How water becomes wine – Thoughts on Raymond Tallis’s book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity
We
use the brain as an adjunct to our life, as a highly sophisticated tool to
facilitate our actions. However, do the functions of the brain alone amply
explain the whole of the human condition?
When I
throw a ball to someone else, I show the unfailing workings of a natural law.
That however does not mean that I represent that law of physics, let alone become
an embodiment of that law. Similarly, when a particular set of neurons in my
brain gave rise to my intention to throw that ball, those neurons were merely involved
in a physiological activity underlying that intention. That does not mean that
this particular of set of neurons is the intention itself.
My MP3 player tells
me that exceeding a certain volume level may harm my hearing in the long term.
By indicating that this man-made device is “telling me” something, I use here language
that anthropomorphises an artefact. I could have said instead that a warning
message is displayed on the music player's screen. But I use the common lingua
which is in tune with current thinking. It is a thinking that has influenced
our technology and design so much that we not only humanize the actions of our
tools and artefacts. We are also more comfortable with technology that
resembles us humans and other familiar objects as much as possible. An example
is the prevalence of skeuomorphism, the design of modern tools, devices and
computer interfaces to closely resemble their older and accustomed
predecessors. Apple’s iBook app for instance employed such a design concept
until recently where the app’s bookshelf faithfully resembles a real-life one.
In this app, you could build shelves for different collections and move books
from one shelf to another. But, despite such uncanny realism, you are relocating
only virtual books in a virtual bookshelf. It is not the same as handling a
real book in a real bookshelf.
It appears that in
such situations we may be mistaking the medium for the message. Raymond Tallis,
in his book Aping Mankind: Neuromania,
Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity suspects that materialist
theories of the brain and consciousness – particularly the computational theory
of the mind – may be prone to this error by mistaking the physical brain for
the whole of consciousness.
We use the
brain as an adjunct to our life, as a highly sophisticated tool to facilitate
our actions. There is no doubt a strong link between our brains and all our
actions, physical and mental. Moreover, we will also undeniably lose our
concept of self (or at least a part of it) if our brain shuts down or a part of
it is clinically damaged. Oliver Sack discusses, for instance, the case of a
patient with anosagnosia where his awareness of one of his legs had been
completely obliterated. On clinical examination, it was found that this had
been triggered by a vascular tumour overlying the right parietal lobe of the
patient’s brain. [i]
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| Frans Hals, Two Singing Boys, 1625 |
However, do the
functions of the brain alone amply explain the whole of the human condition?
How does this functional view explain how “as high-born creatures of intellect
and volition, we battle the indignities of flesh and death,” as Saint Augustine
of Hippo was supposed to have pondered.[ii] Cognitive researchers and thinkers have
conflated the engineering definition of information with consciousness by
removing the human element. This began with a description of the neuron as far
back as the 1940s as not just the basic anatomical unit of the nervous system
but “the basic information-processing unit”.[iii]
Tallis objects to such a view of the mind as an information processing device –
a central tenet of the computational theory of the mind – as a strange and
contradictory move of dehumanising perception and anthropomorphising the organs
of perception. As Warren Weaver pointed out, “information must not be confused
with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with
meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent… as
regards information.”[iv]
John Searle appears cognisant of this subtlety when proposing a more balanced
definition of consciousness by taking into account both the physiological and
other (spiritual?) aspects of our actions. Taking the simple example of how a
person decides to lift his hand and how the hand goes up, Searle contends that “one
and the same event has a level of description where it's neurobiological, and
another level of description where it's mental… that's how nature works. That's
how it's possible for consciousness to function causally”.[v]
In his book,
Tallis also contends that material objects – for example, our neurons – alone
cannot explain consciousness. This is because it is hard to pin down which part
of neural activity does consciousness reside in and is associated with
subjective experience. Nerve impulses neither possess nor do they give rise to
qualia. The properties we ascribe to them are observer-dependent. There is
hence no consciousness without the observer. Tallis argues that human
consciousness has evolved beyond its biological origins and we have over the
years been “weaving a collective space on which we each have our own individual
take.”[vi]
As Tallis explains, “trying to discover… our ordinary Wednesdays in the
tropisms of the evolved organism as reflected in brain activity is like
applying one’s ear to a seed and expecting to hear the rustling of the wood in
a breeze.”[vii]
Biologism – trying to explain everything about the human condition within an
evolutionary framework - is incomplete and incorrect. Biologism expresses “the
bedrock (fallacious) assumption that if two evolving processes [for example,
homo sapiens and our common primate ancestor] have a common origin they cannot
end up any different from one another, from which it follows that the shopper
reaching for a can of beans is… moved by the same forces as the chimp reaching
out for a banana.” [viii]
The current state
of science cannot claim to explain completely and satisfactorily how “the water
of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness” as Colin McGinn
wondered.[ix]
Until this mystery remains unanswered, it is churlish to decry other attempts
to explain the mind and consciousness in terms that differ from a functional/materialist
view of the world. It is also too premature to deny or dismiss concepts such as
free will, self and personal identity merely as man's futile attempt to either
present himself as an entity in the image of god or to ameliorate some kind of
existential darkness.
[i] In Oliver Sacks, “A
Leg to Stand On”, Picador, 1991, p: 55.
[ii] In Miles Hollingworth’s biography of St
Augustine, reviewed in “The Australian Finance Review”, 25 October 2013.
[iii] In ““Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis
and the Misrepresentation of Humanity” by Raymond Tallis, Acumen, 2012, p: 201.
[iv] Ibid, 200.
[v] http://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness.html
[vi] Ibid, p: 237.
[vii] Ibid, p: 237.
[viii] Ibid, p: 153.
[ix] In Humphrey, Nicholas (2012-08-25). A
History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness (Kindle Locations
272-273). Kindle Edition.
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