The Human Implications Of The Theory Of Neuronal Group Selection Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 155):

This final set of chapters asks about the implications of our new brain theory for human (and some inhuman) concerns. It pleads for an open-mindedness about the mind. It suggests that our knowledge is not incorrigible, that we are deeply embedded in the matter of the world as well as in the matter of the mind, that we are each of us unique as individuals (and importantly so), that our thinking in a culture is a critical matter for our being human and for our grasping of meaning, and that, even in disease, our minds are marvellously adaptive. … Above all, it suggests that constructing an adequate theory of the brain promises to offer bases for new harmonies, including those according to which we may place ourselves in the universe.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, knowledge is meaning construed of experience, meaning which may then be reconstrued, for example, as the meaning of scientific theories.

Such systems of meaning are evolving socio-semiotic systems whose material base, on Edelman's model, is the selection of neuronal groups in global mappings in the brains of individuals, who exchange meanings with each other in communities, by expressing such meanings in wordings.

It is the specific evolution of systems of meaning in each individual human, on this material base, that makes each individual human unique.

What is embedded in the matter of the world and the matter of the mind is a symboliser that mediates symbolic processing: whether as a senser that mediates 'interior' mental processes or as a sayer that mediates 'exterior' verbal processes.

It is the emergence of language that is the 'critical matter for our being human and for our grasping of meaning' and it is language that construes the culture of human thinking and saying.

Interestingly, from the perspective of comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, putting humans in harmony with Nature is a primary function of the prescientific reconstruals of experience known as mythological systems.