connections.  They are 'selected' in the sense that this makes more likely to fire as a unit in the future in discriminating visual inputs.