One of my favorite books is Raymond Tallis’ The Hand. (Tallis is an MD and prolific author, and as his Web site shows, really knows how to accessorize.) His new book, Aping Mankind, is a critique of “the belief that brain activity is not merely a necessary but a sufficient condition for human consciousness and that consequently our everyday behaviour can be entirely understood in neural terms.” From the book’s Web page:
Tallis dismantles the idea that “we are our brains”, which has given rise to a plethora of neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines laying claim to explain everything from art and literature to criminality and religious belief, and shows it to be confused and fallacious, and an abuse of the prestige of science, one that sidesteps a whole range of mind–body problems.
The belief that human beings can be understood essentially in biological terms is a serious obstacle, argues Tallis, to clear thinking about what human beings are and what they might become. To explain everyday behaviour in Darwinian terms and to identify human consciousness with the activity of the evolved brain denies human uniqueness, and by minimising the differences between us and our nearest animal kin, misrepresents what we are, offering a grotesquely simplified and degrading account of humanity. We are, shows Tallis, infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biologism.
Tallis has been making this argument for some time in various places. Last year he published a long article in New Atlantis on “What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves.” Earlier this year he wrote a long review of Nicholas Humphreys’ and Antonio Damasio’s recent books in the New Statesman that critique both books as examples of “neuromania,” the belief that “human consciousness– from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self– is identical with neural activity in the human brain.” Also, Mark Vernon has a good account of a recent talk by Tallis at the RSA (which is a great institution, and which I would belong to were I not several thousand miles away from its events); the head of the RSA’s Social Brain project has a response. As Vernon puts it, the entire argument can be boiled down to the claim that
consciousness is not restricted to the brain, but is a phenomenon of the whole person and the community of persons to which belong. Bodies are part of the story, language is part of the story, history and culture is part of the story.
I spent a fair amount of time at Cambridge working through the recent literature dealing with (or at least invoking) neuroscience and attention, and numerous recent books– Carr’s The Shallows is perhaps the most notable but by no means the only example— have pointed to neuroscientific research to support their claims. The deeper I’ve gotten into the contemplative computing project, though, the less I’ve relied on neuroscience, most notably because I’ve realized I’m a lot more interested in the mind (or the extended mind) than I am the brain per se, and thus have backed away from talking so much about fMRI machines and dopamine hits. (The revelation that people are more likely to believe bad arguments if they’re dressed up with some neuroscience-sounding language also pushed me further away from using it heavily.)
