Reflections of a Metaphysical Flaneur

and Other Essays

Raymond Tallis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317546597
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

These essays from one of our most stimulating thinkers showcase Tallis's infectious fascination, indeed intoxication, with the infinite complexity of human lives and the human condition. In the title essay, we join Tallis on a stroll around his local park - and the intricate passages of his own consciousness - as he uses the motif of the walk, the amble, to occasion a series of meditations on the freedoms that only human beings possess. In subsequent essays, the flaneur thinks about his brain, his relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom, his profession of medicine and about the physical world and the claims of physical science to have rendered philosophical reflection obsolete. Taken together the essays continue Tallis's mission to elaborate a vision of humanity that rejects religious myths while not succumbing to scientism or any other form of naturalism. Written with the author's customary intellectual energy and vigour these essays provoke, move and challenge us to think differently about who we are and our place in the material world.

1

Am I My Brain?

Are persons like you and me brains? The short answer is no, but I think I owe you a longer answer. I want to set out some of the reasons why it is wrong to regard people as being identical with their brains and a mistake to talk about brains when we should be talking about people. First, I shall list some of the ways in which persons are identified with their brains. Then I will suggest why so many people are inclined to do this: indeed, see it as plain common sense, validated by neuroscience. After these preliminaries, I shall give some reasons for denying that persons are brains (or their brains). This will take up the bulk of this essay. Finally, I shall say something about the challenges that have to be met if we establish that brains and persons are not identical: “Where do we go from here?”

There are many ways of identifying brains with persons, such that personal identity is brain identity and personal history is brain history: persons are all of their brains; persons are parts of their brains; persons are software implemented in the hardware of the brain; and persons are “connectomes” – how their brains are wired up.

The notion that the person is identical with all of the brain was first adumbrated by Hippocrates 2,500 years ago. As he said in his treatise on epilepsy:

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, grief and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant.

This sounds remarkably similar to Francis Crick a decade or so ago –“Your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (1994: 3) – although Crick, in common with many others, thought that the person was located only in part of the brain not the whole of it. His favoured spot was the claustrum deep in the hemispheres where many neural pathways converge.

These, then, are some of the ways personhood is construed as being identical with activity in the brain. Why are we inclined to believe that we shall find personhood in the brain? There are reasons rooted in everyday observation and reasons that seem to come from neuroscience.

First, some homely observations. Most obviously, the “here” of the “I” is located where the brain is. The brain, or the head that contains it, is seen to define the centre of egocentric space: in so far as that space has coordinates, the brain lies at their point of origin. If my brain is in a particular room in Stockport, so am I. My history and the spatiotemporal trajectory of my brain are inseparable. Second, there are the effects of brain damage. Severe brain damage may lead to loss of consciousness and loss of personhood; and less severe brain damage causes impairment or alteration of consciousness and change in personality.

These homely observations have been supplemented by a huge body of knowledge about the impact of injury to, or dysfunction of, different parts of the brain on every aspect of behaviour and awareness. Recordings made from the brains of living subjects using technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG), and various kinds of brain scan such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have demonstrated correlations of neural activity with the levels of consciousness (alert, drowsy, asleep, comatose and so on); with the contents of consciousness – perception, memory, emotion, thought; and less closely, but still impressive to some, with propensity to behave in a certain way. It is reasonable to conclude from this that every aspect of the consciousness of a person, from the most primitive sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, depends in some sense on, or is caught up with, brain function, and the location, pattern and distribution of brain activity is associated with experiences, moods and so on.

And we are therefore justified in concluding from this that to live a normal life as a person requires a brain in good working order. But are we justified in concluding from this that to live a normal life as a person is to be a brain in some kind of working order? And are we justified in concluding that the brain is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition of personhood – that persons and brains are the same?

In order to answer these questions, I shall look at certain aspects of personhood and see whether they could be identical with what goes on in the brain. The aspects I want to look at are: consciousness, the sine qua non of personhood, as that in virtue of which there are phenomenal appearances, and which, from perception upwards has intentionality; first-person being, which underpins having a viewpoint; the unity of consciousness at any particular time; and the temporal depth of consciousness – the sense of “I” extended over time.

First, consciousness. Is brain activity sufficient for consciousness, so that we can identify the one with the other? Before I deal with the arguments, let me set aside an empirical red herring. It is possible by direct brain stimulation to cause individuals to have quite complex experiences. The most famous example is the work of the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who stimulated certain areas in the cerebral cortex of waking subjects. Doing so seems to evoke not only simple sensations, but often quite complex experiences corresponding to previously dormant memories of past events. This would seem to suggest that experiences could be generated in the standalone brain and that, as suggested in the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, the entire consciousness of a person could be created or constructed by simulation of the neural inputs of a brain sustained in a bath of nutrient.

This conclusion is invalid. After all, Penfield’s subjects were already awake; in other words, the background wakefulness required for the experiences to be had and interpreted was provided independently of the stimulation. And the experiences would not have counted as memories of the subject’s own past except in relation to a life, prior to the moment of stimulation, in which experiences had been had in the usual way and subsequently qualified as memories.

With red herring set aside, I want to turn to the arguments. Before I consider whether key features of personhood could plausibly be located in brain activity, I want to rephrase the question. The brain is a piece of matter. Could a piece of matter have the consciousness that is necessary to be a person? If not, the brain could not be a person. And by “a piece of matter”, I mean a piece of something whose definitive description, or most authoritative portrait, is to be found in the physical sciences. This has been part of the neuroscientist’s creed for a long time, as witness this quote from the leading nineteenth-century biologist Emil du Bois Reymond, one of the founders of neurophysiology (in a letter to a friend of 1842): “Brucke and I pledged a solemn oath to put into power this truth: no other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism”. More recently, this has been spelled out by Daniel Dennett:

There is only one sort of stuff, namely matter – the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology – and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain … [W]e can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth.

(1991: 33)

And Dennett’s sworn foe – John Searle – shares his materialism. “[C]onsciousness”, he says, “is an ordinary biological phenomenon, comparable with growth, digestion or the secretion of bile” (1998: 6).

Dennett’s formulation, which he himself says is the current orthodoxy, should block off the ploy of mobilizing certain terms of rhetoric that are often put in play when materialists are challenged to explain the difference between unconscious matter and conscious people – terms like “emergence”, “supervenience” and “complexity” – since, as Dennett says, they believe that the same physical principles are conserved when we move from rocks to bacteria to professors of philosophy. I shall touch on these terms briefly at the end.

And so to consciousness, and two features – intentionality and appearance – that I want to focus on. The case for the identity of phenomenal consciousness and neural activity does seem to have been based on a slither. The slither is from (rough) correlation of activity in certain parts of the brain and conscious experience to the belief that the brain activity causes or generates the consciousness and thence to the further belief that brain activity is consciousness. This slither has, of course, been challenged from Victorian times onwards. Here, for example, is the view of the physicist John Tyndall quoted by Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution:

The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable … Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions …, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, “How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?” The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.

(Quoted in Wallace 1871: 361)

And the reply of the neurophilosophers has usually been: it’s a brute fact, get over it. So the question we need to ask is: can you be a sincere or consistent materialist and still believe that conscious persons are brain activity, so you could build a person out of neural activity, “using the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, and so on”? If we conclude that we cannot in principle then we need to abandon the person–brain identity theory. In addressing this, I am going to go over some very well-trodden territory in full awareness of the philosopher J. L. Austin’s observation that one has to be a special kind of fool to rush in where so many angels have trodden already.

But I want to take a slightly different path through this well-trodden territory, as I focus on intentionality and phenomenal appearances. Let me touch on intentionality, taking a very simple example: the perception of a material object, such as the case of a person looking at a glass; an embodied subject looking at an object that she appreciates as being other than herself. The laws of nature as evident in the material world seem to be in ordinary operation as we follow the causal chain that links the events in the glass – the interference between light and glass – and the events in the retina and visual pathways terminating in the cerebral cortex. The causal sequence passes through the brain and may have a behavioural output. This is not “awareness of the glass”. The latter – the gaze looking out, as opposed to the light getting in – is in a sense in the opposite direction. This is not, of course, reverse causation or feedback or some kind of ghostly “reaching” for the glass. It is something quite different. The causal chain, the processes and laws by which the light gets into and passes down the visual pathways do not encompass the gaze looking out.

There is something going on here that is at odds with the laws of material nature as they apply to the things that Dennett listed. Intentionality is, to use Herbert Feigl’s phrase of fifty years ago, a “nomological dangler”, which, as he argued, does not fit into the world picture of physical science. We can take hold of this oddness in different ways.

First, intentionality reaches, as it were, causally upstream. If perception of the glass were identical with neural events in the visual cortex, those events would be mysteriously reaching back to their own causal antecedents, interestingly reaching past some antecedents (e.g. activity in the retina) and stopping short of others: everything from the Big Bang onwards that led up to the light interacting at that moment with the glass. It is important that this is not thought of as reverse causation: it does not belong to the causal nexus at all. That is why it is inappropriate to think of the gaze as having effects on the material world, as Rupert Sheldrake does when he thinks of the gaze itself as something that can be felt (as opposed to being seen), as if it were a kind of pressure, so that there is “a sense of being stared at” (2005). To think in this way is to make it too like the inward causal limb and not sufficiently to liberate it from the material world. Second, the objects of our perception (probably unique to humans) exceed that which is revealed to our senses: perception goes beyond sentience. Object perception is the most basic example of the fact that, as Barry Stroud has said, our objects of knowledge are “‘underdetermined’ by whatever it is that we get through that source of knowledge known as ‘the senses’ or ‘experience’” (2000: 6). This is the level at which experience has reference beyond itself.

In summary, contrary to Dennett’s assertion, the law-governed causal pathways seen in the material world do not capture what happens when a person is aware of a glass, never mind when she is aware of another person being aware of her or aware of the pressure to conform to an abstract social norm.

This has prompted some desperate suggestions about how to get rid of intentionality and to deny that consciousness is about anything distinct from itself. These include the assertion that consciousness (or in some cases the mind) is the brain’s experience of itself or that consciousness is our perception of some physical processes in the brain: in short, that consciousness and the appearance of that which seems to appear to us are made of the appearance of nerve impulses to themselves. This notion of the manifest world as an idea cooked up by neurons, which telescopes that which is to be perceived and that in virtue of which it is perceived, this view of neural activity mysteriously aware of itself and transforming that awareness into an awareness of a world that causes it, is possibly the unhappiest marriage of materialism and idealism one could imagine.

One or two writers acknowledge this: for example the philosopher of biology Alex Rosenberg in his latest book, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011). Mind, he argues, is identical with brain. A thought must be an event in the brain. No neural activity can be about anything inside or outside our mind. No thought, therefore, is about anything. What can one say but “speak for yourself, mate”?

So much for intentionality. Now on to appearances. Conscious beings such as you and I are entities in virtue of which items such as material objects have appearances: they appear to us. Do material objects in themselves have appearances, corresponding to or forming the basic contents of consciousness? We can approach this in a couple of ways. The first is to note that the concept of matter, or the basic stuff of the world as seen through the eyes of physics, is alien to appearances. The second is that the notion of material objects having an appearance in themselves, independent of any viewpoint, is self-contradictory, and I shall come to that presently.

As materialist accounts of the world advance towards their own idea of completeness there is a gradual disappearance of appearance. An aspect of this is the way matter is ultimately seen as purely quantitative rather than qualitative. Let me illustrate the connection between the progress towards a quantitative account of things and the marginalization of appearances with a very simple example. Consider an object such as a table. As I experience it, it may seem large or small, light brown or dark brown, heavy or light. As seen through the lens of physical science, even if we do not drill down to the atomic level, the table boils down to certain quantities. It is 1 m × 1 m; it has such and such a weight; the light reflected from it has a certain mixture of wavelengths. This approach to the table, which bypasses those things that are peculiar to my view or yours, as it becomes progressively more objective and a more appropriate substrate for a law-based understanding, gradually elutes phenomenal appearances: those very items that constitute the world of which we are conscious. The latter are dismissed as being ontologically suspect, as mere secondary qualities: the warmth of heat, the opposition of inertia, the brightness of light, are all stripped off. There is a progressive disappearance of phenomenal appearance: of that which fills or (take your pick) constitutes basic consciousness. In short, the world according to physics and the kinds of laws that treat earthquakes and photosynthesis equally – and should treat neural activity likewise – is a world in which appearance has been made wilfully to disappear.

Another way of looking at this is to see that physical science has as its asymptote the most general laws that represent the sum total of things and hence things viewed from no particular perspective. The equations linking patterns of measured change are delocalized: they offer not so much a view from nowhere as a view without a viewpoint. This is another aspect of the fact that the laws of physics are laws of a world in which appearance has disappeared. Although the relationship between measurement and experience is complex, measurement rejects the experiences associated with the process of measurement: all that remains is the number that pops out of the measuring process, a number whose phenomenal appearance is irrelevant. You might think that this argument is based on an elementary confusion between how things are represented and what they are; or between epistemic and constitutive aspects of the material world. But this distinction doesn’t alter the fact that if we remove the very viewpoint that generates the notion of matter as something in itself, and material objects as things in themselves, independent of consciousness, appearances, too, would go. We could make this point in a different way by asking how a rock, or a mountain, or the world would appear from no viewpoint. It would have no appearance at all. An item cannot have an appearance that is from neither front nor back, above nor below, within nor without, near nor far, in good light nor poor light. And this would apply to the material world as seen from within the material world construed according to the laws of physical nature: the material world “revealed” by a material object such as the brain.

So a sincere materialist cannot entertain the idea that the brain would be the basis of phenomenal conscio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Also By Raymond Tallis and Published By Acumen
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Overture: Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur
• Part I: Brains, Persons and Beasts
• Part II: Philosophy and Physics
• Part III: Philosophy and Physics
• Epilogue: And So to Bed: Notes towards a Philosophy of Sleep from A to Zzzzzzz
• Bibliography
• Index