Hello!
(Reposted from user introduction posts, down yonder.)

My name is Justin, I'm 23 years old, living (and currently, shivering) on the Jersey Shore, having just completed a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Eugene Lang College at the New School. I studied social theory, political philosophy, and issues in the philosophy of morality and religion, and I had a great time, though it must be said that the seminars were largely seas of abstraction. Before graduating I chanced on a copy of "Looking for Spinoza" and was struck with the notion there may be different ways to answer the big questions about social meaning.

More recently I've applied to graduate programs in social psychology, with a particular interest in the psychophysiology of stress markers, as exhibited during interpersonal communication about moral issues. I'm interested in explanations of the bio-psychological properties of empathy, including the evolution of social cognition in nonhuman primates-- and, of course, human primates as well-- and issues in the "Theory of Mind" theory, emotional development during childhood, and the existence of social "information-processing" channels that aren't accessible to consciousness.

I have a few years experience working with autistic children. In fact, one way I can get my cards on the table immediately is to say that my father has been working in special education since before I was born, with a focus on autistic students, so I've always known about autism and its implications and that's had a powerful effect on the way I think about empathy.

Philosophically speaking what one might call a "qualified relativist" or "radical pragmatist", very abstruse ways of conveying that I believe our moral, religious and aesthetic explanations of our fellow human beings are not capable of being metaphysically justified; but since meaning is processed, and made significant, through bodily processes, the existence or non-existence of a metaphysical realm doesn't really matter for human meaning, because we feel our beliefs through with our bodies.

A psychological way of saying this is that I believe the true significance of social interaction lies in our bodily representations, just as much as our cognitive representations. Empathy refers to all of the ways that people impact upon each other, and refers to all systems of the body, including the cortex, the so-called "limbic" or subcortical regions, the autonomic nervous system, muscular contractions, heart rate, blood pressure, posture, etc... my, I could go on. I take a particular interest in the writings of Antonio Damasio, Jay Schulkin and Richard Shusterman on these issues. I would recommend Schulkin's book "Bodily Sensibilities" to anyone.

I'm familiar with work like the article above through the writings of Jay Schulkin, Paul Ekman, and Simon Baron-Cohen, among others. I've thought for a long time about the implications of the existence of reflexive neural systems for our social interaction, our social dispositions, our concept of social life. I guess an early interest in autism has made it impossible for me to look at empathy or social interaction in anything like a "given" way. I believe that so much of our interactions with each other are shaped, though not determined, by what lies beneath the surface of our skull and skin.

At the same time I think that acknowledging the power of nonconscious processes in social life should give us a great deal of hope, and take nothing away from the idea of human dignity. It may just be that a moral education involves not teaching concepts and laws about morality, but instead teaching people how to talk to each other in such a way that we don't reinforce habitual programs of fearful, anxious and domineering behavior. Knowing that Darwin and not Augustine got it right doesn't make me more pessimistic about this possibility; if anything it has the opposite effect. There are so many different routes by which humanity can evolve.

I hope these were adequate and interesting enough answers for you, dear moderator; to you and the rest of the community I cheerfully say hello and I look forward to reading, and hopefully participating in, some interesting discussions about sociality.