Quotes from 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.

Qualia are difficult, propositional attitudes are difficult, selves are difficult, so away they must go: they cannot be accommodated in the third-person neurophilosophical framework that combines scientism with an analytical outlook that prefers concepts to consciousness, placing consciousness-free language at the heart of the human mind.[

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.

Intentionality highlights the mystery of what brains are, ultimately, supposed to do; namely, to make other items, indeed worlds, appear to someone.

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.

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

The assumption that 'if science can't see it, then it is isn't real' has nothing to do with science and everything to do with 'scientism'—belief in the 'omnicompetence of science';[30] more precisely, in the omnicompetence of a sub-set of sciences—the natural, rather than the social, sciences

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scientific medicine is one of the greatest triumphs of humankind.