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Neurotrash
Sure, we need the brain for consciousness: "Chop my head off, and my IQ descends." But it's not the whole story. There is more to perceptions, memories, and beliefs than neural impulses can explain.
-- Marc Parry at "The Chronicle of Higher Education" reviewing Raymond Tallis's "Aping Mankind"
I have been fond of including in my blog from time to time some news items on the new findings and thrills from neuroscience and neuroimagery, finding the roots of our feelings and behavior in our brain. So, I thought I should include this hyper-critical take on the field by Raymond Tallis in his new book "Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity".
Tallis is more of a physician and a prolific amateur philosopher, but he has apparently kicked up a little dust storm, and at least has genernated some interesting discussion. Interesting to note at the outset, too, is that Tallis does not attack neuroscientific materialism from a Christian or religious perspective and the idea of a soul, being an atheist. The problem for him is that he does not really have an answer of his own, but he feels that a lot of questions have been brushed aside too lightly.
_ _ _
Raymond Tallis likes a fight. On a recent afternoon, visiting this historic city to lecture at the University of Kent, the physician-philosopher intends to pick one. His target: a rash of pseudo brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing in God and falling in love. Tallis, a former clinical neuroscientist who devoted years to studying stroke and epilepsy, considers such claims trash. Neurotrash.
...
Tallis informs 60 people gathered in a Kent lecture hall that his talk will demolish two "pillars of unwisdom." The first, "neuromania," is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the "intracranial darkness" of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. The second, "Darwinitis," is the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions.
Those trends, as Tallis sees them, are like "intellectual illnesses" metastasizing from academic labs into popular culture. He sees the symptoms in neuro-economic thinkers who explain our susceptibility to subprime mortgages by describing how our brains evolved to favor short-term rewards. He sees them in philosophers who claim that our primate minds admire paintings of landscapes that would have supported hunting and gathering. He sees it in neurotheologians who preach that "God is a tingle in the 'God spot' in the brain."
-- Marc Parry at "The Chronicle of Higher Education"
_ _ _
Tallis, in turn, has come in for some harsh criticism, including from Daniel Dennett, of whom I have been something of a fan.
_ _ _
Stephen Cave, a Berlin-based philosopher and writer who has called Aping Mankind "an important work," points out that most philosophers and scientists do in fact believe "that mind is just the product of certain brain activity, even if we do not currently know quite how." Tallis "does both the reader and these thinkers an injustice" by declaring that view "obviously" wrong, Cave wrote in a Financial Times review. Geraint Rees, director of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, complains that reading Tallis is "a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall." He "rubbishes every current theory of the relationship between mind and brain, whether philosophical or neuroscientific," while offering "little or no alternative," Rees says in an e-mail.
Perhaps the harshest reaction comes from Dennett, an influential U.S. philosopher whose books square human life with science. He sympathizes with Tallis's concerns. But what every philosopher should know is that any philosopher—Plato, Hume, Kant, take your pick—"can be made to look like a flaming idiot if you oversimplify and caricature them," Dennett tells me.
"Tallis indulges in refutation by caricature," says Dennett, a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. "He's not taking his opponents seriously. He's sneering instead of arguing. He's ignoring the complexities of the arguments. So he's not really doing philosophy. He's doing propaganda."
...
Dennett claims he's got much of it sorted out already. He wrote a landmark book on the topic in 1991, Consciousness Explained. (The title "should have landed him in court, charged with breach of the Trade Descriptions Act," writes Tallis.) Dennett uses the vocabulary of computer science to explain how consciousness emerges from the huge volume of things happening in the brain all at once. We're not aware of everything, he tells me, only a "limited window." He describes that stream of consciousness as "the activities of a virtual machine which is running on the parallel hardware of the brain."
"You—the fruits of all your experience, not just your genetic background, but everything you've learned and done and all your memories—what ties those all together? What makes a self?" Dennett asks. "The answer is, and has to be, the self is like a software program that organizes the activities of the brain."
As for Darwin, Dennett cheers him on whereas Tallis charges him with trespassing—in economics, aesthetics, culture, and morality.
"Consciousness, meaning, purpose, culture, and morality are all natural products of evolutionary biological processes," Dennett says.
He adds, "I see Tallis as a sort of outraged defender of an obsolete worldview that's losing ground fast."
That statement will only further outrage Tallis. But he does concede that one of his critics is right. That would be Rees, the neuroscientist who slapped him for junking everybody else's mind-brain theories without proposing his own.
"Absolutely," says Tallis. "I have the Socratic wisdom of knowing that I don't know. Which is a start."
-- Marc Parry at "The Chronicle of Higher Education"
-- Marc Parry at "The Chronicle of Higher Education" reviewing Raymond Tallis's "Aping Mankind"
I have been fond of including in my blog from time to time some news items on the new findings and thrills from neuroscience and neuroimagery, finding the roots of our feelings and behavior in our brain. So, I thought I should include this hyper-critical take on the field by Raymond Tallis in his new book "Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity".
Tallis is more of a physician and a prolific amateur philosopher, but he has apparently kicked up a little dust storm, and at least has genernated some interesting discussion. Interesting to note at the outset, too, is that Tallis does not attack neuroscientific materialism from a Christian or religious perspective and the idea of a soul, being an atheist. The problem for him is that he does not really have an answer of his own, but he feels that a lot of questions have been brushed aside too lightly.
_ _ _
Raymond Tallis likes a fight. On a recent afternoon, visiting this historic city to lecture at the University of Kent, the physician-philosopher intends to pick one. His target: a rash of pseudo brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing in God and falling in love. Tallis, a former clinical neuroscientist who devoted years to studying stroke and epilepsy, considers such claims trash. Neurotrash.
...
Tallis informs 60 people gathered in a Kent lecture hall that his talk will demolish two "pillars of unwisdom." The first, "neuromania," is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the "intracranial darkness" of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. The second, "Darwinitis," is the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions.
Those trends, as Tallis sees them, are like "intellectual illnesses" metastasizing from academic labs into popular culture. He sees the symptoms in neuro-economic thinkers who explain our susceptibility to subprime mortgages by describing how our brains evolved to favor short-term rewards. He sees them in philosophers who claim that our primate minds admire paintings of landscapes that would have supported hunting and gathering. He sees it in neurotheologians who preach that "God is a tingle in the 'God spot' in the brain."
-- Marc Parry at "The Chronicle of Higher Education"
_ _ _
Tallis, in turn, has come in for some harsh criticism, including from Daniel Dennett, of whom I have been something of a fan.
_ _ _
Stephen Cave, a Berlin-based philosopher and writer who has called Aping Mankind "an important work," points out that most philosophers and scientists do in fact believe "that mind is just the product of certain brain activity, even if we do not currently know quite how." Tallis "does both the reader and these thinkers an injustice" by declaring that view "obviously" wrong, Cave wrote in a Financial Times review. Geraint Rees, director of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, complains that reading Tallis is "a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall." He "rubbishes every current theory of the relationship between mind and brain, whether philosophical or neuroscientific," while offering "little or no alternative," Rees says in an e-mail.
Perhaps the harshest reaction comes from Dennett, an influential U.S. philosopher whose books square human life with science. He sympathizes with Tallis's concerns. But what every philosopher should know is that any philosopher—Plato, Hume, Kant, take your pick—"can be made to look like a flaming idiot if you oversimplify and caricature them," Dennett tells me.
"Tallis indulges in refutation by caricature," says Dennett, a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. "He's not taking his opponents seriously. He's sneering instead of arguing. He's ignoring the complexities of the arguments. So he's not really doing philosophy. He's doing propaganda."
...
Dennett claims he's got much of it sorted out already. He wrote a landmark book on the topic in 1991, Consciousness Explained. (The title "should have landed him in court, charged with breach of the Trade Descriptions Act," writes Tallis.) Dennett uses the vocabulary of computer science to explain how consciousness emerges from the huge volume of things happening in the brain all at once. We're not aware of everything, he tells me, only a "limited window." He describes that stream of consciousness as "the activities of a virtual machine which is running on the parallel hardware of the brain."
"You—the fruits of all your experience, not just your genetic background, but everything you've learned and done and all your memories—what ties those all together? What makes a self?" Dennett asks. "The answer is, and has to be, the self is like a software program that organizes the activities of the brain."
As for Darwin, Dennett cheers him on whereas Tallis charges him with trespassing—in economics, aesthetics, culture, and morality.
"Consciousness, meaning, purpose, culture, and morality are all natural products of evolutionary biological processes," Dennett says.
He adds, "I see Tallis as a sort of outraged defender of an obsolete worldview that's losing ground fast."
That statement will only further outrage Tallis. But he does concede that one of his critics is right. That would be Rees, the neuroscientist who slapped him for junking everybody else's mind-brain theories without proposing his own.
"Absolutely," says Tallis. "I have the Socratic wisdom of knowing that I don't know. Which is a start."
-- Marc Parry at "The Chronicle of Higher Education"