Aping Mankind Quotes

“Once the concept of information is liberated from the idea of a conscious someone being informed and from that of a conscious someone doing the informing, anything is possible. Language bewitches us and we imagine that the problem of consciousness has been solved when in fact is has simply been concealed by verbal legerdemain.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“There is, in part, the glamour of science, which, since it is so spectacularly and usefully right over so many things, is often given authority where it has none.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Within the secular world picture, Neuromania and Darwinitis are the biggest piles of rubbish.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The extent of neuromanic imperialism is astounding.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“It is intentionality that tears the seamless fabric of the causally closed material world.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Reasons do not grow out of some putative biological substrate but are a forward-looking affirmation of, assertion of, expression of, myself.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“So it is no surprise that we cannot find free will in this isolated movement in a laboratory, if we treat it as an isolated movement.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Libet’s experiment illustrates how the (neuro-)determinist case against freedom is based on a very distorted conception of what constitutes an action in everyday”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Those who deny our freedom do so on the basis of experiments that remove selves from their worlds and focus on elements of behaviour that are uprooted from the contexts that make sense of actions: or, more precisely, reduce actions to movements.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The discovery that some actions are not as freely chosen as we may have thought does not take us to the conclusion that no action is freely chosen. Degrees of freedom imply freedom.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Trying to discover the contents of 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 woods in a breeze.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“But even those who locate the roots of consciousness in the brain should still recognize that brains together create a space that cannot be stuffed back into the brain.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Notwithstanding the claims of ethologists such as Frans de Waal, 46 there is nothing corresponding to the apparatus of government – in the very broadest sense – in animals.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Unlike the physiological emotions of animals, our feelings are forever articulating themselves, making sense of themselves, narrating themselves, appealing to moral and other expectations, and rights and wrongs, and possibilities and impossibilities, to uphold or question themselves. They are often normative, as in the case of the anger felt at an injustice.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“And it illustrates a profound observation by E. A. Burtt: [I]f he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. 19”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The events in computers do not amount to genuine understanding. Indeed, given that symbols are symbols only to someone who understands that they are symbols, events in computers considered in isolation from conscious human beings do not even amount to the processing of symbols. There is merely the passage of minute electric currents along circuits which may or may not cause other physical events to happen, such as the lighting up of a screen in a certain pattern.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The linguistic habit that has kept so many in thrall to Neuromania is referring to the brain and bits of the brain in ways that would be appropriate only if we were referring to whole human beings.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Meme theory is an example of the kind of prestidigitation needed to present an image of us as biologically programmed in the face of the overwhelming evidence that everyday human life is utterly different from the reflex-, tropism-, instinct-driven life of animals (although of course we rely on reflexes to perform our voluntary actions, may be in part guided by tropisms and have a general direction influenced remotely by instincts).”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The claim that memes are units because they “replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity” 41 manages to be circular, empty and daft all at once: quite an achievement.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Ironically, it was the completion of the Human Genome Project a decade ago that showed how little the genetic code told us about living organisms (and even less about complex ones such as us).”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The desire to minimize human uniqueness has prompted exaggerated claims about animal tool use, about their range and mode of communication and their sense of each other, about their putative beliefs and other modes of thought. However, the monuments of collective endeavour seen in the animal kingdom – for example the heaps created by termites – are the result not of conscious deliberation but of dovetailing automaticities.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The point is that our difference from beasts is wall to wall, permeating every moment of our day.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Surroundedness” does not come free along with, say, a membrane marking the boundary between the organism and the rest of the material world any more than it comes free with an entity such as a pebble that has a continuous surface marking its limits.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“Intentionality highlights the mystery of what brains are, ultimately, supposed to do; namely, to make other items, indeed worlds, appear to someone.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“We cannot, to use the jargon, find “the neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC): more precisely, identify an adequate basis for the difference between neural activity that is, and neural activity that isn’t, associated with consciousness.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The errors of muddling correlation with causation, necessary condition with sufficient causation, and sufficient causation with identity lie at the heart of the neuromaniac’s basic assumption that consciousness and nerve impulses are one and the same, and that (to echo a commonly used formulation) “the mind is a creation of the brain”.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“I am now going to argue that neuroscience does not address, even less answer, the fundamental question of the relation(s) between matter and mind, body and mind, or brain and mind. If it seems to do so this is only the result of a confusion between, indeed a conflation of, three quite different relations: correlation, causation and identity.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“The twentieth century demonstrated how quickly social policies based in pseudo-science, which bypassed the individual as an independent centre of action and judgement but simply saw humanity as a substrate to be shaped by appropriate technologies, led to catastrophe. Unfortunately, historical examples may not be successful in dissuading the bioengineers of the human soul because it will be argued that this time the intentions are better and consequently the results will be less disastrous.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“There is something dodgy, of course, about the claim that an empirical science can address essentially metaphysical questions such as whether or not human freedom is real.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

“new kind of realm was gradually formed. This, the human world, is materially rooted in the natural world but is quite different from it. It is populated by individuals who are not just organisms, as is evident in that they inhabit an acknowledged, shared public sphere, structured and underpinned by an infinity of abstractions, generalizations, customs, practices, norms, laws, institutions, facts, and artefacts unknown to even the most “social” of animals.”
― Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity