Physiological Models Of The Brain Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 11):

But as Whitehead duly noted, the mind was put back into nature with the rise of physiology and physiological psychology in the latter part of the nineteenth century. We have had an embarrassing time knowing what to do with it ever since. just as there is something special about relativity and quantum mechanics, there is something special about the problems raised by these physiological developments. Are observers themselves "things," like the rest of the objects in their world? How do we account for the curious ability of observers (indeed, their compelled need) to carve up their world into categories of things — to refer to things of the world when things themselves can never so refer? When we ourselves observe observers, this property of intentionality is unavoidable.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the rise of physiology and physiological psychology did not put the mind into nature; it merely began the study of the brain from within the confines of Galilean epistemology.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, physiological models of the brain are concerned only with the outer domains of experience, doing and being; they are not concerned with the 'conscious-semiotic centre of the ideational universe' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 131): the symbolic processing of sensing and saying that creates content — meaning and wording — through projection.

From this perspective, observers are 'conscious things', and it is this that distinguishes them from non-observers.  Human observers "carve up their world", not by "referring to things in the world", but by construing their experience as meanings, such as 'observer', 'object' and so on.