PROLEGOMENA...............

It is essential to understand how the neuronal system works in the spinal cord and in the epidermic sensations linked to pleasure or pain, how those sensations first contribute to the cerebral tensions, then to the psychological system, next as a precipitate with reference to the mathematical universalizations, on one side, and to the creative element expressed by the tension and not at all present in the artificial intelligence, on the other side.

It is also interesting to understand the historical limits of cognition, bound not only to a particular period but also to a specific dialectic moment and to a certain specific material position requiring some conceptual universalizations, in order to be justified, as Marx teaches.

Interpretation is a difficult problem to solve, well known in the history of thought as the hermeneutical problem.

Similar problems have proved almost unsolvable in the last decades, especially inside the dialectic-historical materialism. An example for all is represented by the concept of ‘Class’ which cannot be drawn in a non-dialectical way out of the Marxian theory, unless you take the risk of relegating Marxism to an archaic centennial theory, as many intellectuals with a guilty conscience did.

With regard to that concept I decided to create the G.S.R.E. acronym in my ‘prolegomena’1 (standing for High Income Social Group to be used in this situationn only) and G.S.R.B. (Low Income Social Group for the opposite case).

A very complex situation remains at present between the two opposite poles. I would define it as a fan-shaped situation sometimes having a transversal inclination.

Some of the problems emerging from my psychoepistemology move towards a neuroscientific view in favour of a theory of cognition. I am really convinced that the problem to solve concerns comprehension of consciousness on a neuroscientific side.

I am well informed about the debate in the American Universities on the necessity to explain consciousness in that direction. On this subject I will mention the synthesis by John Horgan in the resumptive essay ‘The mystery of consciousness’, 1997, by Nyrev, Inc., published in the United States and Canada, and in ‘Il mistero della coscienza’ by John R. Searle, ed. Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1998, drawn from the Italian edition of ‘Scientific American’.

      Neuron drawing. Nerve cell, including the cell body, axon, and dendrites.  

I would like to develop some Freudian items in a neuroscientific perspective according to Jean-Pierre Changeux’s schemes (Ref. 3 ).

1. With reference to the problem set by Freud on the perception-consciousness mechanism (PC) I would like to check whether a kind of neuroscientific investigation is possible in the future, according to the theory which distinguishes between mental images in physical absence of an object and sensations or perceptions, which appear in presence of an object.
2. I would like to emphasize the importance of the nervous system with regard to the forming of thought, considering the anti-Cartesian implication stated by Damasio from Iowa University (Ref.4).   I would especially examine the function of the system itself in the forming of mental objects and consequently of pleasure and pain as perceived by the sensorial endings, mainly in the skin and the bowels.

I believe the answer to that question confirms the thesis enounced by early Marx (pre-Capital period) explaining that the limits of cognition are linked with the material role of the body inside a certain dialectic-historical structural point of reality.

3. I would like to clear up the mechanisms of Freudian sublimation separating them from a strictly psychoanalytical outlook and recovering them inside a dialectic-historical materialistic outlook, in order to get to a neuroscientific theory of cognition.

In this only way, at the end of the century can we shed light upon such important problem for science development as the brain-mind-cognition-thought-cultural product sequence is.