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.

_Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram through a City_ is a work of joyful wonder inspired by the encounter between the philosopher of the title and one of the world’s most beautiful cities. The memoir is anchored in the enchanting 22 tram journey linking the author’s flat in Prague with the Castle. The city is unpacked in a torrent of sharp-eyed observations, reflections, and speculations, seasoned with mischievous humour. An attempt to encompass the magic, history, culture, and tragedy of Prague is interwoven with reflections on the enigmas of the human mind, of memory and forgetfulness, of knowledge and ignorance, and our strange nature as embodied subjects. The story of the meeting of a mind and a city widens and deepens into a celebration of the mystery of the world and of the human creatures who have constructed it.

These essays from one of our most stimulating thinkers showcase Tallis's infectious fascination, indeed intoxication, with the infinite complexity of human lives and the human condition. In the title essay, we join Tallis on a stroll around his local park - and the intricate passages of his own consciousness - as he uses the motif of the walk, the amble, to occasion a series of meditations on the freedoms that only human beings possess. In subsequent essays, the flaneur thinks about his brain, his relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom, his profession of medicine and about the physical world and the claims of physical science to have rendered philosophical reflection obsolete. Taken together the essays continue Tallis's mission to elaborate a vision of humanity that rejects religious myths while not succumbing to scientism or any other form of naturalism. Written with the author's customary intellectual energy and vigour these essays provoke, move and challenge us to think differently about who we are and our place in the material world.

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.

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.

A little while back I touched on the ‘laws of nature’ in the course of a defence of free will (‘The Mystery of Freedom’, Issue 140). I argued that if we were entirely subject to such laws, then neither the experimental science by which they were discovered nor our capacity to exploit them through technology would be possible. Our undeniable ability to manipulate states of matter inside scientific laboratories in pursuit of knowledge of its general properties, and to apply that knowledge outside of the laboratories in support of our agency, are perhaps the most striking expressions of the way in which we humans transcend the material world. But ‘the laws of nature’ (socalled) deserve more attention than I gave them in that piece on free will.

Long before self-awareness, memory, foresight and powers of conscious deliberation emerge to give an advantage over those creatures that lack those things, there is a more promising alternative to consciousness at every step of the way: more efficient unconscious mechanisms, which seem equally or more likely to be thrown up by spontaneous variation. If you had to undertake something really difficult – for example growing in utero a brain with all its connexions in place – consciousness is the last thing you would want to oversee the task.