Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity [Hardcover]

The doctrine that the brain is the sole source of mental phenomena is so firmly established in Western intellectual circles that it takes a brave thinker to challenge it. Raymond Tallis doesn't merely make the case against it, he tears into it with polemical gusto.

Tallis has no patience with scientism, the 'mistaken belief that the natural sciences can or will give a complete description and even explanation of everything, including human life'. He takes aim at the orthodox view of the brain, promoted aggressively by Daniel Dennett among others, that every mental phenomenon can be accounted for in terms of matter - the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology. Human behaviour and decision-making can't be reduced to what is going on in our brains, any more than it can be explained in terms of evolutionary adaptation, he thinks. Far from being chained to our evolutionary past, human consciousness has developed to the point that we have the ability to recognize and subvert the unconscious impulses that are supposed to drive us.

There are no punches pulled here. The idea underlying modern neuroscience, that nerve impulses can journey towards a place where they become consciousness, is plain 'barmy', Tallis thinks. He is scathing about Daniel Dennett's attempt to explain away intentionality by arguing that the inner life we ascribe to others is merely an 'interpretative device' and that nothing in reality corresponds to it. On the contrary, he argues, 'it is not out of mere interpretative convenience that we ascribe all sorts of intentional phenomena - perceptions, feelings, thoughts - to people; it is because the intentional phenomena are real, as we know from our own case.' These questions are easy to lose sight of, Tallis suggests, especially if one 'is a neuromaniac and has a vested interest in concealing it'.

Tallis is especially scornful about the way academics in the humanities - until recently sceptical of the claims of science - have rushed to embrace what he calls 'Neuromania', developing a whole new line in gobbledygook with which to impress and baffle their readers. He points out that fMRI scanning technology is actually quite a blunt instrument, that misses at least as much neuronal activity as it reveals - and doesn't justify the claims being based on it. The design of the studies used to reveal what's going on in the brain when, for instance, we feel romantic love or go on a shopping binge are 'laughably crude' and actually don't explain very much at all.

What gives the polemic force is the fact that Tallis knows his stuff, as a medical doctor who has also engaged in neuroscientific research. He gives a very detailed picture of what is known about the workings of the brain, and the assumptions that are currently being made about it, before going on to demonstrate what he considers to be gross flaws in the orthodox approaches.

Once I'd grasped how completely Tallis rejects current thinking I was all agog to know what he - a knowledgeable neuroscientist and 'proud atheist' - would propose in its place. He briefly sketches three alternatives: that consciousness is to be understood in terms of human relations as much as in biology (a view apparently now being promoted by the MIT, once the capital of mind-brain identity theory); that the solution will be found in quantum mechanics (which he forcefully dismisses); or that we should seriously moot the possibility of panpsychism, that consciousness is present throughout the entire universe (which, like David Chalmers and Galen Strawson, he considers has a certain logic). However since none of these really appeal, he is content to remain an 'ontological agnostic'.

Aping Mankind is erudite, passionate, witty and humane, although the humour will probably be lost on readers who find their assumptions being mocked. There will be at least some support for the attack on the media's uncritical fascination with neuroscience - this is a bubble just waiting to be pricked. But I can't see the arguments against consciousness being a product solely of brain functions gaining much traction with an establishment so wedded to materialist dogmas. That someone taking the minority view should express himself so forcefully will be considered poor taste.

However for those of us who consider the orthodox view of mind to be scientifically and philosophically incoherent - and richly in need of debunking - his book is a wonderfully stimulating read.

When a colleague told me that evolutionary psychologists had recently discovered that human beings had evolved to be social animals I was aghast. Having been a social psychologist myself for half a century and aware of at least two hundred years of the greatest minds studying people and their society, taking for granted we are all social beings, I was horrified that any discipline could claim to have 'discovered' this self-evident fact. I realised this was part of a turf war, fought with simple experiments using highly complicated brain mapping machines and unverifiable claims for evolutionary origins, to claim intellectual ownership of every conceivable aspect of human activity and experience from rape to religion. But it was not until I read Raymond Tallis' book that I realised just how deeply these neuro-Darwinian revolutionaries had penetrated into every aspect of our intellectual and professional life. He reveals how nothing is sacred to them whether it be the poems of John Donne or jurisprudence, appreciation of paintings or politics.

Fighting his way through this plethora of attempts to diminish human beings to little more than their biology and evolutionary history he shows with remarkable clarity and wit just how illogical and empirically unsound are their claims. He does this by starting with consideration of the basic biological building blocks of nerve cells and synapses then on to larger structures and the brain. At each stage he deftly shows that it is just not possible to explain the richness of human consciousness, interpersonal-contact and culture by reduction to biochemical processes.

What is remarkable and of the greatest importance in his criticism of claims that we are only our brains is that he steers clear of the pitfalls that lay in wait for those who do not have the grasp of neuroscience he has. Tallis makes clear that some sort of spiritual existence independently of the body has no logical support. He also accepts totally the role of our bodies and brains in what makes us who we are, especially when severe brain damage influences how we act. Something he is all too painfully aware of in his clinical practice. But our biology is only a starting point, human experience, society and culture create our being beyond our bodies.

This book is part of a small library of books Raymond Tallis has written on related matters. It shows him to be in the vangaurd of a growing number of philosphers and scientists who have seen that the neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists have been having a free ride. The media fascination with the simplistic idea that we are just naked apes gives publicity to claims that are potentially destructive because they dehumanise human beings. It is for that reason that Tallis' explorations of the ethical implications of the biological interpretations of what makes us people are the most important aspects of this significant book.

This is an important book, although not perhaps for the reasons the author would like. Having enjoyed reading Michelangelo's Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence and hearing Raymond Tallis talk in person on several occasions, I was looking forward to this, with some reservations. Unfortunately, those reservations have been aggravated rather than assuaged now that I'm reading the book. It has much to recommend it and it's also incredibly frustrating in places. I enjoy the breadth of his knowledge and his passionate advocacy of science (as a clinical neuroscientist he was "awestruck by the images that became available" towards the end of his career). Unlike many scientists, he appreciates the usefulness of philosophy in clearing the ground of conceptual muddles, and in this vein he has an admirable disdain for poststructuralism and other such intellectual fads.

A peculiar quality of this book, however, is that some aspects can both impress and frustrate, almost at the same time. For example, the bibliography runs to over fifteen pages, and represents an impressive range of primary publications and secondary reading. Tallis not only knows what he's talking about, he seems to know what everyone else is talking about. So, why can I, with a much smaller library of references, identify at least three or four books that are unaccountably absent? Now, I usually don't like critics who complain about what's missing, but occasionally I think such complaints can be justified.

For example, one of the major themes of the book explores, to put it crudely, the gap between matter and consciousness. Tallis is keen "to resist the claim that it is the structure and complexity of the brain that creates consciousness". Those who suppose that the contents of consciousness boil down to "patterns of material objects or events" in the brain forget that these have to be picked out by something else: "a conscious observer". How Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain is actually the title of Antonio Damasio's latest book, mysteriously uncited by Tallis despite being highly relevant. Damasio explores how "the brain manages to introduce a knower in the mind" (p11 of his book). In contrast, time and again Tallis pours scorn on "the Hippocratic notion that the brain and the mind are identical" (p39 of his book) and so, it would seem, Tallis must conclude that Damasio is making a fundamental mistake. And yet when Damasio writes that there "is indeed a self, but it is a process, not a thing", surely Tallis would agree?

"The notion that our consciousness, the self to which the successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identical with activity in our brains is so widely received that it seems downright eccentric to profess otherwise." That Tallis is aware of his own eccentricity is endearing up to a point, until it becomes, and in one sense literally, self-defeating. In his vehement rejection of the brain he does not see that he's also throwing overboard the very thing he wants to preserve, the self.

For all its complexity and diversity, the self has one very simple, and logically crucial, property: boundedness. Tallis seems to forget this when he insists that our "consciousness, and the engines that shape it, cannot be found solely in the stand-alone brain; or even just in a brain in a body; or even in a brain interacting with other brains in bodies". Our consciousness, he continues, "participates in, and is part of, a community of minds built up by conscious human beings over hundreds of thousands of years". Surely, he is confusing consciousness with culture?

In Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief (another uncited book), Nicholas Humphrey identifies one necessary condition for natural selection as being that living organisms should be highly discrete in the way they go about things. Having boundaries is essential, not just biologically, but for precisely those aspects of human nature that Tallis fears are under threat from a biological description: personality, character, personhood, self.

Humphrey also notes that scientific materialism "is regarded by many, even by some of its own prophets, as deeply unsatisfying" (p7 of his book). Along with the "resistless melancholy" Elizabeth Barrett feared would fall upon her if she had such thoughts, this captures the overwhelming feeling of this book. I certainly got the impression that Tallis would agree wholeheartedly with Elizabeth Barrett that scientific materialism is "a miserable creed" but I just don't share his pain. That could well be because I am too stupid to understand the issues, and I freely admit I may be closer to the pig satisfied than Socrates unsatisfied.

However, Tallis is not quite the socratic sage himself. In a revealing sentence he says: "if the arguments sketched above were sound... then we would require no data to support them". Now, he is enough of a philosopher to realize that arguments are either sound or unsound, not true or false, but he seems to forget that validity is only one criterion for soundness: the premises must also be true, and this requires data.

This is not the only infelicity in reasoning. In attacking the bogeyman of determinism he mistakenly conflates ultimate and personal responsibility, as if losing one jeopardizes the other. In her magnificent Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction (Philosophy and the Human Situation) (another uncited book), the professional philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards addresses many of the issues that concern Tallis. Indeed, her title is one of the major themes of his book, which makes this omission all the more curious. In contrast with Tallis, she writes that "many philosophers argue that determinism is essential for free will and responsibility" (p139 of her book). You wouldn't get that impression reading Aping Mankind.

Tallis snorts in derision at uberneuromaniac Daniel Dennett's idea that free will is an illusion. What's so funny about that? Gravity, too, is an illusion (a "fictitious" force, according to Victor Stenger in Fallacy of Fine-Tuning), but I don't go jumping out of fifth-floor windows expecting to fly. This polemical tone can be entertaining so long as you share his judgement about who is a deserving target, although it also inevitably corrodes his intellectual project. For example, he quite rightly recoils from prefix promiscuity, where neuro- is tagged on to everything. And yet Tallis is guilty of this himself. I've always read Dennett as a philosopher who has a broad and deep interest in science. I've heard him lecture several times, and I've never heard him described or introduced as a "neurophilosopher" and yet this is how Tallis chooses to characterize him. It is one of the many ironies in this book that Tallis narrows Dennett with this demeaning term, while elsewhere lambasting those who limit our view of the mind to brain.

Is it also a cheap rhetorical trick to invent ridiculous sounding terms like Neuromania and Darwinitis and then go on at length as though they were real? I wouldn't go that far. These ugly diseases of the mind are more than "shaping fantasies" apprehended by the seething brain of Raymond Tallis. That they are not entirely within his own head gives this book some legitimacy, although, ironically, their unreality would vindicate some of his arguments about the mind's wonderful ability to transcend material reality. He has given local habitation and names to more than "airy nothing" but I fear he "sees more devils than vast hell can hold".