Winds of change? Humanist deflates popcorn neuroscience

In "Mind in the Mirror," Raymond Tallis reflects on V.S. Ramachandran's The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human, "Neuroscience can explain many brain functions, but not the mystery of consciousness":

The subtitle of V.S. Ramachandran's latest book prompts a question: Why should "A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human" be of particular interest? The answer is obvious if you believe, as so many do, that humans are essentially their brains. When a brain scientist speaks, we should pay attention, for "What makes us human" then boils down to what makes our brains special, compared with those of other highly evolved creatures.

RaymondTallis

Dr. Ramachandran and many others, including prominent philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Patricia and Paul Churchland, promise that neuroscience will help us understand not only the mechanism of brain functions (such as those that coordinate movement or underpin speech) but also key features of human consciousness. As of yet, though, we have no neural explanation of even the most basic properties of consciousness, such as the unity of self, how it is rooted in an explicit past and explicit future, how experience is owned and referred to a self, and how we are, or feel that we are, voluntary agents. Neuroscience, in short, has no way of accommodating everyday first-person being.

No, and neuroscience is often invoked to explain things it doesn't:

Here, as elsewhere, the intellectual audit trail connecting the neuroscience to the things he claims to explain is fragile. For a start, mirror neurons have been observed not just in monkeys and humans but also in swamp sparrows, enabling them to learn to sing the songs they hear. They are admirable birds, but their cultural achievements are modest. Moreover, the existence in humans of a distinct mirror neuron system with properties such as "mind-reading" is still contested. At any rate, the claim that mirror neurons are a "specialized circuitry for social cognition" in humans is a death-defying leap beyond the humble "Monkey see, Monkey do" function they were first observed to have.

Tallis describes himself, at his own site, as a humanist. He is emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, and will publish Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, presumably a bash at evolutionary psychology and related pseudosciences.

It's good to see actual humanists weighing in on these questions. Humanism had a respectable history before it was taken over by Darwin worshippers, at which point, the term might better have become "primatist." What the new humanists were really interested in of human experience is what a chimpanzee could replicate. And once Apes R' Us hit pop culture, it did considerable damage. After all, many people do not want to rise to the challenge of being human.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Neurolaw? Your brain is your best defense ... literally!

In “Why blame me? It was all my brain’s fault”, Raymond Tallis warns against “the dubious rise of neurolaw”. Essentially, this is an effort to calim that the defendant's "brain" did it (and therefore he himself didn't). He writes,

Those who blame the brain should be challenged as to why they stop at the brain when they seek the causes of bad behaviour. Since the brain is a physical object, it is wired into nature at large. “My brain made me do it” must mean (ultimately) that “The Big Bang” made me do it. Neuro-determinism quickly slides into determinism tout court.

And there is a contradiction built into the plea of neuromitigation. The claim “my brain made me do it” suggests that I am not my brain; even that my brain is some kind of alien force. One of the founding notions of neurolaw, however, is that the person is the brain. If I were my brain, then “My brain made me do it” would boil down to “I made me do it” and that would hardly get me off the hook. And yet, if I am not identical with my brain, why should a brain make me do anything? Why should this impersonal bit of matter single me out?

Of course, the underlying idea, as Mario Bearegard and I explain in Chapter 5 of The Spiritual Brain is that consciousness and free will really don't exist.

And sure enough, the comments to the article make that agenda perfectly clear:

... a central tenet of neuroscience (as distinct from both neurolaw and neuromythology) is that behavior is the result of neural activity -- there is nothing extra. While this conclusion may be debated, if it is true then the question is not to distinguish between acts caused by brain activity and those caused by persons, but to distinguish between pathological from normal neural activity,

writes Paul C. from Atlanta.

We, as a society, will need to come to terms with the fact that true free-will and genuine responsibility in the sense people want it to be true are not scientifically (or philosophially) viable. Instead, our apportioning of blame, or not, to individuals for their actions is based on a blend of culture and evolutionary traits.

chimes in Elan from Boca Raton.

Neither commenter explains how that has been demonstrated, and for a very good reason: It hasn't been demonstrated. Rather, it is a central tenet of materialism! If you are a materialist, you will believe that that is true and you will look for confirmation. You will ignore or treat as a problem any evidence that it is not true.

Read the Introduction to The Spiritual Brain here for a look at the actual state of the evidence, which is quite different from what the materialist implies. Note, for example, that a recent edition of Scientific American we read:

How Does Consciousness Happen

Two leading neuroscientists, Christof Koch and Susan Greenfield, disagree about the activity that takes place in the brain during subjective experience

By Christof Koch and Susan Greenfield

Well, if there is still debate even about what activity takes place (and this doesn't even address the "hard problems" of consciousness), you can be pretty sure that materialists have not made their case.

In the end, neurolaw is just another materialist fad like Freudianism or Marxism or Darwinism. My brain made me do it instead of my mother made me do it or my class position made me do it or my animal ancestors made me do it.

The best argument for the self ever devised is the strange fact that, whenever there's trouble, the only one who DIDN'T do it is me.