Professor Raymond Tallis is not the obvious candidate to deliver a sustained assault on the pervasive intellectual fashion for explaining all human conduct with reference to the observable movements of neurons in the brain: he is a most distinguished neurologist. Neither might he be expected to apply his formidable mental axe to hacking away at the modern creed that everything man has done is merely the result of selfish genes attempting to replicate themselves: Tallis is a professing atheist who joined Richard Dawkins in protesting against the Pope’s visit to Britain.
Yet still, his book Aping Mankind does exactly that. It is an impassioned and intensely erudite denunciation of these presumptions — the widespread deference to which Tallis scorns as “capitulation to scientism”.
In particular, he is infuriated by the popular tendency — for which David Attenborough is probably no less responsible than Richard Dawkins — to view human and animal behaviour as not just analogous but indistinguishable in being purely biologically conditioned, with no greater independence or behavioural subtlety in our lives than in those of chimpanzees. Thus Tallis describes as “disgusting, as well as nonsense” the view of an American ethics professor that capturing dolphins for aquariums is “roughly the same thing whites were doing to blacks 200 years ago in the slave trade”. The point is that upgrading the relative significance of beasts has the effect, if not the intention, of downgrading the suffering of humanity, which, in Tallis’s view, is profoundly different. We, unlike our distant biological ancestors, have attained full self-consciousness; this includes, most importantly, awareness of the meaning of death.
It is consciousness, or more precisely, our consciousness of our own identity and personhood, that lies at the heart of Tallis’s argument that we have transcended our biological identity. He does not dispute the ability of brain scans to discover the nature of neurological disease, or even to determine the way in which our senses are activated and operated (this, after all, is the author of the medical textbook The Clinical Neurology of Old Age), but Tallis denies not just that neurology has begun to discover what makes us self-aware and fully intentioned agents of our own actions: he insists that such biophysical scanning never will and never can unlock the secrets of humanity.
In so arguing against the idea that because the brain is a physical entity everything about the mind of man can ultimately be discovered and mapped by technologies of physical examination, Tallis appears to fall into the ancient philosophical swamp known as dualism. This is the now widely mocked belief, associated with Descartes, that the mind is in some way a nonphysical substance separate from the body — the “ghost in the machine”.
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Tallis is understandably anxious to dispel any suspicion that he is at one with that 17th-century Frenchman — and he is certainly not arguing for the existence of the soul. At the same time he struggles (not surprisingly) to establish in what sense our unique personhood and intentionality exist in a non-physical domain; and yet he must demonstrate that they are in some sense non-physical entities, because if they are purely physical then every single thing about them must ultimately be discoverable, at least in theory, by neurological examination — which Tallis denounces as neuromania.
It is only in the closing pages of a book that proclaims the metaphysical specialness of man from a great height, but without an ontological parachute, that Tallis attempts a suggestion as to what this unique human consciousness consists of, if not just the cells of our brains. He invents the term “thatter”, the interacting world of human propositions and intentionality — which he also describes as “trillions of cognitive handshakes” — existing alongside, but separate from, matter.
It is easy to mock such an unashamedly intuitive hypothesis. In my days as a student of philosophy at Oxford, I certainly would have done. Yet I have emotional, if not intellectual, sympathy for Tallis’s attempt to establish a theory of being that allows for humanity’s moral specialness. If everything about us is purely a function of biology and our minds are nothing more than conditioned electrical impulses, then we are indeed merely containers for a collection of indifferent and ineluctable causes and effects: we may think that we are as free as cars on the open road, but actually we are all deluded trams.
Tallis reveals his own deep humanity by revolting against this; and, knowing that he is a man prone to depression, I can understand why he fights so furiously against “Darwinitis” — determinism is moral meaninglessness, which equals dark despair. For some, religion is the way out of that pit, but Tallis insists that what we call “God” is “logically impossible”.
Still, in the last sentence of his book he suddenly invokes — it appears nowhere up to that point — the word “spiritual”. Funny, that.