Raymond Tallis > Quotes

“[...] the less you know, the less you will be aware of your ignorance. The familiar metaphor is that the wider the circle of our knowledge, the greater its contact with the unknown, and the more oppressive our feeling of cognitive inadequacy. By contrast, a small mind finds a small world to match it, and the smaller the mind the more it feels it has the world sussed.”
― Raymond Tallis

“We are accustomed to the idea that the truth of things may be neither pleasant nor comforting; we are less accustomed to the idea that the truth may be unfruitful.”
― Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness

“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

“There is a Greek proverb: ‘Each is furthest from himself’. It is open to many interpretations, but this is what it means to me: because we look out from within ourselves at the world around us, we tend, in a rather fundamental sense, to overlook ourselves. We are the dark centre, or the invisible origin, of the world with which we interact. At the heart of our concern with ourselves is a taking-for-granted, which prevents us from noticing at the deepest level that we exist. ‘I need this’, ‘I want that’, ‘I must do the other’ distracts us from the fact that ‘I’, the one who needs, wants, must do, is ourself; or that there is one who needs, wants, must do, and that one is I. In unremitting pursuit of our direct and indirect self-interests, and our responsibilities, we look away from the self that is interested and bears responsibility. It is presupposed but unvoiced.”
― Raymond Tallis, I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being

“The most extensive and sustained exploration of the world, and the mightiest monument of collective wondering, is, of course, science. Richard Dawkins speaks of 'the feeling of awed wonder' that science can give us and asserts that 'it is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest music and poetry can deliver'. Anyone who is not acquainted with science - its questions, its answers, the limits to its answers, and honesty about those limits, the brilliance of its methodologies and instruments, its sense of the unanswerable - is denying herself a great opening, a dormer window, in conciousness.”
― Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections

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

“Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. ... The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. ... This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities...”
― Raymond Tallis

“And even if we are not worried when various modes of biologistic pseudo-science are ubiquitous in our talk about ourselves, surely we should worry when they are starting to be invoked by policy-makers.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“William Osler’s ironical definition of man as ‘the medicine-taking animal’ is therefore justified inasmuch as it captures something distinctive about humans.”
― Raymond Tallis, Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and its Discontents

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“Aping Mankind is a one-stop shop for anyone who wishes to question the wild and often ludicrous claims that are made on behalf of biologism.”
― 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

“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

“Neurophilosophers have made it a matter of honour even to deny the existence of such things as beliefs, desires, and so on.[”
― Raymond Tallis, Why the Mind Is Not a Computer: A Pocket Lexicon of Neuromythology

“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 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

“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