What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us Abut Ourselves

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What neuroscience cannot tell us abut ourselves

There has been much breathless talk of late about all thevaried mysteries of human existence that have been or soonwill be solved by neuroscience. As a clinical neuroscientist, Icould easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that Ibelieve has a better claim than mathematics to being Queenof the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which manyother sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry,biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology,

among others. In addition, its object of study is the onematerial object that, of all the material objects in theuniverse, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and moregenerally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving allproper respect to what neuroscience can tell us aboutourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditionsthat are necessaryfor behavior and awareness.

What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a

satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficientforbehavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what thesephenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete inseveral crucial respects, as we will see. The pervasive yetmistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account forawareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise inscience-based faith. While to live a human life requireshaving a brain in some kind of working order, it does notfollow from this fact that to live a human life is to be a brain

in some kind of working order. This confusion betweennecessary and sufficient conditions lies behind theencroachment of neuroscientistic discourse on academicwork in the humanities, and the present epidemic of suchneuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines as neuroaesthetics,neuroeconomics, neurosociology, neuropolitics,


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neurotheology, neurophilosophy, and so on.

The failure to distinguish consciousness from neural activitycorrodes our self-understanding in two significant ways. If weare just our brains, and our brains are just evolved organsdesigned to optimize our odds of survival or, moreprecisely, to maximize the replicative potential of the geneticmaterial for which we are the vehicle then we are merelybeasts like any other, equally beholden as apes andcentipedes to biological drives. Similarly, if we are just ourbrains, and our brains are just material objects, then we, andour lives, are merely way stations in the great causal net thatis the universe, stretching from the Big Bang to the Big

Crunch.Most of those who subscribe to such neuroevolutionaryaccounts of humanity dont recognize these consequences.Or, if they do recognize them, then they dont subscribe tothese accounts sincerely. When John Gray appeals, in his2002 book Straw Dogs, to a belief that human beings aremerely animals and so human life has no more meaningthan the life of slime mold, he doesnt really believe that thelife of John Gray, erstwhile School Professor of EuropeanThought at the London School of Economics, has no moremeaning than that of a slime mold else why would he haveaspired to the life of a distinguished professor rather thansomething closer to that of a slime mold?

Wrong ideas about what human beings are and how we work,especially if they are endlessly repeated, keep us fromthinking about ourselves in ways that may genuinely advanceour self-understanding. Indeed, proponents of theneuroscientific account of human behavior hope that it willsomeday supplant our traditional understandings of mind,behavior, and consciousness, which they dismiss as merefolk psychology. According to a 2007 New Yorker profile ofprofessors Paul and Patricia Churchland, two leadingneurophilosophers, they like to speculate about a day
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when whole chunks of English, especially the bits thatconstitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific wordsthat call a thing by its proper name rather than some outwornmetaphor. The article recounts the occasion Patricia

Churchland came home from a vexing day at work and toldher husband, Paul, dont speak to me, my serotonin levelshave hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, myblood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it werent for myendogenous opiates Id have driven the car into a tree on theway home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me aChardonnay, and Ill be down in a minute. Such awkwardchemical conversation is unlikely to replace folk psychologyanytime soon, despite the Churchlands fervent wishes, if

only because it misses the actual human reasons for thereported neurochemical impairments such as, for example,failing to get ones favored candidate appointed to a post.

Moreover, there is strong reason to believe that the failure toprovide a neuroscientific account of the sufficient conditionsof consciousness and conscious behavior is not a temporarystate of affairs. It is unlikely that the gap betweenneuroscientific stories of human behavior and the standard

humanistic or common-sense narratives will be closed, evenas neuroscience advances and as our tools for observingneural activity grow more sophisticated.

In outlining the case that neuroscience will always have littleto say about most aspects of human consciousness, we mustnot rely on weak mysterian arguments, such as ColinMcGinns claim, in his famous 1989 Mind paper Can WeSolve the Mind-Body Problem?, that there may be a

neuroscientific answer but we are biologically incapable offiguring it out. Nor is there much use in appealing toarguments about category errors, such as consideringthoughts to be kinds of things, which were mobilizedagainst mind-body identity theories when philosophy wasmost linguistically turned, in the middle of the last century.
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No, the aim of this essay is to give principled reasons, basedon examining the nature of human consciousness, forasserting that we are not now and never will be able toaccount for the mind in terms of neural activity. It will focus

on humanconsciousness so as to avoid the futility ofarguments about where we draw the line between sentientand insentient creatures, because there are more negativeconsequences to misrepresenting human consciousness thananimal, and because it is human consciousness thatunderlines the difficulty of fitting consciousness into thenatural world as understood through strictly materialistscience.

This critique of the neural theory of consciousness will beginby taking seriously its own declared account of what actuallyexists in the world. On this, I appeal to no less an authoritythan the philosophy professor Daniel Dennett, one of themost prominent spokesmen for the neuroevolutionaryreduction of human beings and their minds. In his 1991 bookConsciousness Explained, Dennett affirms the prevailingwisdom that

there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter the physicalstuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology and the mind issomehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, themind is the brain.... We can (in principle!) account for everymental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws,and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity,continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, andgrowth.

So when we are talking about the brain, we are talking aboutnothing more than a piece of matter. If we keep this in mind,we will have enough ammunition to demonstrate thenecessary failure of neuroscientific accounts of consciousnessand conscious behavior.

It is a pure dedication to materialism that lies behind another
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common neuroscientistic claim, one that arises in response tothe criticism that there are characteristics of consciousnessthat neuroscience cannot explain. The response is a strangelytriumphant declaration that that which neuroscience cannot

grasp does not exist. This declaration is particularly liable tobe directed at the self and at free will, those two mostpersistent illusions. But even neuroscientists themselvesdont apply this argument consistently: they dont doubt thatthey thinkthey are selves, or that they have the illusion thatthey act freely and yet, as we will see, there is noconceivable neural explanation of these phenomena. We aretherefore justified in rejecting the presumption that ifneuroscience cannot see it, then it does not exist.

The Outward GazeA good place to begin understanding why consciousness isnot strictly reducible to the material is in looking atconsciousness ofmaterial objects that is, straightforwardperception. Perception as it is experienced by human beingsis the explicit sense of being aware of something materialother than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sittingon a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your

eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. Thestandard neuroscientific account says that your perception ofthe glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. Thereis a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with theneural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with,as in Dennetts words, the same physical principles, laws,and raw materials that suffice to explain everything else inthe material universe.

Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal pathexplains how the light gets into your brain but not how itresults in a gaze that looks out. The inward causal path doesnot deliver your awareness of the glass as an item explicitlyseparate from you as over there with respect to yourself,who is over here. This aspect of consciousness is known as


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intentionality(which is not to be confused with intentions).Intentionality designates the way that we are conscious ofsomething, and that the contents of our consciousness arethus aboutsomething; and, in the case of human

consciousness, that we are conscious of it as something otherthan ourselves. But there is nothing in the activity of thevisual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no morethan material events in a material object, which could makethat activity be aboutthe things that you see. In other words,in intentionality we have something fundamental aboutconsciousness that is left unexplained by the neurologicalaccount.

This claim refers to fully developed intentionality and not thekind of putative proto-intentionality that may be ascribed tonon-human sentient creatures. Intentionality is utterlymysterious from a material standpoint. This is apparent firstbecause intentionalitypoints in the directionopposite to thatof causality: the causal chain has a directionality in space-time pointing from the light wave bouncing off the object tothe light wave hitting your visual cortex, whereas yourperception ofthe object refers or points from you backto the

object. The referential pointing back or bounce back isnot feedback or reverse causation, since the causal arrowis located in physical space and time, whereas the intentionalarrow is located in a field of concepts and awareness, a fieldwhich is not independent of but stands aside from physicalspace and time.

Ironically, by locating consciousness in particular parts of thematerial of the brain, neuroscientism actually underlines this

mystery of intentionality, opening up a literal, physical spacebetween conscious experiences and that which they areabout. This physical space is, paradoxically, both underlinedand annulled: The gap between the glass of which you areaware and the neural impulses that are supposed to be yourawareness of it is both a spatial gap and a non-spatial gap.


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The nerve impulses inside your cranium are six feet awayfrom the glass, and yet, if the nerve impulses reach outorreferto the glass, as it were, they do so by having the glassinside them. The task of attempting to express the

conceptual space of intentionality in purely physical terms isa dizzying one. The perception of the glass inherentlyis ofthe glass, whereas the associated neural activity exists apartfrom the cause of the light bouncing off the glass. This alsomeans, incidentally, that the neural activity could exist due toa different cause. For example, you could have the sameexperience of the glass, even if the glass were not present,by tickling the relevant neurons. The resulting perception willbe mistaken, because it is of an object that is not in fact

physically present before you. But it would be ludicrous totalk of the associated neural activity as itself mistaken;neural activity is not aboutanything and so can be neithercorrect nor mistaken.

Let us tease out the mystery of intentionality a bit more, ifonly to anticipate the usual materialist trick of buryingintentionality in causation by brushing past perception to itsbehavioral consequences. If perceptions really are material

effects (in one place the brain) of material causes (inanother place the object), then intentionality seems to runin the contrary direction to and hence to lie outsidecausation. That your perception of the glass requires theneural activity in your visual cortex to reach causallyupstream to the events that caused it is, again, utterlymysterious. Moreover, it immediately raises two questions.First, why does the backward glance of a set of effects tosome of their causes stop at a particular pointin the causal

chain in this case, at the glass? And, second, how does thisreaching backward create a solid, stable object out ofsomething as unstable as an interference with the light? Theordinary inference implicit in everyday perception is that theevents which cause nerve impulses are manifestations ofsomething that transcends those events namely, an


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object that is the relatively permanent locus of possibilityfor many future events making intentionality even moremysterious.

The bounce back is necessary to mark the point at whichsense experiences are, as it were, received; the same pointwhere, via a variety of intermediate steps, they can triggerbehavioral outputs. This is a crucial point of demarcationwithin the causal nexus between perceptual input andbehavioral output. And yet there is nothing within thenervous system that marks this point of arrival, or the pointat which arrival passes over into departure (perceptual inputinto behavioral output). Nor is there anything to distinguish,

on the one hand, those parts of the nervous system that aresupposed to be the point of arrival of neural activity as acomponent of conscious experience from, on the other, thoseparts that are mere unconscious way stations en route tosome other point of arrival.

In any event, identifying experiences with neural activityrequires that intentionality, which has no place in thematerial world since no material object is aboutany othermaterial object nevertheless fastens us into the materialworld. Examination of neural activity reveals only anunbroken causal chain passing from sensory inputs to motoroutputs. Intentionality is significant because it is that whichopens up the otherwise causally closed physical world. It liesat the root of our being a point of departure in the world, asite at which events originate that is, of our being actors.And the weaving together of individual intentional spacescreates the human world that shared, public, temporally

deep sphere of possibilities, that outside-of-nature whichmakes our individual and collective human lives possible. Itlies at the origin of everything that distances us from thematerial world. Without intentionality, there is no point ofarrival of perceptions, no point of departure for actions, noinput and output, no person located in a world. It is


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intentionality that opens up the present to the absent, theactual to the possible, and the now to the past and thefuture, so that we are able to live in a world that is aninfinitely elaborated space of possibilities, rather than being

simply wired in to what is. These are large claims, some ofwhich I have already elaborated in these pages (see HowCan I Possibly Be Free?, Summer 2010). But the aspectspresented here will be enough to wrest ourselves back frombeing assimilated into our brains.

It should also be noted that looking at the difficultiesintentionality poses to materialism relieves us too of the needfor the problematic views of (intermittently quite sensible)

philosophers such as John Searle, who argues in his famous1980 paper Minds, Brains, and Programs that intentionalityis a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be ascausally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its originsas lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biologicalphenomena. Searle says this to undermine computationaland functional theories of mind; but he still remains insidethe biological frame of reference. And this requires him tothink of intentionality that in virtue of which an effect

reaches back to its cause to be itself the effect of anothercause or set of causes. (The functionalism that Searle wasrebutting claims that, just as a computer program is definedby how it transforms input to output, a piece ofconsciousness is defined by the particular causaltransformation it effects between an organisms perceptualinput and its behavioral output. But since functionalism triesto assimilate perception into causation by arguing that thecontents of consciousness are identical with their causal

relations, it is just as easily disposed of by looking carefully atthe counter-causal nature of intentionality, and the need for apoint of arrival and departure, for input and output, withoutresorting to Searles argument from biological causes.)

Focusing on intentionality and placing it in the context of a
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materialistic, neuroscientific theory underlines what anextraordinary phenomenon perception is. It is that in virtue ofwhich an object is revealed to a subject; or, rather, that invirtue of which the experiences of a subject are the

revelation of an object. And this brings us to the heart of thetrouble that the neural theory of perception is in: its centralclaim is that the interaction between two material objects either directly, such as by touch, or indirectly, such as byvision will cause one to appearto the other. The counter-causal direction of intentionality not only shows that thiscannot be accommodated in physical science (of whichneuroscience is a part) but that appearance is not somethingthat the material world, a nexus of causation, affords. Indeed,

we could go further and argue that the progressive enclosureof the world within the framework of physical science, itsbeing construed as a material world, tends towards theelimination of appearance.

Making Appearance DisappearPhysical science begins when we escape from our subjective,first-person experiences into objective measurement, andthereby start to aspire towards Thomas Nagels view from

nowhere. You think the table over there is large; I think it issmall. We make a measurement and discover that it is twofeet by two feet. We now characterize the table in a way thatis less beholden to our own, or anyone elses, personalexperience. Or we terminate an argument about whether thetable is light or dark brown by translating its color into amixture of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. Thetable has lost contact with its phenomenal appearance to me,to you, or to anyone, as being characteristic of what it is.

As science progresses, measurement takes us further fromactual experience, and the phenomena of subjectiveconsciousness, to a realm in which things are described inabstract, general quantitative terms. The most obvioussymptom of this is the way physical science has to discard


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what it regards as secondary qualities such as colorexperiences, feelings of warmth and cold, and tastes. Theyare regarded as somehow unreal, or at least as falling shortof describing what the furniture of the world is in itself. For

the physicist, light is not in itself bright or colorful; rather, it isa mixture of vibrations of different frequencies in anelectromagnetic field. The material world, far from being thecolorful, noisy, smelly place we experience, is purportedlyinstead composed only of colorless, silent, odorless atoms orquarks, or other basic particles and waves best describedmathematically.

Physical science is thus about the marginalization, and

ultimately the elimination, of phenomenal appearance. Butconsciousness is centrally about appearances. The basiccontents of consciousness are these mere secondaryqualities. They are what fill our every conscious moment. Asscience advances, it retreats from appearances towardsquantifying items that do not in themselves have the kinds ofmanifestation that constitute our experiences. A biophysicalaccount of consciousness, which sees consciousness in termsof nerve impulses that are the passage of ions through semi-

permeable membranes, must be a contradiction in terms. Forsuch an account must ultimately be a physical account, andphysical science does not admit the existence of anythingthat would show why a physical object such as a brain shouldfind, uncover, create, produce, result in, or cause theemergence of appearances and, in particular, secondaryqualities in the world. Galileos famous assertions that thebook of nature is written in the language of mathematicsand that tastes, odors, colors ... reside only in

consciousness, and would be wiped out and annihilated ina world devoid of conscious creatures, underline theconnection, going back to the very earliest days of modernphysical science, between quantification and thedisappearance of appearance.


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Any explanation of consciousness that admits the existenceof appearances but is rooted in materialist science will failbecause, on its own account, matter and energy do notintrinsically have appearances, never mind those

corresponding to secondary qualities. We could, of course, byall means change our notion of matter; but if we do not, andthe brain is a piece of matter, then it cannot explain theexperience of things. Those who imagine that consciousnessof material objects could arise from the effect of somematerial objects on another particular material object dontseem to take the notion of matter seriously.

Some neurophilosophers might respond that science does not

eliminate appearance; rather, it replaces one appearancewith another fickle immediate and conscious appearancewith one that is more true to the reality of the objects itattends to. But this is not what science does least of allphysical science, which is supposed to give us the final reporton what there is in the universe, for which matter (or mass-energy) is the ultimate reality, and equations linkingquantities are the best way of revealing the inner essence ofthis reality. For, again, it is of the very nature of mass-energy,

as it is envisaged in physics, notto have any kind ofappearance in itself.

This lack of appearance to mass-energy may still seemcounterintuitive, but it will become clearer when we examinea well-known defense, again made by John Searle, of thetheory that mind and brain are identical or specifically,that experiences can be found in neural impulses becausethey are the same thing. In his 1983 book Intentionality,

Searle who, as already noted, is committed to a neuralaccount of consciousness addresses the most obviousproblem associated with the claim that experiences areidentical with neural activity: experiences are nothing likeneural activity, and the least one might expect of somethingis that it should be like itself.
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Searle denies that this is a problem by arguing that neuralactivity and experiences are different aspects of the samestuff; more precisely, that they are the same stuff seen atdifferent levels. The immediate problem with this claim is in

knowing what it means. Clearly, neural activity andexperiences are not two aspects of the same thing in the waythat the front and back of a house are two aspects of thesame house. Searle tries to clarify what he means using ananalogy: experience is related to neural activity, he says, asliquid properties of water are related to the behavior ofthe individual molecules of H2O. They are the same stuff

even though molecules of H2O are nothing like water. Water

is wet, he argues, while individual molecules are not.

Wetness is the one specific liquid property of water he citesat the outset, and the only others he mentions are that itpours, you can drink it, you can wash in it, etc. Because ofthis, it may seem at first that all Searle has accomplished isisolating the experiential qualities of water from the non-experiential. That is, one interpretation of Searles supposedexplanation is that neural activity is related to experience inthe same way water is related to experiences of water. This

explanation, of course, is completely inadequate, because itsimply sets us at a further regress from the answer.

But it turns out that this interpretation of Searles argumentis the charitable one. We can see why in a section whereSearle responds to this famous argument made by Leibniz inThe Monadology(1714):

And supposing that there were a machine so constructed as

to think, feel, and have perception, we could conceive of it asenlarged and yet preserving the same proportions, so that wemight enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should onlyfind on visiting it, pieces which push against another, butnever anything by which to explain perception. This must besought for, therefore, in the simple substance and not in thecomposite or in the machine.


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Searles response:

An exactly parallel argument to Leibnizs would be that thebehavior of H2O molecules can never explain the liquidity of

water, because if we entered into the system of moleculesas into a mill we should only find on visiting it pieces whichpush one against another, but never anything by which toexplain liquidity. But in both cases we would be looking atthe system at the wrong level. The liquidity of water is not tobe found at the level of the individual molecule, nor [is] thevisual perception ... to be found at the level of the individualneuron or synapse.

The key to understanding Searles argument and its fatal flawis in the words, But in both cases we would be looking at thesystem. It turns out that in this water/H2O analogy, it is not

just the water but both levels that are already levels ofexperience or of observation. Searle in fact requiresexperience, observation, description in short,consciousness to generate the two levels of his wateranalogy, which are meant to sustain his argument that twostuffs can be the same stuff even if they do not look like one

another. This supposed explanation evades the question ofexperience even more than does the first. For what Searle isin effect arguing, though he does not seem to notice it, is thatthe relationship between neural activity and experience islike the relationship between two kinds of experience of thesame stuff. And this is unsatisfactory because the problem heis supposedly solving is that neural impulses are not likeexperiences at all. (This rebuttal also applies even moreobviously, in fact to another, very popular analogy,

between dots of newsprint and a picture in the newspaper asneural activity and experiences. The dots/picture analogyalso has the benefit of making clear another vulnerability ofsuch analogies: the suggestion that neural activity is microwhile experiences are macro, when it is not at all evidentwhy that should be the case.)


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Some will object to this experiential characterization of thelevels argument, and will formulate it instead in terms oflevels oforganization or complexity: for example, the Earthsclimate and weather system is organized into many different

levels of complexity, each exhibiting distinct behavior anddistinct sorts of phenomena, from the interplays causingcycles of temperature over the centuries, down to thebehavior of storms, down to the interactions of molecules.The implicit idea is that each level of complexity is governedby its own distinct set of laws. But one cannot take thedistinction between these sets of laws to be inherent in theclimate/weather system without in effect saying that whenenough matter gets together in the same vicinity, it becomes

another kind of matter which falls under the scope of anotherkind of law (at the same time that it remains the more basickind of matter under the scope of the more basic kind of law).That flies in the face of reductive materialism not tomention raises some very difficult questions about theidenticality of these different kinds of matter. What is more,the getting together that makes, say, a storm a wholemade out of parts, is itself description-dependent and henceperception-dependent. The very term complexity refers toa description-dependent property. A pebble may be seen assomething very simple one pebble or somethinginfinitely complex a system of a trillion trillion sub-atomicparticles interacting in such a way as to sustain a staticequilibrium.

The persistent materialist may launch a final defense of theargument, to the effect that the particular descriptions ofwater and H2O molecules Searle mentions do not really

depend on experience at all. He writes, In its liquid statewater is wet, it pours, you can drink it, you can wash in it,etc.... When we describe the stuff as liquid we are justdescribing those very molecules at a higher level ofdescription than that of the individual molecule. One mightargue that these enumerated qualities of water are all


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physical facts, that they are true even when there is no onepresent to observe them. But to the extent that thisreinterpretation of Searles argument helps it to hold water(so to speak), it is only due to the original arguments

imprecision. For if we take it to be truly independent ofexperience that water is wet, it pours, you can drink it, youcan wash in it, then these facts are equally true of acollection of molecules of H2O, because of course the physical

stuff known as waterjust is a collection of molecules of H2O.

Water and H2O molecules, considered solely as physical

things, are identical, and have all of the same properties. Noappeal to levels of description should even be necessary.The reason it is necessary hinges on Searles description ofone level as that of the individual molecule. But anindividual molecule is not at all the same thing as water which is a collection of many individual molecules and soof course we should not expect the two to have the sameproperties. If we remove from the analogy the differingappearances to us of water and H2O molecules as sources of

their un-likeness, then all Searle has demonstrated is how athing can be unlike apartof itself, rather than unlike itself.

This is trivially true, and does not apply in any event to thequestion at hand if neural impulses are taken to be identicalto experiences.

Searle makes his position even more vulnerable by arguingthat not only are neural activity and the experience ofperception the same but that the former causes the latterjust as water is caused by H2O. This is desperate stuff: one

could hardly expect some thing A to cause some thing B with

which it is identical, because nothing can cause itself. In anyevent, the bottom line is that the molecules of H2O and the

wet stuff that is water are two appearances of the same thing two conscious takes on the same stuff. They cannot beanalogous to, respectively, that which supposedly causesconscious experiences (neural impulses) and conscious


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experiences themselves.

What Physical Science is Blind ToTo press this point a little harder: conscious experiences andobserved nerve impulses are both appearances. But nerveimpulses do not have any appearance in themselves; theyrequire a conscious subject observing them to appear andit is irrelevant that the observation is highly mediatedthrough instrumentation. Like all material items, nerveimpulses lack appearances absent an observer. And giventhat they are material events lacking appearances inthemselves, there is no reason why they should bring aboutthe appearances of things other than themselves. It is

magical thinking to imagine that material events in a materialobject should be appearings of objects other thanthemselves. Material objects require consciousness in orderto appear.

All Searle has explained, again, is how two differentappearances of the same thing can be unlike each other; butthe problem he means to solve in the first place or shouldmean to solve is how something that itself has noappearance can give rise to, in fact be identical to,appearances. That is, Searles task is to show how somethingthat itself has no appearance can be an appearance andwithout someone else observing the thing so as to give it theappearance. The question becomes pointed in Leibnizsthought experiment: how, from looking at the raw material ofneurons in someones brain, are we, as outside observers,supposed to get the appearances these neurons are meant tobe causing, or generating, or identical to? Searle is forced

into this conclusion: If one knew the principles on which thesystem of H2O molecules worked, one could infer that it was

in a liquid state by observing the movement of the molecules,but similarly if one knew the principles on which the brainworked one could infer that it was in a state of thirst orhaving a visual experience. In other words, just by looking at


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neural impulses and translating them into the other levelof description, we can get at the corresponding experiences.This sounds fine until we consider just what getting atthose experiences means. For what Searle does not account

for is how knowing thata particular brain is having aparticular experience is supposed to be enough to deliveractually having that experience yourself. To fully acceptSearles conclusion, we would have to believe that having theexperience is the same as knowing that it exists that itarises for the one person experiencing it, perhaps, from someimplicit act of translation or inference and so, amongother things, that just by looking at someone elses brain inthe proper way, we could have the same experiences they

are having. These are absurd conclusions, as we will see.

From a more practical standpoint, we can see why it willnever be enough to dismiss the problem of appearances outof hand by appealing either to the idea that perceptions arejust brain activity like any other brain activity, or the ideathat consciousness (and so all appearance) is an illusion. Forin either case, while appearances are nothing but neuralactivity, we still must be able to explain why some neural

activity leads to the sensation (or illusion) of appearancewhile otherneural activity does not; and we must be able todistinguish between the two by looking only at the materialneurons. Neurophilosophers should be able to recognize thisproblem, since they acknowledge that the vast majority ofneural impulses are notassociated with appearances orconsciousness of any sort. The search for neural correlates ofconsciousness has in fact turned up clusters, patterns, andlocations of activity that are not in any significant respect

different from neural activity that is not so correlated. What ismore, clusters, patterns, and so forth also require anobserver, to bring them together into a unity and to see thatunity as a unity. That which requires an observer cannot bethe basis of an observation.


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The fact that intentionality does not fit into the materialistworld picture has often been noted, but it is important toemphasize its anomalous nature because it lies at the root ofpretty well everything that distances us from the material

world, including other animals. The nature of intentionalitybecomes most clear when we see that the perceiver is anembodied subject when the object is related to an I whoperceives it, and who experiences himself as being located inthe same experiential field as the object. The requirement ofadmitting the existence of a perceiving self is, of course,enough to make neurophilosophers hostile to the notion ofthe subject. But if they deny the existence of a self, they stillhave to account for how it is that matter can be arranged

around a viewpointas near, far, and so forth for theconstruction of what Bertrand Russell called egocentricspace, in which indexical words like this, that, andhere find their meanings.

There are no appearances without viewpoints: for example,there are no appearances of a rock that are neither from thefront of it nor from the back of it nor from any other angle.But there is nothing in the material brain, as we have seen,

that could make it anyones own brain, or that could locate itat the center of anyones sensory field as the foundation of aviewpoint. We cannot appeal to the objective fact that thebrain is located in a particular body to install it as someonesbrain, because ownership does not reside in bodies absentconsciousness, or indeed self-consciousness butconsciousness is just what we are unable to find by looking atthe material of the brain. Nor is the fact that the brain islocated at a particular point in space sufficient for making it

the center of a particular someones personal space anymore than that fact is sufficient for a rock to have its ownpersonal space.

The view from nowhere of physical science does notaccommodate viewpoints. And since the material world has


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of itself no viewpoints, it does not, of itself, have centers or, for that matter, peripheries. The equation E=mc2, like alllaws of physics, captures an ultimate, all-encompassingscientific truth about the world, a viewless view of material

reality, and has nothing to say about the experience of theworld.Absent from it is that which forms the basic contentsof consciousness: the phenomenal appearances of the world.

Mysteries of the Subjective SelfThe loss of appearances is not an accidental mislaying. It isan inevitable consequence of the materialist conception ofmatter as we have it today. The brain, being a piece ofmatter, must be person-free. This is true not only by

definition but also in other, specific senses. Persons orselves have two additional features which cannot becaptured in neural terms.

The first is unity in multiplicity. At any given moment, I amaware of a multitude of experiences: sensations, perceptions,memories, thoughts, emotions. I am co-conscious of them that is, I am aware of each of them at once, so that they areintegrated into a unity of sorts. Moreover, co-consciousnessincludes consciousness of things I cannot currently see ortouch: it includes consciousness of the absent past, of theabsent elsewhere of the present, and of the possible future.

It is difficult to see how this integration is possible in neuralterms, since neurophysiology assigns these experiences tospatially different parts of the brain. Aspects of consciousnessare supposedly kept very tidily apart: the pathways forperception are separate from those for emotion, which areseparate from those for memory, which are separate fromthose for motivation, which are separate from those forjudgment, and so on. Within perception, each of the senses ofvision, hearing, smell, and so forth has different pathwaysand destinations. And within, say, visual perception, differentparts of the brain are supposed to be responsible forreceiving the color, shape, distance, classification, purpose,


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and emotional significance of seen objects. When, however, Isee my red hat on the table, over there, and see that it issquashed, and feel cross about it, while I hear you laughing,and I recognize the laughter as yours, and I am upset, and I

note that the taxi I have ordered has arrived so that I cancatch the train that I am aware I must not miss when all ofthese things occur in my consciousness at once, many thingsthat are kept apart must somehow be brought together.There is no model of such synthesis in the brain. This is theso-called binding problem.

Converging neural pathways might seem to offer a means bywhich things are all brought together this is the standard

neurophysiological account of integration. However, itsolves nothing. If all those components of the moment ofconsciousness came together in the same spot, if theiractivity converged, they would lose their separate identityand the distinct elements would be lost in a meaninglessmush. When I look at my hat, I see that it is red, andsquashed, and over there, and a hat, and all of the rest. Hereis the challenge presented to neuroscience by theexperienced unity and multiplicity of the conscious moment:

that which is brought together has also to be kept apart.Consciousness is a unification that retains multiplicity.

Neurophilosophers have tried to deal with this problem byarguing that, while the components of experience retain theirindividual locations in the brain, the activity that occurs inthose different locations is bound together. The mechanismfor this binding is supposed to be either rhythmic mass neuralactivity or emergent physical forces which transcend the

boundaries of individual neurons, such as electromagneticfields or quantum coherence arising out of the properties ofnerve membranes. This way of imagining the unity ofconsciousness assumes, without any reason, that linkedactivity across large sections of the brain say, a coherentpattern of rhythmic activity, made visible as such to an


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observer by instrumentation will be translated, or moreprecisely will translate itself, from an objective fact to asubjective unity. We are required to accept that somethingthat is observed as an internal whole via instrumentation

will be experienced as a whole, or itself be the experienceof a whole, such that it will deliver the wholeness of a subsetof items in the world while at the very same time retainingthe separateness of those items.

The other distinctive feature of subjectivity is temporal depth.The human subject is aware of a past (his own and theshared past of communities and cultures) and reaches into afuture (his own and the shared future). For simplicitys sake,

let us just focus on the past. There are manyneurophilosophical accounts of memory, but they have onething in common: they see memory as, in the slightly scornfulphrase of the philosopher Henri Bergson, a cerebraldeposit. Memory is, to use the slippery term, stored as aneffecton the brain, expressed in its altered reactivity. Thistheory has been demonstrated, to the satisfaction of manyneurophysiologists and cognitive neuroscientists, in creaturesas disparate as apes and fruit flies. Some of the most lauded

studies on memory, such as those that won ColumbiaUniversity neuroscientist Eric Kandel his 2000 Nobel Prize,have been on the sea slug.

In reality, Kandel did not examine anything that should reallybe called memory it was actually altered behaviorinresponse to training by means of an electric shock essentially a conditioned reflex. A sea slug does not, so far asanybody knows, have semantic memory of facts that is,

memory of facts as facts, laden with concepts. It does nothave explicit episodic memories of events that is, eventsremembered as located in the past. Nor does it haveautobiographical memories that is, events remembered aslocated in its own past. It does not even have an explicitsense of the past or of time in general, and even less of a


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collective past where shared history is located. Nor can oneseriously imagine an elderly sea slug actively trying toremember earlier events, racking its meager allocation oftwenty thousand neurons to recall something, any more than

one can think of it feeling nostalgic for its youth when itbelieved that it still had a marvelous life ahead of it.

Of course, neurophilosophers are not impressed by theobjection that the sea slug or any other animal model doesnot possess anything like the kind of memory that wepossess. It is, they say, simply a matter of different degreesof complexity of the nervous system in question: explicitmemories involve more elaborate circuitry, with more

intermediate connections, than the kinds of conditionedreflexes observed in sea slugs. To dissect this response, wehave to examine critically the very idea that memories areidentical with altered states of a nervous system. Let us lookfirst of all at how the fallacy commanded acceptance. Kandel,like many other researchers, seems to assimilate all memoryinto habitmemory, and habit memory in turn into alteredbehavior, or altered reactivity of the organism. And alteredreactivity can be correlated with the altered properties of the

excitable tissue in the organism, which may be understood inbiophysical, biochemical, or neurochemical terms the kindsof chemical changes one can see in the contents of a Petridish. But these changes have nothing to do with memory aswe experience and value it, though they have everything todo with overlooking the true nature of memory.

This is because habit memory is merely implicit, while humanmemory is also explicit: the former sort of memory is

merely altered behavior, while the latter is something one isaware of as a memory. Those who think this a false elevationof the human must address not only the fact that there aretwo broad categories of memory to be found among animalspecies, but that both of these types of memory coexist inhuman beings. We not only have uniquely explicit memory,


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but also have the same sort of implicit memory as Kandelssea slugs. Moreover, we can have both of these types ofmemory about the same event: After a spark from adoorknob shocks my hand as I close the door during the

winter, I will instinctively flinch from touching it again, andwill then stop and explicitly remember thatI had previouslyreceived an electrostatic shock. This time, I will explicitly planto shut the door with my foot, an act that will itself after afew repetitions become instinctive or implicit, until I againstop to recall the explicit memory of the event that led to thehabit. The neurophysiological account fails to address thesedistinctions.

To get to the bottom of the fallacies that underlie the veryidea of a neurophysiology of memory, we need to remindourselves that the nervous system is a material object andthat material objects are identical with their present states. Abroken cup is a broken cup. It is not in itself a record of itsprevious states of a cup that was once whole except toan outside observer who previously saw the cup in itsunbroken state and now remembers it, so that he or she cancompare the past and present states of the cup. The broken

cup has an altered reactivity it moves differently inresponse to stimuli but this altered reactivity is not amemoryof its previous state or of the event that caused itsaltered reactivity, namely its having been dropped. Likewise,although the altered state of the sea slug is, as it were, arecord of what has happened to it, it is a record only to anexternal consciousness that has observed it in both its pastand present states and is aware of both. And this is equallytrue of the altered reactivity of neurons exposed to previous

stimuli in higher organisms.

Indeed, just as a conscious observer is required for thepresent state of the broken cup to be regarded as a recordor memory of its having been dropped, so it must be aconsciousness that identifies the particular piece of matter of


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the cup as a single object distinct from its surroundings,having its own distinct causal history, of which there is onespecial event among all others of which the cup is a record:its being dropped. From a consciousness-free material

standpoint, the cup is but an arbitrary subset of all matter,and its present state owes equally to every prior state of thematter that composes it. The cup would have to be at once amemory of the moment it was dropped and of theinnumerable moments when it sat motionless in the cupboard with the former in no way privileged. In fact, if you believethat the present state of an object is a record or memory ofall the events that brought it to its present state, you arecommitted to believing that, at any given moment, the

universe is a memory of all its previous states. This need notbe so, of course, if an object is encountered by a consciousindividual who can see its present state as a sign of its paststate, and so can focus on salient causes of salient aspects for example, the event that led to the cup being broken. Theconscious individual alone can see the present state as a signof a past state and pick out one present state as a sign of oneof the events that brought it from its past state to its presentstate.

This final point illustrates how the effect of an experiencedevent is a record of this event only to an observer. But thebrain, being a material object, cannot be its own observer,comparing its past and present states. More precisely, thepresent state of a portion of the brain cannot reach out orrefer, by the temporal equivalent of intentionality, to thosesalient events that changed it from an earlier state. And yetthis is what memory does. Memories, that is to say, have an

even more mysterious and counter-causal about-ness thanperceptions of present events: they reach back to previousexperiences, which themselves, through perception, reachedout to that which, according to orthodox neuroscience,caused the experience. Memories supposedly therefore reachback to the mental causes of their physical causes. What is


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more, just as in vision I see the object as separate frommyself, in memory I see the remembered object as differentfrom the present, from the totality of what is here I see itas absent. The memory explicitly locates its intentional object

in thepast. To borrow a phrase that Roger Scruton used inrelation to music, memories have a double intentionality.

The failure of neuroscientism to deal with this last twist of theknife is illustrated by a recent paper in Sciencewhich someregarded triumphantly as having nailed memory. The authorsfound that the same neurons were active when an individualwatched a TV scene (from, of all things, The Simpsons) aswhen they were asked to remember it. Memory, they

concluded, is simply the replication of the neural activity thatwas provoked by the event that is remembered. This fails todistinguish, and so leaves unexplained, how it is that anindividual experiences a memory as a memoryrather than assomething present or, actually, a hallucination ofsomething present.

A putative neural account of memory cannot deal with thedifference between perceptions and memories because thereis no past tense or indeed future tense in the materialworld. Consciousness, with its implicit sense of now, isrequired to locate events in one panel or other of the triptychpast, present, and future; it is the conscious subject thatprovides the reference point. This is why Einstein said thatphysicists know that the distinction between past, present,and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Aconsistent materialism should not allow for the possibility ofmemory, of the sense of the past. It only manages to seem to

do so because observers, viewpoint, and consciousness aresmuggled into the descriptions of the successive states of thebrain, making it seem that later states can be aboutearlierstates.

As if the unity of the self or subject or I at aparticulartimewere not sufficiently resistant to neurological explanation, the
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1164685http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1164685


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unity of the selfovertime is even further beyond its reach.The objective endurance of the brain does not generate thesensed co-presence of successive states of the self, even lessthe sense that one has temporal depth. Even if the self were

reduced to a series of experiences, as in the accounts ofDavid Hume or Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, it would notbe possible to see how the series was explicit as a series,with different moments explicitly related to each other,where one part accessed another and saw that it belonged tothe same self. Indeed, starving the self down into a mereimplicit thread linking successive experiences renders it less,not more, amenable to neural reduction, since the question ofwhy some particular set of successive experiences rather

than another should be linked together as a single seriesbecomes even more glaring when the experiences are seenas but some arbitrary physical events among other physicalevents occurring in many different locations in physicalspace.

And the problem is by no means absolved if the sense of selfis as claimed by some neuroscientists, like so many otherthings they are unable to explain an illusion. My feeling

that I am the same person as the person who married mywife in 1970 is just as impossible to explain neurologically if itis an illusion as if it is true. Neural activity does not have thewherewithal to create the sense that we have of feeling thatwe are the same individual at different times just as little ifthe sense is illusory as if it is true. The notion that thematerial brain can produce the illusion of the self but not bethe basis of the real thing seems, to put it mildly, rather odd.And what is it to which the illusion is presented? Here again is

the neuroscientific reduction to absurdity, in its purest form:illusions must be experienced bysome being, but beingsomething is itself an illusory experience.

An Insincere MaterialismThe belief among neurophilosophers that the brain, a


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material object, can generate tensed time is one amongmany manifestations of the insincerity of their materialism.As we have seen, under cover of hard-line materialism, theyborrow consciousness from elsewhere, smuggling it into, or

presupposing it in, their descriptions of brain activity. Thisploy is facilitated by a mode of speaking which I call thinkingby transferred epithet, in which mental properties areascribed to the brain or to parts of the brain (frequently verytiny parts, even individual neurons), which are credited withsignaling, and often very complex acts such asrewarding, informing, and so forth. The use of transferredepithets is the linguistic symptom of what Oxford philosopherP.M.S. Hacker and University of Sydney neuroscientist M.R.

Bennett described, in their 2003 book PhilosophicalFoundations of Neuroscience, as the mereological fallacy:ascribing to parts properties which truly belong to wholes.This fallacy bids fair to be described as the Original Sin ofmuch neurotalk, and it certainly allows the mind-brain barrierto be trespassed with ease.

This ease is in turn concealed by the ubiquity of transferredepithets outside brain science in everyday life. We are so

used to talking about machines (particularly computers)detecting, signaling, recording, remembering,warning, and so forth, that we hardly notice, even lessobject, when this talk is applied to brains. Indeed, given thatthe brain is often billed as the most sophisticated of allmachines, the computer to end all computers, it hardly needsto demonstrate its entitlement to being credited with suchactivities. While the homunculus is out of fashion, and ghostshave been exorcised from the machine, there are apparently

billions of micro-homunculi haunting the cerebral cortex. Theexiled homunculus has crept back in the form of a millionbillion angels bearing messages from one part of the brain toanother, chattering endlessly across synapses.

This absurdity is concealed yet more deeply by a mode of


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speech that populates even the material environment thatsurrounds the brain with signals and messages andinformation. All the nervous system has to do is to extractand transmit those signals and messages and information.

The Princeton psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird, a leadingfigure of the school of thought that held that the brain-mindis a computer, stated in his 1988 book The Computer and theMind that light reflected from surfaces and focused on theretinae contains a large amount of information. (Gossipystuff, light.) He admitted, however, that there were noentirely free gifts:

No matter how much information is in the light falling on the

retinae, there must be a mental mechanism for recoveringthe identities of the things in a scene and those of theirproperties that vision makes explicit to consciousness.

Nevertheless, stipulating that there is information in theenergy tickling up the brain is a flying start, and gets youacross the brain-consciousness barrier without any scientificor indeed conceptual work being done. The otherwiseinexplicable miracle by which the brain is supposed tosupport intelligent consciousness is made rather easier tounderstand when the energy that impinges on it is billed asinformation information about the brains surroundings.

This trend, incidentally, is the top of a slippery slope at thebottom of which much lunacy lies. Information, once freedfrom the confinement of conscious human beings offeringinformation to other human beings requiring to be informed,is everywhere. It is in the light; it is in DNA and otherstructures of the body. It is even in the material transactionsof the non-living universe, as has been suggested by theadvocates of digital physics the idea that the universe iscomputation. By such misuse of language, matter becomesconsciousness, or the energy in the material world comes toknow itself, as has been suggested by the advocates ofpanpsychism the idea that all matter is at least partially


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conscious.

The promotion of energy to information is the inverse of thedemotion of consciousness to material transactions. In onedirection, consciousness is in nothing; in the other, it is ineverything. It gets right to the heart of how inherently absurdand paradoxical is neuroscientism to recognize that itnaturally splits into these two wholly and fundamentallyopposed modes of thinking, yet relies simultaneously onthem both.

Finding OurselvesWe can see more clearly now the wide gap between brainfunction and consciousness really, between people and

their brains. This gap is seemingly crossed by linguisticlegerdemain: people can be brainified if the brain ispersonified. But we have seen reasons why this gap shouldbe unbridgeable. This, however, only throws into greaterrelief the magnitude of what remains to be answered, and sowe must ask where we go from here. The failure to explainconsciousness in terms of the brain which follows from thefailure of matter as understood in the most rigorous scientificmanner to be able to house consciousness raises twoimmediate questions.

The first and most obvious question is: Why, if the brain is notthe basis of consciousness, is it so intimately bound up withit? Even those of us who object to the reduction of persons tobrains have to explain why, of all the objects in the world, thebrain is so relevant to our lives as persons. Nor can weoverlook the extraordinary advances that have come fromneuroscience in our ability to understand and treat diseasesthat damage voluntary action, consciousness, and mood something that has been central to my entire professionalcareer as a clinical neuroscientist. If consciousness, mind,volition, and so forth are not deeply connected with brainactivity, then what are we to make of the genuine advancesthat neuroscience has contributed to our management of


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conditions that affect these central underpinnings of ordinarylife?

The second question is whether, having shown the difficulty no, the impossibility of trying to get from brains alone topersons, we should abandon the very notion of the brain as astarting point for our thoughts about human consciousness.This question, however, brings us back to the first. If we sayI wouldnt start from here, then what do we do with thefacts of neuroscience? Where does the brain fit into ametaphysics, an epistemology, and an ontology of mind thatdeny the brain a place at their center? If we are thinking of anew ontology, an account of the kinds of things there are in

the universe that goes beyond the traditional division intomental and physical things; or if we are to go beyond aninteractive epistemology that begins with sensations arisingout of the impingement of energy on our brains and ascendsto our knowledge of the laws of nature; then how shall wemake sense of the things neuroscience tells us? How shall wedeal with the fact that we are evolved organisms as well aspersons?

These questions are posed because the case outlined herehas been, necessarily, quite negative. It has merely beenmeant to clear the decks so we can set sail on the real workof finding apositive description of our nature, of the place ofmind in nature, and, possibly, of the nature of nature itself.We need to start again thinking about our hybrid status: aspieces of matter subject to the laws of physics, as organismssubject to the laws of biology, and as people who have acomplex sense of themselves, who narrate and lead their

lives, and who are capable of thinking thoughts like these.

Raymond Tallis, emeritus professor of geriatric medicine atthe University of Manchester, United Kingdom, is the author,most recently, ofMichelangelos Finger: An Explorationof Everyday Transcendence (Yale, 2010) and Aping
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/authors/raymond-tallishttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0300166486?tag=the-new-atlantis-20http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300166486?tag=the-new-atlantis-20http://www.thenewatlantis.com/authors/raymond-tallishttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0300166486?tag=the-new-atlantis-20http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300166486?tag=the-new-atlantis-20


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Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentationof Humanity (Acumen, forthcoming in 2011). This essay hasbeen adapted from a lecture delivered in February 2010 atthe American Enterprise Institute.

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us Abut Ourselves

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