Raymond Tallis FRCP FMedSci Winchester Why Neuroscience1

Raymond Tallis FRCP FMedSci

Winchester Why Neuroscience 1

Why My Talk Will Be Short(ish)

It’s day three of the meetingNo-one ever complained of a talk that was too short

I want you to give me a hard time


Clarification

Not a critique of neuroscience

Neuroscience is the Queen of the Sciences


My position (1)Neuroscience reveals some of the

most important necessary conditions of behaviour and awareness.

What it does not do is provide a satisfactory account of the sufficient conditions of awareness and behaviour.

The mistaken idea that it does is neuroscientism.


My position (2)

While to live a human life requires a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this that living a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order.


The Roots of Neuroscientism

Confuse correlation with causationConfuse causation with identifyThe brain lights up when I feel sad therefore

feeling sad is the brain lighting up


Some Children of Neuro-Scientism

Neuro-aestheticsNeuro-lawNeuro-economicsNeuro-sociologyNeuro-politicsNeuro-theologyU.S.W.


Socrates


Socrates (via Plato)

“Fancy being unable to distinguish between the cause of a thing and the condition without which it could not be a cause! It is this latter, as it seems to me, that most people, groping in the dark, call a cause--attaching to it a name to which it has no right”. Phaedo 98b


Focus on Human Consciousness

More calamitous consequences of ‘neuralising’ human as opposed to animal consciousnessAvoid empty arguments about the nature and reach of animal consciousnessHuman consciousness makes the impossibility of fitting mind into matter more obvious


Consequences of Neuro-scientism

Darwinising the mind

Reduction of the mind to a way-station in a causal net


Responses to Critique of Neuroscientism

‘One fine day’ neuroscience will produce an adequate account of consciousness

That which neuroscience cannot see doesn’t really exist - the ‘I’, free will etc


A Serious Inconsistency

They don’t doubt that they think they are selves or that they have the illusion that they act freely and yet there is no conceivable neural explanation of these phenomena.

How would a nervous system that has no basis for a self have the basis for the illusion of the self?


Bill of Fare

Perception and IntentionalityPhysical Science, Phenomenal Consciousness

and the Disappearance of AppearanceViewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and

the Self Where Now?


The Problematic Perspective Neuroscientistic OrthodoxyThere 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… We 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.

Daniel Dennett Consciousness Explained


Bill of Fare

Perception and IntentionalityPhysical Science, Phenomenal Consciousness

and the Disappearance of AppearanceViewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and

the SelfWhere Now?


The Ground Floor: Perception of an Object



Glass

“Glass”

Neural activity

Identity

Perception

Light as Cause

Intentionality of gaze

Limitations of the Physiology of Visual Perception

The inward causal chain explains how the light gets into my brain but not how this results in a gaze that looks out.


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Glass

“Glass”

Neural activity

Identity

Perception

Light as Cause

Intentionality of gaze

The Mystery of Intentionality if Neuromania Were True

My perception of the glass would require the neural activity in the visual cortex to reach causally upstream to the events that caused them.


Additional Problems with the Physiology of Perception

Why does the counter-causal intentionality stop at a particular point?

How does perception assemble a stable object out of transient events?


A Mystery we Take for Granted

The ordinary inference implicit in everyday perception that the events causally upstream of the nerve impulses are manifestations of something that transcends those events – namely an object that is the relatively permanent possibility of endless events – makes intentionality even more mysterious.


Hermann von Helmholz


The Bounce-Back of Intentionality

Marks the point at which perceptions are received/arrive Without ‘bounce-back’ there would be no demarcation between input and output : the organism would not be a ‘centre’ as matter doesn’t have centres (or peripheries)Nothing distinctive about the neural correlates of consciousness


Heart of the Trouble

The unintelligibility of the claim that the interaction between two material objects (a glass, my brain) will make one appear to the other

Causal interaction does not generate appearance


Bill of Fare

Perception and Intentionality

Physical Science, Phenomenal Consciousness and the Disappearance of AppearanceViewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and the SelfWhere Now?


Physical Science: The Disappearance of Appearance

Replacement of phenomenal appearance by quantitative measurements

The description of matter (in-itself) is essentially mathematical: it has only primary qualities which are not qualities at all

The elimination of secondary qualitiesThe elimination of all (phenomenal)

qualitiesWinchester Why Neuroscience 29

Dennett Again on the Orthodoxy

“the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition and growth.”

These principles are mathematical: they relate quantities and by-pass qualities – which is why they can be common to all these things.


The Disappearance of Appearance. The Bottom Line

Nothing in physical science (including – or especially - QM!) can explain why a physical object such as a brain should find, uncover, or create, appearances. Matter and energy, as understood scientifically, do not intrinsically have appearances.Material objects require consciousness in order to appear.


A materialist explanation of consciousness rooted in physical science must fail because matter and energy, as understood scientifically, do not intrinsically have appearances, never mind those corresponding to secondary qualities. Material objects require consciousness in order to appear – and then they will have a particular appearance that will depend upon the viewpoint of the conscious individual observing it.


View of a Rock from No Viewpoint


The Gaze of Physics

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Bill of Fare Preliminary commentsPerception and IntentionalityPhysical Science, Phenomenal

Consciousness, and the Disappearance of Appearance

Viewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and

the SelfWhere Now?


Viewpoints: Awkward and Inescapable

Intentionality is most evident when the the perceived object is related to an ‘I’

Egocentric space: near, far etcThe material brain is ownerlessMaterial world has no centres nor

peripheries Winchester Why Neuroscience 38



Viewpointless matter

The Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and the Self

Where Now?


Subjects (Selves, Persons)

Unity-in-multiplicity

Temporal depth


Unity-in Multiplicity of Consciousness

We are co-conscious of many separate things in a conscious field

Models of integration do not deliver unity-in-multiplicity - i.e. merging without mushing

Models of binding do not deliver unity never mind unity-in-multiplicity


Binding Problem: Would-Be Solutions

Synchronous activity over the brainPlace of convergence of activity:

claustrumElectromagnetic fieldsQuantum coherence


Subjects (Selves, Persons)

Unity-in-multiplicity

Temporal depth


Neurophysiology of Memory

Memory as a cerebral deposit

‘Stored’ in the form of the altered reactivity of the brain


The Haunted Slug


Sluggish RecallNo semantic memory of factsNo explicit episodic memories of events, that

it locates in the past;No autobiographical memories it locates in

its own past. No explicit sense of time, of the past, even

less of a collective past where shared history is located.

No active recallNo nostalgia


Memory in a Dish?The past states of a material object cannot be

retained in the present state of a material objectMemories are explicitly of the past Tensed time is not evident in the material worldExplicit memories (the only real memories) have

double intentionality: reach back to experience which reaches back to object that caused the experience


Gotcha!

Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, Roy Mukamel, Michal Harel, Rafael Malach, Itzhak Fried ‘Internally Generated Reactivation of Single Neurons in Human Hippocampus During Free Recall’ Science 3rd October 2008 Vol 322: No 5898 pp.96-101.

Recording from single cells in people being investigated for the source of epileptic discharges


No Tenses in Matter

There is no ‘now’

There is therefore no ‘past’, or ‘future


Tensed Time and the Material World

Once Einstein said that the problem of Now worried him. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future but that this difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter for painful but inevitable resignation. Rudolf Carnap


Tensed Time and the Material World

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Albert Einstein, 1952


Tensed Time and NeuroscienceNeuroscience is ultimately a biophysical or

physical science.A consistent materialism should not allow for the

possibility of memory, of the sense of the past. It only seems to do so because observers,

viewpoint, consciousness are smuggled into the image of the successive states of the brain, making it seem that later states can be about earlier states.

In short, neural accounts of memory are a cheat


References Critique of neuro-determinism:

Raymond Tallis ‘Can I possibly be free?’ New Atlantis Summer 2010 (can download from the net)

Against naturalisation of knowledge

Raymond Tallis The Knowing Animal. A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 2005)




Viewpointless matterThe Unity of Consciousness, Memory , and

the Self

Where Now?


Urgent Questions (1)

Why, if the brain is not the basis of consciousness, is it so intimately bound up with our awareness and our behaviour?

What are we to make of the genuine advances of neuroscience?


Urgent Questions (2)Should we abandon the brain as a starting point for our understanding of consciousness?Where would the brain fit into a metaphysics, an epistemology, an ontology, that denies the brain a place at their centre?How shall we deal with the fact that we are evolved organisms as well as persons?


The Purpose of this Talk

Largely negativePath-clearing – removing ‘some of

the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge’ John Locke

Clear the way for a radical re-think and the positive, descriptive and explanatory work that lies ahead


Documents

Raymond Tallis FRCP FMedSci Winchester Why Neuroscience1