The world comes crashing down

I have done a lot of work thinking about the ‘agent’ of social action. I suppose it was just a matter of time before an article addressing social cognition landed on my table. This turning point came after I started looking into cognitive enhancement (one core focus of transhumanism) and began wondering about the social meaning of brain manipulating. Thus I began reading about cognitive science and cognitive psychology. The latter I have some experience about a decade back when I was studying for a brief while in the University of Joensuu (now called the Eastern University after the unification between universities in Kuopio and Joensuu). So, the article I am now reading starts with a main stream sociology shattering abstract form How is Social Realism Possible: Sociology after Cognitive Science by Patrick Pharo in European Journal of Social Theory (10/30: 2007)

This article explores the limits of social constructionism and criticizes the
‘demiurgic conception of society’ associated with it. It contemplates the
possibility of sociological realism by investigating the intrinsic and objective
properties of action, cognition and morality. The incorporation of intrinsic
meanings and intentions in social actions, the objective information supporting cognitive processes and human sensitivity to pleasure and pain as well as
the normative rejection of undue suffering, delineate the objective core of
social facts, which can be interpreted or influenced, but not arbitrarily or
capriciously constructed or manipulated. This general argument is supported
by various illustrations drawn from the semantics of social actions and
classical puzzles of interpretative sociology such as the meaning of suicide
or the morality of social sanctions.

Now, for many sociologists the constructivist stand is a ‘given’. The human actor is considered more or less a ‘blank slate’ that processes meaning and somehow learns the cultural habits and ways of thinking. In this article we find no over determination of the cognitive theory so there is no reduction of action to workings of neurons. However, the question is being raised about the human actor making decisions in a socially constructed reality. Very interesting. This could have a deeper effect on my attempt to construct an actor with a concrete human-technology connection.