Quotes from Raymond Tallis

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.

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.

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.

Within the secular world picture, Neuromania and Darwinitis are the biggest piles of rubbish.

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.

The extent of neuromanic imperialism is astounding.

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".

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.

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.

The point is that our difference from beasts is wall to wall, permeating every moment of our day.

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

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.

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.

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.

Reasons do not grow out of some putative biological substrate but are a forward-looking affirmation of, assertion of, expression of, myself.

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.

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).

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.

The most serious dangers emanate from those for whom the moral high ground is a platform for self-advancement, many of whom have never borne, or have been willing to bear, the responsibilities that weigh on the daily life of practitioners.

William Osler's ironical definition of man as 'the medicine-taking animal' is therefore justified inasmuch as it captures something distinctive about humans.

It is intentionality that tears the seamless fabric of the causally closed material world.

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.

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).

The lengths that post-analytical philosophers of mind have gone to in order to avoid acknowledging contents of consciousness have been extraordinary.