The limits of neuroscience

I've been looking for good counterpoints to John Gray's mind-altering book Straw Dogs since reading it a couple of years ago. Raymond Tallis provides one in his formidable critique of "neuroscientism" in The New Atlantis. Here's a drop from the bucket: A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects — that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with, as in [Daniel] Dennett's words, "the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice" to explain everything else in the material universe. Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but...