Brain Science Podcast discussion

"In a devastating critique Raymond Tallis exposes the exaggerated claims made for the ability of neuroscience and evolutionary theory to explain human consciousness, behaviour, culture and society.

While readily acknowledging the astounding progress neuroscience has made in helping us understand how the brain works, Tallis directs his guns at neuroscience’s dark companion – “Neuromania” as he describes it – 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.

With the formidable acuity and precision of both clinician and philosopher, 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.

Combative, fearless and always thought-provoking, Aping Mankind is an important book, one that scientists, cultural commentators and policy-makers cannot ignore."

And, BTW, Tallis is committed to atheistic naturalism as a worldview!

I'm not familiar with this book or author, but it's good to know his agenda.

Wikipedia says, "Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe."

So far, so good. However, I'm troubled by Tallis/your emphasizing "human uniqueness" and resistance to "minimising the differences between us and our nearest animal kin, [which] misrepresents what we are, offering a grotesquely simplified and degrading account of humanity. We are...infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biologism."

Seems to me an adherent to naturalism would eschew elevating one organism over others. Normally it's the religious who tout the differences between humans and other life forms given that man is made in the image of God.

All life forms are complex and humans only more so. Tallis is indeed treading new ground apparently, but how does he suggest the study of the human animal if not within the framework of biological evolution?

I took a look at the 3 reviews of this book on Amazon, which were all positive, in order to see if I could get a sense of his approach. According to one reviewer (so correct the reviewer's misinterpretation if necessary), Tallis believes,

There is a "collective space" made up of a "community of minds" that inhabit a kind of conceptual world that is beyond biology.

Perhaps you could cite the science Tallis draws from for this.

I have not read Aping Mankind or any of Tallis' previous work so I am not familiar with his agenda. However, this argument about human uniqueness has a long history. My position is that I do not think that either recognizing that consciousness comes from the brain or the fact that we share a lot of brain functions with other mammals threatens our uniqueness.

Yes, I do consider myself a philosophical naturalist, and while I don't think humans are as special as we sometimes like to think, I do believe that our uniqueness has biological roots. If the quote above defining "neuromania" is accurate, it sounds like Tallis has invented a new word for an old argument.

But as I said before I haven't read his work so I don't know what world view he is trying to defend.

The ideas of a collective space made up of a community of minds that inhabit some sort of conceptual world beyond biology sure sounds like pseudoscience to me.

I am a new-comer to Biological matters, since about 8 years ago. First I read Richard Dawkins' books on mathematical evolution, where he explains that an ant or a termite gets an evolutionary advantage from helping its fellows, since in a single-queen nest, they share a lot of genes. So Darwinism explain altruism.

When I see Charlie Rose on CNBC interviewing Edward O Wilson, I learn that an update to this theory takes account of inter-group competition for resources, as well as inter-individual, and in the human case (and with other social animals like wolves), that is the mathematical motivation for altruism.

People talk about the granny-gene, where women live longer than men because their contribution to child-raising in older age groups, frees up younger women to gather food.

So Darwinism is probably more complex and nuanced than Tallis imagines.

We do seem to regularly underestimate other primates. I remember seeing on TV a psychologist competing with a chimpanzee on a game where numbers from 1 to 9 are randomly displayed on a computer screen, and the subject has to press the numbers in ascending value order. The chimpanzee was about 3 times faster than the psychologist. This was explained by the need for the chimp to keep track of friends and rivals in encounters between rival sub-groups.

Interestingly, the chimp looked much clumsier in his hand-waving in front of the screen, than did the psychologist with her seemingly carefully targetted motion of hand and outstretched fingers. But the results showed otherwise. We are easily fooled by form.

It does seem paradoxical that wolves appear more altruistic than chimps, but of course chimps in enclosures are fed individually, and they do not have to depend on each other in hunts for monkeys.

Lots of studies have shown that chimps can be trained to communicate in symbol sequences, approximating to human speech. I know this work is criticised as not taking into account the complex recursive nature of speech, but in my other postings on this site I have given evidence for a rejection of Chomsky's purely recursive models of language.

Unless Tallis takes all these sorts of things into account, I don't think his views can carry much weight. Whenever I visit a book shop, I am repelled by the simplistic discussions of the philosophy books, and attracted much more by those on cognitive psychology.

A big gap in my toolkit used to be my lack of statistical knowledge. I put that right 3 years ago, and now books on language acquisition or machine learning, or papers on medical trials make a lot more sense to me.

There is such a lot to learn before you get to be any use in science, and other things like setting exams, or I guess treating patients, tend to limit the time left for learning. The philosophers just seem to want to ignore all this new knowledge.

I believe Tallis is mainly wanting to critique the reductionism that often goes hand-in-hand with philosophical naturalism, and the epistemic hubris that follows.

Whilst I found Francis Crick's 1994 book "Astonishing Hypothesis" a good introduction to the brain, especially the visual cortex, his quest for the seat of consciousness strikes me as rather hopeless.

Reviews of Tallis's book regularly mention this quest for the consciousness.

There are I believe 44 already-identified areas for analysing image, in the visual cortex. David Caplan's book "Language" explains the language model, based on psychological experiment, that shows us to have 8 independent dictionaries in our brains. A recent book by Dehaene brings these models up to date, relative to MRI imaging.

Neuroscience seems always to show that our brains consist of quite large committees, voting together on every decision, however minute, that we make. In fact, I get practical experience of this when I write software to analyse text.

Here in the UK, we can watch our parliamentary committees on TV, and personally I have had a little experience of chairing discussions. At the end, the chairperson seems to remember only the conclusions, not the arguments by individual members.

If we cannot remember something, we cannot be conscious of it. So we get a kind of Uncertainty Principle, where you can either introspect and to some extent see the individual components and their arguments, or else you can rationalise your reasons for action and see just the chairman's view. And all the psychology work on memory shows that we tend to push all experience into existing frameworks of knowledge, so as to generalise our experience as much as possible. The chairman appears to be just as simplistic as the individual components.

But don't we have the same experience when watching a Shakespeare play? We can analyse the individual lines, but what matters in the end is how we felt when we walked out of the theatre.

Whether our increasingly complex computer systems will ever reach a point where they develop a consciousness, is not likely to bother us for a few decades yet.

Many of us have watched with sadness the character deterioration that comes with alcoholism or dementia, although of course we do tend to project our prior images of the people involved onto them even when these do not fit. As you increasingly lose mental functionality, the consciousness seems to grow smaller.

That's my 5 pennorth on the question of consciousness.