As Ramachandran points out, the current revolution in the understanding of neural processes may be as fundamental as the Copernican or Darwinian revolution. You have to be careful not to characterize this discovery in the wrong way, though; as, for instance, by dismissing empathy as being "just another neurological process." Ramachandran skirts the edge of a reductionist argument by stating that "our conscious experience and sense of self is based entirely on the activity of a hundred billion bits of jelly — the neurons that constitute the brain." This implies that the mind can be reduced to patterns of neural activity, but that's nonsense. As an emergent property of the brain, mind may be qualitatively distinct from the neuronal processes that give rise to it, in the same way that water's characteristics are not just a combination of the characteristics of hydrogen and oxygen.

There's an argument, used by Metzinger (although I haven't found out who originated it) that what counts as 'hardware' and what counts as 'software' depends on what level of reality you're at. Put it this way: at the subatomic level, electrons and protons are physical, and an atom is just something they do. They're hardware, hydrogen is software. Go up a level, and atoms are what's physically real, while molecules are what they do. At this level, 'water' as a distinct substance isn't visible. At the level of individual ants, the coordinated intelligence of the entire colony isn't visible either; the ants are 'real' and they just do stuff. But go up a level and the anthill emerges as a qualitatively distinct entity on its own. One of the features of such emergent systems is that their qualities are usually impossible to predict or even see at the lower level of the entities that make them up. You can't predict the qualities of water from observing hydrogen or oxygen.

This, I would argue, is the crucial argument that makes it possible to connect the theory of mirror neurons to real human ethics: empathy does not reduce to the action of mirror neurons, it emerges from them, and so at the level of human experience empathy still has to be treated as real, not an epiphenomenon. At our level of reality, water is not just di-hydrogen oxide but has its own features; likewise, ethics continues to have qualities of its own that are essentially independent of the neurological widgets that make it possible.

What the theory of mirror neurons does is allow us to unite what we see on the macro level with what's going on at the micro level. It doesn't reduce the one to the other.

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