Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

by 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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Psychology, Neuroscience, Cultural, Biology

400 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2011

About the author

Professor Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic and was until recently a physician and clinical scientist. In the Economist's Intelligent Life Magazine (Autumn 2009) he was listed as one of the top living polymaths in the world.

Born in Liverpool in 1946, one of five children, he trained as a doctor at Oxford University and at St Thomas' in London before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford. Professor Tallis retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer, though he remained Visiting Professor at St George's Hospital Medical School, University of London until 2008.

Prior to his retirement from medicine to devote himself to writing, Raymond Tallis had responsibility for acute and rehabilitation patients and took part in the on-call rota for acute medical emergencies. He also ran a unique specialist epilepsy service for older people. Amongst his 200 or so medical publications are two major textbooks - The Clinical Neurology of Old Age (Wiley, 1988) and the comprehensive Brocklehurst's Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology (Harcourt Brace, co-edited with Howard Fillitt, 6th edition, 2003). Most of his research publications were in the field of neurology of old age and neurological rehabilitation. He has published original articles in Nature Medicine, Lancet and other leading journals. Two of his papers were the subject of leading articles in Lancet. In 2000 Raymond Tallis was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in recognition of his contribution to medical research; in 2002 he was awarded the Dhole Eddlestone Prize for his contribution to the medical literature on elderly people; and in 2006 he received the Founders Medal of the British Geriatrics Society. In July 2007, he received the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing, and in November 2011 he was honoured with the International League Against Epilepsy's Special Excellence in Epilepsy Award. He is a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

Over the last 20 years Raymond Tallis has published fiction, three volumes of poetry, and 23 books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism. Together with over two hundred articles in Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and many other outlets, these books offer a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness, the nature of language and of what it is to be a human being. For this work, Professor Tallis has been awarded three honorary degrees: DLitt (Hon. Causa) from the University of Hull in 1997; LittD (Hon. Causa) at the University of Manchester 2002 and Doc (Med) SC, St George's Hospital 2015. He was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Liverpool until 2013.

Raymond Tallis makes regular appearances at Hay, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and other book festivals, and lectures widely.

Raymond Tallis's national roles have included: Consultant Advisor in Health Care of the Elderly to the Chief Medical Officer; a key part in developing National Service Framework for Older People, in particular the recommendations of developing services for people with strokes; membership of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence Appraisal Committee; Chairmanship of the Royal College of Physicians Committee on Ethics in Medicine; Chairman of the committee reviewing ethics support for front-line clinicians; and membership of the Working Party producing a seminal report Doctors in Society, Medical Professionalism in a Changing World (2005). From July 2011 to October 2014 he was the elected Chair, Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD).

In 2012 he was a member of the judges' panel for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

In 2015 he judged the Notting Hill Essay prize.

Reviews

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tallis takes on neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists who, he argues, reduce humans to beasts. We have bodily functions like animals but beyond that, we're qualitatively different and exceptional. Our distinctive trait is consciousness, which has nothing to do with our biology.

Tallis has this theory about the development of consciousness. Our upright, bipedal position frees our hands. During our development as individuals (and as a species), we touch our body and become aware of it as an object and its distinction from the "I" who touches. That distinction extends to the distant environment when we point with our finger. The end result is an "I" consciousness that can separate the body from space and time. From here, like-minded humanity exchanges knowledge and we form a community of minds that contributes to the body of objective knowledge that progressively solves human challenges. Mind becomes transcendent.

I don't know whether any of this has merit, but it is an interesting notion. Where Tallis's argument runs into problems is his refusal to acknowledge our animality in all of this. In one of his many illustrations about how we differ from animals, he uses the example of spitting. In spitting out disgusting food, we are animal, but when we add the human mental element, we spit to indicate contempt for someone. O.k., but why do we have contempt? What is that about? And that question prompts others. Why do we love? Why are some ambitious for power? Why are so many preoccupied with status and rank? Why do we defer to leaders? Why do we conform to the group?

Tallis is offended when the "material metaphysics" of the ultra Darwinists downgrade religious beliefs. Religious belief systems, he says, are the result of our self-awareness about our own mortality, something animals do not have. Isn't this also an example of not just our humanity, but of our animal desire to live and, because we can think, to live forever?

How many of these ends of behavior are built into our survival needs? How many of these ends are served by our consciousness? That's the main point of evolutionary psychology that Tallis so vehemently attacks. Yes, we do have a community of minds that builds a body of objective knowledge. But that lofty side of humankind is more than likely a by-product of an abstract mind that evolved to do something entirely different: serve our survival goals. And despite Tallis's criticism of hard core evolutionary biology - and many of his points seem valid enough - this is, really, evolutionary biology's central point.

Tallis argues that evolutionary biology degrades our humanity in other ways as well. His picture of evolution is that of a "war of all against all" and selfish desire run rampant. Clearly we love, we express sympathy and compassion, and we cooperate with each other for the common good. Are these the simple choices of a collective humanitarian consciousness as Tallis would have us believe or do they come from our biology? Evolutionary theory might have a thing to say about how these other-oriented traits evolved, beyond kin selection.

Tallis also states that we do things deliberately rather than go through life reacting, as animals do, in a ping-pong fashion. That's an interesting take on animals, but this is not how much of evolutionary psychology accounts for human behavior. Our capacity for abstraction is also part of our evolutionary history and that capacity gives us the ability to choose one course over another, informed by not what's inside, but what's outside, based on information that has a direct bearing on our survival. The ends of behavior are related to survival and well being, but how we satisfy those ends depends on our ability to perceive the world objectively. We have fixed ends, but we are free to choose how we achieve those ends. Rather than degrading, what's not cool about that?

Like some of the neuroscientists that he criticizes, Tallis pushes human "exceptionalism". As with the question of whether a glass is half full or half empty, we can choose to say we are more animal than human or vice versa. The problem with leaving our animality behind, though, is the attitude that underlies it. Why do we need "exceptionalism" to refer to ourselves? Why can't we see ourselves as a life form like another other life form? Each has an exceptional quality. In a way, this is the essential meaning of a species. Our special trait is our conscious mind, but why give the "rah rah" to one species and not the others? Why can we not celebrate that all life seeks to live and that we, like animals, seek to be free not just of suffering, but to be free, period? To his credit, Tallis says he's against animal suffering, but he still calls them "beasts." The problem is when there's is a conflict between beasts and humans, humans will always win. That's why we dominate now, and that's why we are likely creating the next great species extinction. That adds a new dimension to human exceptionalism.

There's good stuff in this book, but the language he uses gets in the way. Why the prejorative terminology? Why the put down comments about the arguments of others? Why not simply state one's point and simply state how one disagrees with their arguments.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raymond Tallis understands something that many in the cruder reaches of online atheism do not: humanism and materialism are not only not synonymous, but prove under relatively little scrutiny to be irreconcilable. As soon as one posits that the totality of human personhood is reducible to a closed physical circuitry of cause and effect produced through the interaction of discrete objects in the nervous system in response to environmental stimuli, mind and personhood disappear as the integrated reality we experience at every moment; the “I” of the self dissolves into a series of “its”, a mishmash of passive automaticities that cannot of themselves account for the unitive, intentional, willful, and temporally-coherent properties of consciousness.

Needless to say, a coherent humanism is impossible if the human person is flattened out and stitched into the kaleidoscopic embroidery of physical events. Absent any kind of extra-physical reality, peering into the human brain from the “perspective from nowhere” that science aspires to, empiricists find no initiator of our actions in the world—no homunculus tucked away in the cerebral cortex making free, spontaneous choices and directing our bodies accordingly—within which our free will may be localized. Without such an initiator, we (or the “we” we think we are) cannot be the cause of our own actions; and thus there is no free will.

The physicalist worldview, when taken out of the realm of empirical observation and advanced as a totalizing normative ideology, not only dismantles the volitional human being but also produces, among some, a shockingly strident anti-humanism. Thus Stephen Hawking’s characterization of humanity as “a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet”, Voltaire’s as “insects devouring one another on a little atom of mud”, and the misanthropic philosopher John Gray’s assertion that “human life has no more meaning than that of slime mould”, can be greeted with reverential assent by those who wish to be inducted into the society of enlightened beings rather than the dismissive, joyful mockery they deserve. Setting aside the absurdity of trying to denigrate the only beings in the known universe with the capacity to denigrate themselves, it is painfully ironic that the naïve scientism championed by humanists who wish to free humanity from the yoke of what they regard as some supernatural Nobodaddy end up subordinating it to a paradoxically physicalist metaphysics with apostles of such virulent misanthropy that Jonathan Edwards would tell them to lighten up.

Tallis, himself a neuroscientist as well as a philosopher, has made it his project to demolish the pretentions of physicalist reductionism and its imperial designs on every field of thought. A genuine humanist as well as an atheist, he identifies two pillars of the pseudo-pathological reductionism of contemporary materialist thought: Neuromania, the belief that consciousness is identical with brain activity and that personhood—along with the things we experience as persons, like love, wonder, creativity, beauty, temporality, and the like—can theoretically be detected with an MRI machine; and Darwinitis, the analogous belief that the evolutionary processes that gave rise to the human species can also account for the nature of human persons, which consequently trivializes the distinctions between humans and other animals as matters of degree rather than of kind. These mutually-reinforcing assertions are waging a two-pronged war on the humanities; and to Tallis’s dismay, many have chosen a path of collaboration rather than resistance.

Through a series of exhaustive arguments, Tallis refutes numerous attempts to explain how the phenomenal world we experience through consciousness can be attributed solely to a collection of nerve impulses. The passive matter of the brain simply cannot be made to account for the intentionality or “aboutness” that is characteristic of a conscious state. Even the most fundamental and prosaic conscious experiences, the qualia through which it is like something to taste a banana or see the color yellow, are suggestive of a “pushing back” against the flow of physical causality, an agency and willfulness as well as a coherent self, undiminished through time, in which these qualia are experienced and accommodated.

It is this irreducible intentionality, which is not approximated anywhere else in the cosmos, that has allowed us to exceed, in some sense, the physical constitution of our bodies. Our bodies are necessary for us to be conscious, of course, but they are not sufficient to explain consciousness. Somehow, in the midst of a personless, perspectiveless flow of physical contingencies, a being emerged that knows itself as a being, has a conscious perspective, and knowingly and proactively changes the world around it. We have created a world offset from the natural world from which we emerged: a human world established through our collective consciousness and sustained at all times by “ a trillion cognitive handshakes”. This world, and the persons who inhabit it, are no insects on an atom of mud. They are a light shining in a darkness that has not overcome it.

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually finished this a week after getting it early last month. It's one of those books that I wrote lots of notes alongside and I haven't yet had time to do a collated review but I will do one later as I think it's an important book. Just a few points here. First, there is an awful lot I disagree with. That's fine. That's how it should be. That's what conversations produce, discussions, arguments. But the book itself is well written, well structured, fair and honest: it is often rhetorical, ironic, downright sarcastic and vituperative but it wears it well. The Launcelott Spratt bombastic tone is a bit annoying at times but also kind of endearing. The main thing is, Tallis has given us a swashbuckling demolition job on Neuromania and the horrendous drift towards identifying the mind with the brain. What's more, he shows clearly why this is not some arcane academic dispute but of central importance to our society and culture. I cannot think of a more fortuitous book to come my way after the despair induced by that dreadful Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. I have reviewed that book and am most concerned that my low rating of it is against the grain. Why, there are respectable people out there who think McGilchrist is 'erudite' because he has an average knowledge of art, literature and philosophy. Curiously, Mary Midgley has blurb on the back of McGilchrist's book praising it, and blurb on the back of Tallis's book praising that too - even though the latter refers to the former as representing the extremest form of Neuromania. That's philosophers for you. Anyway, I'll come back to this soon.

[Osore Misanthrope]

[Note to the writer and publishers: centipedes are not insects, please correct this on page 4, ISBN 978-1-84465-272-3. Тако бива кад се лекар хвата биологије.]

Људи воле једноставне одговоре, а социобиологија и еволуциона психологија (ЕП) их штедро обезбеђују, нарочито у подружју са помамом за неуронаукама – неуроманијом. Дарвинизам као универзална киселина која разједа сваки концепт и преобликује мисаони крајолик, како је то чувено и сликовито рекао Денет, тако постаје бољка – дарвинитис – на коју ни он сам није имун. Алудирајући на Волтерову пародију Лајбница (Кандид) кроз лик др Панглоса који види овај свет као најбољи од свих светова, у коме све има сврху, па тако и нос који постоји да би носио наочаре, Гулд и Луонтин објављују рад Спандрели светог марка или панглосијанска парадигма: критика адаптационистичког програма, острвљујући се на тенденцију да се свака (тренутно) адаптивна карактеристика сматра адаптацијом, што се поткрепљује непроверљивим ad hoc објашњењима (just so stories) – отуда панадаптационизам/панглосијанизам. Оно што се чини адаптацијом може бити спандрел, нуспродукт адаптационих процеса кооптиран за биолошку функцију, попут шупљине у љуштури (umbilicus) коју неки пужеви користе за инкубацију јаја. Као што спандрел у архитектури није настао да би носио фреске, тако ни ова шупљина није селектована због јаја – она није селектована уопште. (Ексаптација, за разлику од спандрела, јесте адаптација која је променила функцију, нпр. перје – од терморегулационе до летачке ф-је.) Природа и еволуција нису сврховити и не постоји план или циљ на основу кога еволуциони механизми делују. Телеолошко и креационистичко разумевање природе су највећа срамота за биолога.

ЕП дарвинитисти, Козмидес и компанија, формулишу тезу о модуларном уму која је панглосијанска, непроверљива и редукционистичка, атомизује мозак по моделу рачунара или швајцарског ножића, са наводно аутоматским функционалним целинама, модулима, еволутивним наслеђем/пртљагом наших предака из каменог доба. На трагу социобиолога, они тврде да ове адаптације која наш мозак вуче из прошлости у савременој средини могу бити маладаптивне. Њихове причице су заводљиве и логичне, али не пружају адекватне евиденције. Људско понашање је биологизовано и сагледава се геноцентрично, у светлу Докинсовог себичног гена као наводне јединице селекције. Човек је тобоже програмиран, често се понаша импулсивно, инстинктивно и ирационално, јер га је природна селекција обликовала тако да тежи да осигура опстанак својих гена повећањем фитнеса – фертилитета и вијабилитета. Мушкарци су зато склони неверству, силовање је природно, а ту је и модул за љубомору, подлога за Хјумову зверску природу човека у чијем друштву доминирају компетитивни, антагонистички односи. Биологизам и социјални дарвинизам in a nutshell.

Истина, као што сам то више пута овде провриштао, јесте да је дихотомија урођено/стечено лажна, да се средином сматра и молекулски миље у коме се гени експримирају још током развића и да човек није преформиран (хомункулус) у гаметима; да инстинктивно понашање захтева адекватан средински стимулус (видети огледе Лермана на пацовима и Гетлиба на пачићима) и да је човек производ садејства, а не сукоба природе и културе, да постоји прожимање између гена и средине, биокултурни процес (а питање у којој мери и коеволуција између гена и културе – види пример са лактазом).

Потребно је стално наглашавати ову критику јер су биологизми у тренду, а новинари нарочито вољни да од ионако самопромовишућег научног резултата направе сензацију. Универзална киселина или зараза лабораторијским мантилом, како каже Талис, проширила се на готово све академске сфере. Књижевни дарвинисти, не увиђајући да бављење књижевношћу није наследно и стога не може бити адаптација, држе га за исто, уз објашњење да оно повећава фитнес и настаје као последица сексуалне селекције, иако се не може рећи да писци слове за плодне полигамисте са гомилом деце (приметити мизогину компоненту у фиксацији на мушке писце-заводнике). Штавише, ова причица, погађате, сеже до људи из каменог доба, о чијем језику и наративима не знамо ништа. Ту је и евокритика да тумачи ликове, лица и лирске субјекте из текстова рђавим алатима социобиолога и ЕП-фрикова. Узјахивањем можданих скенера од стране филолога (какав интердисциплинарни луксуз!), добијамо neuro-lit-crit небулозу где се доживљај текста не артикулише речима, већ скеновима, и не само то: “The authors go on to explain that “when moving his right hand, an actor playing Macbeth would activate the right cerebellar hemisphere and the left primary cortex, as shown in figure 14” (indeed, as we do when we scratch our noses). This, as Massey points out, helps us neither to understand Shakespeare nor to advance our understanding of neurology.”

Од Докинсове погрешне аналогије мема, културно преносивих образаца/идеја, и гена, проистиче културна еволуција, биологизација културних промена, чиме се атомизује људско друштво, занемарују се његова емергентна и контингентна својства, историјски аспект, а у корист наводно трансисторијских законитости (културна промена као порекло са модификацијама). Истина, културна дешавања и превирања, за разлику од природне еволуције, нису утемељена на физичким носачима варијабилности (какви су гени), културна разноликост не мора настати насумично (попут биолошке варијабилности), може бити дизајнирана, диригована и сврховита, за разлику од еволуционих механизама који делују ненасумично (селекција, асортативно укрштање) или насумично (мутација, дрифт, проток гена), али без циља. “Линеарна објашњења довољно блиска историји омогућавају удаљеном посматрачу да види каузалност уместо проксималности. Ове аналитичке трасе су заправо лажне тангенте – накратко блиске, али никад у сусрету, контуре историје.”* Рејмонд Талис се залаже за људску изузетност инсистирајући на ономе што нас од осталих животиња разликује. Овде је кардинално питање животињске културе која (не) постоји у зависности од биолошке врсте и дефиниције културе. Једино људи поседују симболичку културу.

Проблем свести: насупрот картезијанском дуализму ума (свести) и тела (мозга), између њих се ставља знак једнакости. Талис пита како мозак може истовремено да буде и узрок свести и сама свест, тј. како узрок може бити истовремено и последица. Ако је мозак неопходан узрочник, да ли је истовремено и довољан? Мисаони опит мозак у бачви се наводно урушава јер захтева свесне екстерне посматраче мозга у бачви.

Талис сматра да свест није идентична неуронској активности и не види како је утеловљена, било на основу функционалне локализације, било на бази различитих образаца неуронске активности. Акциони потенцијали, њихова просторна и временска сумација, синаптичко потенцирање, ритам окидања, ексцитабилност…све то је у основи свести, али како знати шта је свест тачно? Сумација? – Каква? Сâмо путовање импулса? – Куда, како?

Свест супервенира на неуробиолошким процесима (а ови на хемијским и физичким) и не може се на њих свести. Другим речима, свест је емергентна јер није прост збир својих делова, тачније, поседује одлике које феномени у њеној основи немају. Ово није разлог да се тврди како је свест мистерија, али можда никада неће постојати некакав краниоскоп који ће моћи да пружи слику свих неуробиолошких дешавања у основи свести и препише је на језик хемије и физике на чије законе се ова ослања. Живи системи су најсложенији познати системи у васиони, а људски мозак је можда најсложенији орган од свих, и стога ово не треба да чуди. Повлачење каузалног ланца од великог праска до (по)мисли је излишно и погрешно. Срећом, Талис је атеиста и изричито против било каквих натприродних објашњења, попут духова или хомункулуса у лобањи.

Друга мистерија за Талиса јесте интенционалност – како наша перцепција објекта може бити и мишљење тог објекта, како се нервна активност узрокована перцепираним објектом усмерава натраг на тај објекат. Овде бих дописао нашу способност да вољно активирамо своју мождану активност, промишљамо, маштамо…

fMRI – ограничења (Рејмонд Талис + Хелена Лонгино):
• промене у протоку крви могу бити последица (пре)усмеравања кисеоника у више од једне области неуронске активности;
• мале структуре са великим утицајем на фукнционисање нервног система се не виде на скену због малог протока крви;
• последична активност мозга одражава искуство, емоцију или диспозицију, али није поистоветљива са њима;
• супстракција – опсервира се додатна активност ионако заузетог мозга;
• варијације у одговору на сукцесивне стимулусе су испеглане;
• из коваријансе понашајних диспозиција и (активности) опсервираних структура извлаче се каузални закључци и претпоставља се функционална улога ових структура у понашању, као и заједнички узрочник мождане активности и когнитивних перформанси;
• претпоставља се и да су сурогати за понашање довољно корелисани са понашањем од интереса
• погрешна статистика преувеличава корелације**;
• однос структуре и функције није један кроз један; више фукнција може одговарати једном региону мозга, и обрнуто;
• “The apparent fact that the same brain areas are activated when we listen to pleasurable music and during sex confirms how uninformative imaging is. Techniques that cannot distinguish between hearing an organ played and having one’s organs played with tell us little about them.”

“Did she envisage a generation of white-coated critics, dissecting rat brains with one hand and texts with the other, and congresses on experimental neuro aesthetics?” Следе примери неуроманије.
• Неуро-естетика: бављење уметношћу последица сексуалне селекције – укуси зацементирани код наших предака из саване.
• Неуро-право: квазиаргумент криминалаца – то нисам ја, то је мој мозак, он ме је натерао на непочинство.
• Неуро-економија: “Our decisions are snap and the snap snapped shut a long time ago, perhaps as far back as the Pleistocene era.”
• Неуро-теологија: вера у натприродно је наводно адаптација – промовише кооперацију и солидарност, а тиме и репликацију гена; тобоже постоје ген и мождана структура за бога (грешка генетичке каузалности – не постоји ген за нешто).

Longino, Helen E. "Studying human behavior.". University of Chicago Press, 2013.
** Vul, Edward, Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman, and Harold Pashler. "Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition." Perspectives on psychological science 4, no. 3 (2009): 274-290.
*Fracchia, Joseph, and Richard C. Lewontin. "Does culture evolve?." History and theory 38, no. 4 (1999): 52-78.

Недостаје ми бриткост код Талиса, Ниче ме звао јутрос да оштримо бритве...

[Nebuchadnezzar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raymond Tallis plays the Renaissance Man learned in the sciences and humanities come to debunk the twin evils of "Neuromania" and "Darwinitis" in Aping Mankind. Let me start off by pointing out where I'm in agreement with Tallis. He didn't need to convince me that there is an epidemic of over-inflated claims coming out of a collection of fields that might be termed "neuro-evolutionary studies." (I've increasingly found myself using his coinages, though I would shift more blame for these phenomena onto the popularizers.) Tallis covers similar territory that Steven Rose did in his attacks on "neurogenetic determinism" and he goes after his targets with similar polemic verve. I also agree that the importation of neuro-evolutionary ideas into the humanities has often been facile. Tallis' defense of the humanities is certainly valuable, especially in the current political climate.

However, Tallis' book is not merely a refutation of Neuromania and Darwinitis. His arguments against them are in part done in the service of defending free will, human exceptionalism, and some of his pet ideas about the nature of consciousness. His positive arguments are less convincing than his negative ones. There is not enough space in one volume to fully flesh out his views and, indeed, one of the chapters is merely a precis of The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Human Being and he references his other books copiously. This can make it difficult to truly judge Tallis' arguments in places even if one still gets the flavor of them.

There are two habits of Tallis' that mar some of his arguments, as Justin Garson notes and expands on in his review. The first is to dismiss partial explanations as worthless. Granted that many studies he reviews are overly simplistic, but this doesn't mean that they contribute nothing to our knowledge. His net is cast wide enough to occasionally catch some research that I'd call pretty solid.

The second of these habits is committing a persistent category mistake or fallacy of division. Tallis asserts that Neuromaniacs fallaciously argue that there is no such thing as the self or free will because these things cannot be found in the brain. However, he then uses this to argue that neuroscience has nothing to say about these properties. Tallis seems to take this as a defeater of Neuromania because he only considers mind-brain identity theory rather than also arguing against models of consciousness in which it is dependent on, but not reducible to, the brain.

The book still makes for a good antidote to the pernicious illnesses of Neuromania and Darwinitis, though, even if the positive arguments are sometimes flimsy.

[Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

The classic philosophers' debate about mind goes like this: do we have nonphysical spirits/minds, or does mind have a purely physical basis? In favor of a nonphysical mind, one might point out that, even with today's best available technology, scientists are not yet able to correlate a person's every thought with a visual image of their brain activity. Since mind is "invisible" or cannot (yet) be pointed to as a visual image, and its origins are mysterious, therefore it must be "nonphysical". On the other hand, in favor of a physically-grounded mind, one might say that simply because science has not yet unraveled the exceedingly complex and delicate workings of the brain does not mean that the brain will prove insufficient to explain consciousness. Appealing to fanciful spirits will not answer these unanswered questions; it merely creates a silly fiction that looks like an answer. Furthermore, if mind is nonphysical, the very idea of nonphysicality generates some unanswerable questions, such as "How can a nonphysical spirit be located in a physical body?" and "How can a nonphysical spirit exchange information with its physical body?"

Aping Mankind caught my attention because I wanted to hear Raymond Tallis argue against the idea that consciousness is caused purely by physical attributes. In this day and age, are there any good scientifically-supported arguments for a nonphysical spirit? Would Tallis, an atheist and medical scientist, defend the idea of ghosts?

No, he doesn't, which left me bewildered and disappointed. In this book, Tallis bypasses the classic debate. He manages to argue at great length against the idea that consciousness is entirely grounded in the brain without giving adequate attention to the obvious follow-up question: "OK, but there's no ghosts, right?" If consciousness is not in the brain, where is it? He doesn't really explain, at least not in enough detail to satisfy someone who has just waded through his 361-page argument. He alludes to the "pre-modern" nature of belief in ghosty souls but he never explicitly, personally rejects this pre-modern belief nor does he present a clear alternative.

Toward the end, he devotes a few pages to explaining what he thinks is missing from our theory of consciousness. Our sense of self is based on linked ideas and shared culture, he says. Taking photographs of a single person's brain ignores the connections between people, the relationships that make us who we are.

Yes, indeed, our minds are shaped by interaction with other people. But what -- I must ask -- is the metaphysical nature of this interaction, this culture? Is culture, too, a ghost, a nonphysical stratum in which are suspended nonphysical souls? Or does culture, in addition to its behavioral and historical characteristics that are truly shared facts, instantiate itself in each individual's brain as a personal, evolving concept and thus is it as physically grounded as the rest of our ideas? If scientists knew how to fully "read" a living, thinking brain, could they, in principle, see culture in there, too, along with every other part of the personality? Why not?

Tallis is not principally arguing against the idea that mind is material. (At least, I don't think so--it's hard to tell.) That's a question I think he needed to address, but it's not what he focused on. As indicated in the book's subtitle, he's principally arguing against what he calls "neuromania" -- the idea that neuroscientist's photographs of brain activity can explain everything there is to know about human consciousness, including lofty, complex ideas like religion, art, and memory -- and "Darwinitis" -- the compulsive attribution of all human thought and behavior to whatever maximizes survival. The former is more central to his argument. I have never perceived "neuromania" as a special problem. While many people (myself included) believe that their most complex ideas and intense feelings are ultimately grounded in the physical brain, I don't know anyone who suffers the "neuromaniac" delusion that confuses a blurry, uninterpreted photograph of a brain with the subjective feeling of consciousness itself. As Tallis is a neuroscientist, perhaps he has indeed met people who suffer this delusion because they are neuroscientists invested in inflating the significance of their research methods, but if so it seems that neuromania afflicts mainly neuroscientists and not the general population. Maybe the book is best read as a cautionary tale for neuroscientists.

This book has many good qualities. Tallis is witty, well-read, and original. He has firmly held atheist beliefs but doesn't feel the need to remind the reader of it constantly, refreshingly preferring to engage the reader in a discussion of ideas rather than a duel of identities. He believes in evolution and doesn't waste time defending it in this book, presuming that his reader can appreciate a philosophical discussion that assumes twenty-first century science. Nor is he anti-religion. The book even won a blurb of praise from Roger Scruton, a philosopher who has defended the role of religion in public life. Tallis recognizes that religious beliefs contain meaning that is important for anyone studying human consciousness, and he's not averse to the sparse use of the word "spirituality" to describe a certain human need when no other word will do. He has written some delightful passages on what he calls "Thatter," the tendency of humans to use language to represent things as "facts that..." which another book I'm simultaneously reading has termed "metarepresentation."

My frustration with Aping Mankind is just that it elided the question of consciousness-as-ghost consistently throughout many densely written pages through which I spent an inordinate number of hours searching for what I was hoping it would say. This book may be very useful to someone writing a philosophy thesis on the topic of mind, as there are many excellently expressed original ideas, but I wouldn't recommend this as an introductory text because for me it hopped over some of the central issues.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've enjoyed the Tallis style of fisticuffs ever since I first read his barbed assault on post-structuralism in Not Saussure. In the last 15 years, I've bought far more of his books than I've finished, but I did make through this one – despite his penchant for logic-chopping points into bosons and inventing neologisms like "neuromania" and "Darwinitis." If you're the type of skeptic entertained by Frederick Crews on Freud or Paul Feyerabend on scientific method, then you'll find Tallis a treat.

Tallis is an atheistic humanist whose humanism is as vigorous as his atheism, which makes for fine polemics. Here his double-barrels are aimed at thinkers who reduce the mind to the brain (which seems to include almost everyone who's written on the subject). He makes great sport with our current credulity toward functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – the observation that some specific activity "lights up" some part of the brain can apparently convince of us of anything. For much of the book he marches us through the perils of neurological naïveté, with its "risible simplication of human behaviour" – to the point that I now regard a brain scan ("that fast-acting solvent of critical faculties") as suspect in the hands of a physical philosopher as the photographs of the Cottingley Fairies.*

He saves the fun stuff for the end, savaging the "neuromanic" reduction as it manifests in art and literary criticism, law, ethics, economics and (remarkably for an atheist) theology. Here, for example, is his comment on A. S. Byatt's application of neurological findings to the poetry of John Donne:

By adopting a neurophysiological approach, Byatt loses a rather large number of distinctions: between reading one poem by Donne and another; between successive readings of a particular poem; between reading Donne and another metaphysical poet; between reading the metaphysical poets and reading William Carlos Williams; between reading great literature and trash; between reading and many other activities... That is an impressive number of distinctions for a literary critic to lose.

At the heart of the entire discussion is the mystery of consciousness, and Tallis freely admits he cannot clarify the conundrum – at best we end up with ontological agnosticism: "the failure to find a neuroscientific basis or correlative of the self is evidence not that the 'I' is an illusion, but that neuroscience is limited in what it has to say about us."

_______________
*For the bemused, I should probably mention that Tallis is a gerontologist specializing in the treatment of epilepsy and stroke, in which fMRI plays an critical diagnostic role.

[Greg Nigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tallis has written one very good book and one mediocre book, and they are both between the same two covers.

The first half of Aping Mankind is a sweeping, scathing and often hysterical demolition of the notion that the full panorama of human cognition can be reduced to neural activity. Tallis's brilliance here is not simply in showing that neuroscience hasn't explained consciousness through brain activities. His most compelling achievement is in showing that neuroscience *can't* explain consciousness through reference to brain activities.

Central to his thesis is the recognition that the fundamental properties of consciousness, such as awareness of time and perception of qualities, cannot be represented by physical processes (neuron firings) that do not themselves contain those properties. Physicality, for example, does not experience time or its passage. Time is an ordering of events that relies on consciousness for the ordering. But to use physical processes to explain the consciousness that has an awareness of time is to smuggle consciousness in to explain itself.

This is one minor piece of a comprehensive critique Tallis offers in the first half of his book, and it's brilliance makes it worth the purchase.

Tallis, though, loses me in the second half. His explanation of how consciousness came to be is interesting, but like so many evolutionary tales it is simply a historical narrative. Such tales are a dime a dozen in the field of evolution, stories that posit a set of adaptive transitions. For some good reasons to doubt such a narrative, see, for example, What Darwin Got Wrong.

Tallis then situates consciousness within the community, outside the confines of the brain per se. In this regard he parallels the same argument made in Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.

Ultimately, Tallis's strong commitment to an explanation consistent with conventional neo-Darwinian mechanisms leaves his "explanation" lacking. Any materialist (and therefore randomly driven) explanation that does not account for the accumulation of functional information is not really an explanation at all.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really hard read. Tallis is obviously well read and a gifted thinker, but this also makes him a hard read if the topics in science and philosophy are not things you are already familiar with as he is a name dropper and many of the names may mean nothing to you. His writing style is also difficult at times as you have to carefully follow whether he is arguing a point of science or logic. But overall his critique of both where certain neo-atheists are taking Darwin's theory and the claims being made by atheistic materialists regarding neuro-science are very profound. Tallis doesn't believe their claims are justified by current science and they in fact are merging and confusing science with their philosophical presuppositions. Tallis is an atheist himself and looking for an understanding of human consciusness in science, but he very much thinks that the ideology of certain neo-atheists has completely overshadowed their science. Tallis believes there is something unique about humans among all the beings on earth and advocates that consciousness has in a sense put humans "above" passive participation in the evolutionary process. He doesn't believe consciousness can be explained by the current claims of materialists.

[Maher El-khalidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aping Mankind was not an easy book to read but rather a demanding onerous book with lots of complex and tortuos ideas and concepts to digust. Yet it was really intellectually stimulating and I was often compelled to check meanings , bakground , names and concepts on the net and on wikipedia. The author critisizes many of the authors whom I am very familiar with all the way from biologists as Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson to Philosophers as Daniel Dennet and Patricia Churchland and many others. Reading the book was an excersize in reconsidering what I considered as biologic /scientific facts . He succeeded in planting the seeds of doubt when it comes to evaluating the truth-value of texts of other writer who are considered authorities in thoer own fields. It took me a few weeks to read the book and some days I was really baffled by what he wrote and his questioning of the conclusions which one forms when reading the other texts . I am really happy that I have read the book and I think it is worthy of a second read somtime in the future !!

[Oliver Ward · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely dire. The guy references Wikipedia twice early on in the book.

He keeps referring to consciousness as 'extra-natural' as distinct from 'supernatural' without ever laying out how the terms differ.

The central take-away message from this book is that Raymond Tallis can't get his head around the complexity of the brain and the phenomena it produces, so he has decided that there must be something mystical at play, that he refuses to define, because he has no idea what it is.

He makes no honest attempt to grapple with the problem, and doesn't have enough humility to say "I don't know what consciousness is or how it is produced. Nobody seems to know. This is a confusing and difficult science. Let's not invoke mysticism until we've ruled out every other possibility!"

Pseudo-intellectual bullshit.

[Till Noever · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very few books can claim to have changed my mind about something fundamental. This one did. Not an easy read, tightly argued, occasionally polemical and ultimately convincing me that my prior views were probably mistaken.

[Andrew]

A full-throated attack on scientism from someone who has the scientific background to back up his claims, and is just as militant in his non-dualist atheism as anyone could be. He's deeply skeptical of evo-psych bullshit, but he comes at it from a largely Dawkinsian perspective. He's even more skeptical of piss-poor cognitive science, but that's because he himself is a widely respected cognitive researcher. His attack comes from the inside, which makes it all the more powerful. The answer is not to disregard science, but on the contrary, to use the tools of science to reveal the limits of certain claims that – while scientific in their language and their ethos – are ultimately very human constructs.

Do I agree with him? I'm not sure. Especially the free will bits, I do feel like he starts to get a bit numinous, and while I agree on his commitment to humanism, I have to wonder at what point his insistence on human agency might run afoul of the evidence – I haven't read Sapolsky's book-length case against free will yet, but it seems intriguing and challenging. I think a side-by-side might be fruitful.

[Jeffrey Butler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've always been interested by the question of free will, and the various arguments around it, so when Peter Watts mentioned this book in one of his blog posts ( http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=3415 ), I thought I'd give it a try. It did not go well. So if there is no such thing as free will, as Peter often argues, then I rest the blame for this... experience, at his feet.

In fact, it went poorly enough that I did not even manage to finish the book; I hit the wall about two thirds of the way through, and then began to simply skip through for what I thought would be the interesting bits.

In my reading of the book, three principle questions were raised, namely:
- What is consciousness?
- Do we have free will?
and most centrally,
- What and where is the Mind?

What was disappointing to me is that Tallis does not answer any of these questions, at least not in any substantive way. What’s more, in the end, he argues for what is essentially a non-spiritual dualism. This allows him to argue that the Mind is not subject to the physical laws that govern mere matter and energy but, rather, supersedes them. Thus, he has no need to address the questions of free will or consciousness, at least not directly, because if the mind is out of the realm of the physical, then so are these two questions. He does take a stab at these points, however, which breaks down to the idea that the complexity of our lives is so much greater than that found in non-sentient species that it represents a qualitative rather than quantitative change. This strikes me as disingenuous for a person claiming subscribe to evolutionary theory, which always relies on incremental charge - even in periods of rapid adaptation.

And all of these arguments are made after an agonizingly long list of complaints about the imperfect state of current research. Indeed, Tallis offers an extensive critique of some of the hyperbole linking specific behaviors to FMRI data as well as some of the other generalizations made in the field, that are based on a very specific and narrow data set. But this process of critique is an agonizing one. I find his writing verbose, repetitive and somehow, still unclear. Admittedly, I’m a big fan of the rather pedestrian:
- Tell them what your going to tell them,
- tell them what your telling then and then,
- tell them what you just told them
school of presentation. However, the writing in this, highly complex, book felt more like a stream of consciousness rant than a series of well contextualized arguments. And considering that he offers no substantial alternative, he could surely have done this in far, far, fewer pages.

As an additional point of contention with this book I found his arguments around evolution rather unsatisfying. He argues that and that humanity has superseded simple biological evolution (a point I’m willing to accept), and yet he rejects Dawkins "meme" theory because it is too reductionist, and then, in a typical evasion, he fails to offer any alternative.

In Tallis’ view, there there was a point in prehistorical human evolution where our species Mind generated spontaneously out of a necessary complexity of (his “Trillion Cognitive Handshakes) and we began to gaze outward at objects as separate from ourselves. This is where he says consciousness began. Personally, I’m more engaged by Julian Jaynes idea of the bicameral mind - that at one point humanity would have reacted to things in an animalistic manner, but that we would experience insights or ideas as voices from a god or spirit. Jaynes then argues that the breakdown of these two halves, into a single Mind, is what generated consciousness.
Now I’m not saying that I buy this explanation - but it is more satisfying than Tallis’ handwaving about some critical mass of human interaction that suddenly generates his dualistic Mind.

Despite his lack of testable alternative hypotheses, Tallis argues that his book is necessary, that his critique will allow us to move past the material as a basis for the Mind, and allow us to look for this non-material Mind. He invokes the example of Max Planck’s observations on black body radiation and how it initiated the quantum approach to physics. But Tallis’ analogy fails for me, as he does not provide any productive hypothesis as Planck did, he simply says that the existing data fails and so all materialistic approaches must also fail. This strikes me as rather a stretch.

In the end, if you are looking for a catalogue of critiques of contemporary neuroscience, this book may be for you. Indeed, a highly edited version of this book would have likely been appropriate and valuable to a smaller, perhaps strictly academic audience, rather than a member of the laity, such as myself. But if you are interested in a cogent discussion of the issues of the Mind, consciousness or free will, then would suggest you look elsewhere.

[Richard Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with so much of this book, particularly the attack on crude 'Darwinian' approaches. However, at the end of the day, I think he buys too much into the 'Two Cultures' view. I think there are ways of opposing the reductive trends in current neuro-science without committing ourselves to the idea that human beings are not animals. Yes, we are a very special animal. Despite his repeated disavowals the framework is basically Cartesian- there is Nature and there is us building cathedrals and writing symphonies. I will probably use the book as the foil to one of my chapters.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

As indicated by its subtitle, Aping Mankind is Raymond Tallis’ critique of two prevalent misconceptions: 1) “Darwinitis” – that human beings are mere biological organisms, possessing no significant differences from other animals and 2) “Neuromania” – that all of human behavior and experience boils down to brain chemistry.

Paradoxically, Tallis himself is an atheist neuroscientist convinced of the merits of Darwinian evolution. His position can be summarized with the following quote: “I am an atheist humanist; but this does not oblige me to deny what is staring me in the face – namely, that we are different from other animals and that we are not just pieces of matter” (349).

Having stated his commitment to atheism from the start, I was interested to know what solutions he would propose for the serious problems the book was written to highlight. How does he affirm intrinsic human value and exceptionality, given that materialism and the Darwinian paradigm (two views that usually go hand-in-hand with atheism) undermine such assumptions? If all of reality can be summed up as matter plus the blind forces of nature, morality is an illusion and human rights have no grounding (Here I’m making a stronger point that Tallis makes in his comments on human ethics, but a valid one nonetheless). Distinctive human features like self-awareness and free will cannot be real. Humans are animals controlled by (or, really, identical to) our brains – evolved organs themselves controlled by the laws of nature.

But, as Tallis eventually acknowledges, he is not in possession of any solutions. His goal is to point out the danger of currently prevailing paradigms as well as their woeful inadequacy to account for human experience, so that the way can be cleared for new thinking on the subject. Yet, despite his tacit acknowledgment of materialism’s lack of explanatory power, Tallis seems at least partially unwilling to look outside of it for answers. For example, Tallis states that evolutionary theory cannot explain consciousness – how matter can produce it or why it would produce it. He also insists (quite rightfully) that consciousness is real – not an illusion (a problematic notion many atheist materialists hold to). Yet he remains a Darwinist. His suggested explanation for humanity’s elevated sense of self-awareness? The opposable thumb (plus other evolved anatomical traits that set us apart from our primate cousins). But this is merely another evolutionary explanation and therefore does not escape Tallis’ own critique. He anticipates the objection that “a biological account of how we partly escaped biology” may be seen as self-contradictory – but I don't see how he escapes it.

Aping Mankind is a fairly dense read with difficult concepts (I admit I couldn’t wrap my head much of it). My feeling is that it could have been reduced in length, being overly repetitive. It also would benefit from more outline/preview statements to make the various trains of thought easier to follow. Lastly, it was somewhat frustrating to hear Tallis so exhaustively refute materialism without also acknowledging that mind/consciousness, morality, human value, etc. would be more at home in a theistic worldview. But bravo to him for pointing out what so many ignore.

For more like this see Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.

[Tristan Sherwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admit it, the title alone draws you in, doesn't it?

Raymond Tallis is on top form in this amazing book, expertly describing the complexity and the uniqueness of being human, whilst exposing scientism's leanings towards understanding human consciousness as mere brain-activity and thinking of human behaviour in the same way as animal behaviour (and vice versa). Through his expert knowledge of biology, and his very well sharpened philosophic skills, Tallis demonstrates that to be human is something that transcends being an "animal"; we are very different, and these differences need to be realised.

Now before any "creationists" reading this begin to believe that they have stumbled upon the science book they've been waiting for; Tallis is not arguing against Biological Evolution or engaging in an anti-scientific rant. Tallis, as an Atheist, Humanist, Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester, and a pro-evolutionist, is arguing that human evolution has moved us beyond the state of being "just an animal". In his own words; "As an Atheist and also a Humanist I believe that we should develop an image of humanity that is richer and truer to our distinctive nature than that of a exceptionally gifted chimp" (p.10).

I loved this book! Seriously, it was extremely enriching - especially against a back-drop of consistent pop-science news articles that wish to describe everything about us, and our behaviour, using a frame of reference which is constructed out of animal-analogies and brain-scans. Tallis, through what many would consider his magnum opus, provides a beautiful description of our transcendent state.

This is a big book, in many ways - so, if you want to get to grips with Raymond Tallis prior to tackling this, then I would also recommend "The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head".

[Mike Rot · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant rebuttal to those scientific endeavors that wish to explain consciousness away as nothing more than a biological byproduct, a challenge not from the straw man religious fanatic they tend to prop up, but from a self-proclaimed atheist humanist who happens to also be a clinical neuroscientist. To me Intelligent Design is a misdirect, the real danger to the future integrity of human knowledge, to the progress of modern civilization, is this ill-conceived scientism that goes largely unnoticed, that informs policies, that dilutes ethical reviews, that marginalizes the humanities, and all based on a fallacious lie, a fundamental flaw of basic logic and reasoning that is so easy to disprove, but which those with (as Taleb calls it) "skin in the game" would rather not acknowledge. The problem comes down to an insistence of either/or, like Bush said, you are either for us or you are against us. Such a brute, stupid position. Science works, biology is part of the equation, there is overlap, there are domains where the presently stated laws of physics make sense; but not everything. There is something more to being a human, and this is not a metaphysical flight of fancy, but provable by virtue of the limitations prescribed by science, and by the experiential reality of consciousness as a quantifiable 'something more'. Without appealing to a teleological account of evolution, without entirely re-framing science as we know it, there is no escaping the fact that the characteristics that distinguish us from beasts are not causally demonstrable to known biology, and there is a very convincing case to be made they never will be.

Read this book, it is thoughtful, well-written, fascinating, and I would say, critically important.

[Andrew Halfacre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. Tallis has three targets:

1) The kind of stupid scientism which has abused the work of Darwin
2) Those who exaggerate (for effect and for funds) the validity of neuroscience as a way of telling us truths about ourselves
3) The over eager claims made for man as 'just another animal'

This last one is important because Tallis, an atheist humanist, argues that failing to distinguish man properly prevents us from solving the mystery of consciousness. Man is the explicit animal, he knows what he does. And too often he knows what he should do and doesn't do it. This is a great mystery which Tallis would like to see receive more attention.

Not always and easy read and it repeats some of his earlier writings but the flashes of insight are enough to recommend this

[Peter Haslehurst · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that permanently changes the way I think.
Raymond Tallis, a distinguished clinical neuroscientist, mounts a pugnacious, funny, curmudgeonly defence against neurodeterminism. The fact that he is an outspoken atheist only makes this book more remarkable. He carefully argues that the mind is more than the brain, and that consciousness is not an illusion that your neurons cook up in the dark cave of the skull. I didn't follow every step of his argument – he calls on many disciplines along the way, including some quite tricky (or at least unfamiliar to me) philosophy. I'm tempted to turn round and reread it straight away, just to get it clearer in my head.
Brilliant.

[Zachary Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would highly recommend this work to anyone feeling disillusioned with the all too common attempts to reduce human life to level or brain waves or animal behavior. Tallis tackles these subjects and mounts a strong defense of the uniqueness of humanity and the lack of simple identity between brain functions and complex human actions.

[laura]

probably a seriously annoying book, but r.tallis had some interesting things to say on 'start the week' this week, and i want to remember that this book exists. he calls both materialism and dualism bankrupt. it's a cool question what the alternatives might be.

[Noor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aping Mankind presents a powerful critique against the temptation to fuse scientific inquiry with overly simplistic and shallow isms. A neuroscientist and self-proclaimed atheist, author Raymond Tallis distinguishes between the advances of neuroscience with its petty use as a proxy for the hidden phenomena and complexity of human behavior and society, a term he calls neuromania. These complexities include the concepts of freewill and (neuro)determinism, efforts to find a “neural account of consciousness”, and the subject of his other discussion—Darwinism.

While Raymond Tallis presents thought provoking ideas for the scientist, I found this book to be a bit dense and tedious for someone without such a technical background. The text was often slow and redundant, with key points being left to only occupy a narrow space. I also found myself to be frequently unsure of whether he was alluding to scientific or philosophical grounds for his argument. For example, building on the work of thinkers before him, he chalks up our self-awareness and potent sense of agency to the hand. It was the hand, he argued, that divided animal consciousness to human self-consciousness. His reasoning for this is highly theoretical, describing its versatility, its proximity to the eye, the reciprocity of touching and being touched, and the position of the index finger that can point in differentiation between the public world and the private self. These ideas, while highly illuminating, can better be condensed into a smaller volume. Aping Mankind, in its present form, is unlikely to be engaging to the nonscientist.

[ger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucid addressing of some real problems with the brain as mind brigade. Tallis has a comprehensive and wide understanding of the issues and if you're interested in this area it's well worth a read. It is dense at times but the 'Neuromania' it tackles really is getting away with murder. He fails to give an alternative theory on how we conceive of consciousness but that being said I think it's an important book.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is closer to a 3.5 stars - In the book, Tallis gave great critiques of (popular) neuroscience (e.g. neuroaesthetics) but many of these commentaries requires prior knowledge or context of what is already being said/has been said. The humanistic ideas and critiques, while great, are not a breeze to understand - though I think his target audience are not lay-readers to begin with.

[Sebb · Rating 1 out of 5]

The worst book on the philosophy of mind I can imagine. Employs every fallacy of reasoning recorded and is rife with projection when criticising 'neuromanics' for emplying dualism, words with shifting meanings and treating metaphors as real. Somehow rejects emergence as a worthwhile concept out of hand (while implictly using it to defend the theory of evolution)

[William Mwasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I9

[Samir Firdovsioglu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raymond Tallis is one of those atheists who can see the madness in the modern scientism, biologism, materialism and whole other -isms. A must read book.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think if you read this book carefully and seriously you can't help but become a bit of an "ontological agnostic", a label Tallis (who is also an atheist humanist) applies to himself at the end of this thought-provoking book. His arguments lend serious credence to the idea that human consciousness cannot be explained in strictly biological terms, and therefore, the increasingly popular "my brain made me do it" type arguments, as well as simplistic evolutionary accounts of why we behave the way we do, simply lose credibility.

The arguments are complex and carried out over the space of many paragraphs and chapters, but a couple of his main critiques can be (rather inadequately) summarized as follows:

1. A purely physical description of the world does not account for our own conscious experiences of it. In strictly physical terms, objects can be measured objectively, but there is no physical accounting of the way things appear to us. "The very notion of a complete account of the world in physical terms is of a world without appearance and hence a world without consciousness." It follows then that our conscious actions are not causally hardwired into the physical universe (an argument that addresses both neurological determinism and the more general old-school determinism).

2. There is a bit of a self-defeating fallacy to many of these reductive type arguments. For example, if science has now proven to us that we are the slaves of a subconscious irrationality, is this claim itself the product of subconscious irrationality? If my behaviors in mate-finding and child-rearing are actually rooted in distant evolutionary drives, is my own realization of this also the product of a distant evolutionary drive? Another quote from Tallis: "To accept science as the last word on the mind is to overlook that which made science possible: the mind itself."

I can't do the arguments justice in a few short blurbs, so suffice it to say that this is one of the most hopeful books I've read in a long time. I feel justified in clinging to the belief that my free will is not an illusion, and that my decisions, feelings, and thoughts are not just by-products of subconscious processes merely masquerading as a conscious self. And that's kind of a big deal.

[Sara Van Dyck · Rating 4 out of 5]

This challenged much of my thinking, since I have -or had - accepted the prevailing attitudes that we are biologically determined. Tallis argues, persuasively to me, that we not just passive products of evolution. We are unique, we are”fundamentally different from animals.” Why does this make a difference? Because we can work together to improve the conditions of our existence

Some of the big issues here revolve around the interpretation of and generalization from scientific findings. I am not an expert in any of this, but Tallis's conclusions have a common-sense ring to them. For instance, looking at how we choose our life's companion, it does seem that beyond physical preferences which may be driven by evolution, other factors are important: conversation, common interests, shared tastes, etc. – and these are mediated through the role of language.