Raymond Tallis

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.

Understanding hunger is the key to understanding ourselves. While they seem the most obvious things about us, our hungers are also deeply mysterious, arising out of, and casting light on, the unique character of human consciousness. In humans, physiological need is transformed into a multitude of needs that are remote from organic necessity. Even first-level biological hunger is experienced differently in humans; and little in human feeding behaviour has any parallel in the animal kingdom.In this book, Ray Tallis takes us through the different levels of our hunger. Out of our primary appetites arise a myriad of pleasures and tastes that are elaborated in second-level hedonistic hungers creating new values. The evolution of appetite into desire opens the way to social hungers such as the hunger for acknowledgement. Awareness of death awakens a further level of hunger for something that lies beyond the pell-mell of successive experiences leading towards extinction. The art of living is the art of managing our hungers

There has been an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the enigma of human consciousness among neuroscientists, psychologists, and professional philosophers. Much work is aimed at accommodating consciousness within the currently dominant physicalist world picture. This book is a comprehensive and sometimes impassioned attack to "biologize" consciousness by explaining its origin in evolutionary terms and identifying mental phenomena with brain processes; to "computerize" it by identifying mind with the supposed computational activity of the brain; and to empty or eliminate it by denying the reality of qualia. Raymond Tallis's critique concludes with a long look at man--"the explicit animal"--that makes the irreducible mystery of human consciousness impossible to overlook or deny.