Raymond Tallis Takes Out the 'Neurotrash'

[rug]

October 9, 2011

By Marc Parry

Canterbury, England

Raymond Tallis likes a fight. On a recent afternoon, visiting this historic city to lecture at the University of Kent, the physician-philosopher intends to pick one. His target: a rash of pseudo brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing in God and falling in love. Tallis, a former clinical neuroscientist who devoted years to studying stroke and epilepsy, considers such claims trash. Neurotrash.

Taking out academic "trash" is a familiar role for Tallis. He first gained notice in the 1980s for brawling with literary theorists. The bearded doctor in the red fedora has since written more than 30 books that span philosophy, fiction, poetry, medicine, and cultural criticism. Much of this output he produced between 5 and 7 a.m., before starting his day job as a professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, a feat that earned him fame as one of Britain's top 100 public intellectuals (Prospect Magazine) and one of the world's leading polymaths (The Economist).

In 2006, Tallis gave up hospital-ward rounds for a full-time writing life that unfolds in morning and afternoon rounds of two local pubs. In these "offices," the atheist-humanist nurses his animosity toward thinkers who reduce human beings to animals "acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains by evolutionary forces." He takes aim at their exaggerated claims in a new book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (McGill-Queen's University Press).

"We live in deeply pessimistic times," says Kenan Malik, a London-based historian of ideas. "There's a tendency to look at humans as being prisoners either of culture or of nature. Much of his argument runs against the grain of the received wisdom in contemporary culture."

http://chronicle.com/article/Raymond-Tallis-Takes-Out-the/129279/

[darkstar3]

1. The article spends an inordinate amount of time establishing the professor's supposed authority.

:boring:

[rug]

2. Here, this will save you time.

Raymond Tallis F.Med.Sci., F.R.C.P., F.R.S.A. (born 1946 in Liverpool) is a British philosopher, humanist, poet, novelist, cultural critic and retired medical doctor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis

He is quite accomplished.

[darkstar3]

3. And?

Do you really not see where this is going?

[rug]

4. In a different direction from you.

[darkstar3]

5. That's because I avoid fallacious BS.

To spend so much time and effort to setup the supposed authority of this professor is clearly the foundation of an argument from authority. Worthless reading.

[EdMaven]

6. put you down as a fan of pseudo brain science then? man = meat, etc.?

[darkstar3]

7. Yeah, because THAT'S what I said.

:eyes:

[EdMaven]

8. phrased in the form of a question, alex.

[frogmarch]

9. My favorite part:

(snip)

Stephen Cave, a Berlin-based philosopher and writer who has called Aping Mankind "an important work," points out that most philosophers and scientists do in fact believe "that mind is just the product of certain brain activity, even if we do not currently know quite how." Tallis "does both the reader and these thinkers an injustice" by declaring that view "obviously" wrong, Cave wrote in a Financial Times review. Geraint Rees, director of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, complains that reading Tallis is "a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall." He "rubbishes every current theory of the relationship between mind and brain, whether philosophical or neuroscientific," while offering "little or no alternative," Rees says in an e-mail.

Perhaps the harshest reaction comes from Dennett, an influential U.S. philosopher whose books square human life with science. He sympathizes with Tallis's concerns. But what every philosopher should know is that any philosopher—Plato, Hume, Kant, take your pick—can be made to look like a flaming idiot if you oversimplify and caricature them," Dennett tells me.

"Tallis indulges in refutation by caricature," says Dennett, a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. "He's not taking his opponents seriously. He's sneering instead of arguing. He's ignoring the complexities of the arguments. So he's not really doing philosophy. He's doing propaganda."

At least Dennett takes the bait. Two other Tallis targets, John Gray and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, declined to be interviewed for this story. Some find Tallis's arguments so "tiresome" they won't debate him in public, says one friend, Simon Shorvon, a professor of clinical neurology at University College London.

~~

I think Tallis just likes to stir things up a bit. I think it's good to do that sometimes. It keeps people on their toes.

[bananas]

15. Reality is jelly. Trying to nail it to a wall is stupid.

After putting a lot of holes in the wall, people wake up.

[Jim__]

10. An interesting article on an important topic.

It's too bad that Tallis caricatures the aspects of neuroscience that he disagrees with. I think he talks about some important issues. For instance:

Many, many things, says Tallis, but the most basic problem with neuromania he illustrates by cuing up a slide of a fuzzy gray brain with some yellow bits lit up. This image represents love. At least that's the claim of two researchers, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, who investigated the neural activity associated with romantic love by using fMRI scans to observe how subjects' brains reacted when they were shown pictures of loved ones. To Tallis, headline-grabbing studies like that—Aping Mankind skewers countless examples—are "crude enough to make a Martian laugh."

"Love is not like a response to a single stimulus, such as a picture," says Tallis, 65, who relishes his "robust" 38-year marriage to Terry Tallis, 64, a mostly retired social worker. "It's not even a single enduring state, like being cold. It is a many-splendored and many-miseried thing," which includes hope, jealousy, kindness, lust, guilt, delight, and moments of not feeling in love at all.

I don't know how much of this portrayal of what Bartels and Zeki said is caricature. I hope all of it. I hope they did not do an fMRI of people gazing at pictures of loved ones and then claim that the fMRI created an image representing love. The problem I have is that I'm not sure it's caricature.

A paper that talks about some problems with neuroscience is Brain Overclaim Syndrome and Criminal Responsibility: A Diagnostic Note. The paper is by Stephen J Morse, a psychologist and a professor of law and psychology. The paper is mostly about the application of neuroscience in courts of law, in particular with respect to the case of Roper v Simmons, the case in which the Supreme COurt ruled that execution of convicts below the age of 18 is unconstitutional. But, some of what Morse says about fMRI and consciousness is similar to what Tallis is saying about fMRI and love:

Many journals in psychiatry and medicine now ask authors to include a
“declaration of interest” to indicate possible conflicts of interests or other
influences on the author’s conclusions. For example, sources of support for the
research should be disclosed. As a diagnostic investigator and in the spirit of
disclosure, please permit me to list the most important philosophical, moral and
legal commitments with which I approach this investigation. First, I am a
thorough-going, matter-up materialist who believes that all mental and behavioral
activity is the causal product of lawful physical events in the brain. Second, I am a
non-reductive materialist who believes, roughly, with John Searle and many
others, that conscious mental states are real, that they are caused by lower level
biological processes in the brain, that conscious states are realized in the brain—
the mind-brain—but not at the level of neurons, and that conscious states can be
causally efficacious.2 Third, I am a compatibilist who believes that moral and
criminal responsibility are compatible with determinism or universal causation.
Fourth, I believe that desert is a necessary condition of just punishment under
current law and that it should be at least a partial justification for the fair
imposition of punishment under any proposed criminal law. Last, I oppose the
death penalty.

...

For a materialist, the brain always plays a causal role in behavior. Despite all
the astonishing recent advances in neuroscience, however, we still know woefully
little about how the brain enables the mind, and especially about how
consciousness and intentionality can arise from the complicated hunk of matter
that is the brain. At a recent conference on the abnormal brain, the eminent
philosopher of mind and action, John Searle, opened his keynote speech by telling
the following anecdote.3 Some years ago, Searle said, he decided to learn what the
new neuroscience had to teach about the relation of brain to mind and action. He
devoured the most important texts only to be dismayed that these texts did not all
begin with a disclaimer that we do not know much about this relation yet. Just so.

Brain imaging studies have been the most potent pathogen causing BOS, so it
is useful to say a few words about such studies. Imaging is at present very
expensive and requires carefully chosen and cooperative subjects. Consequently,
the number of experimental subjects and controls in any study tends to be small
and precise replications are infrequent. The problem of small samples will
probably be remedied by advances in the efficiency of the technology of
imaging—indeed, this is already happening for readings of activity at the surface
of the brain—but for now it is a dominant feature of imaging studies.

Statistically valid findings are based on mean differences and do not imply
that there is an absolutely clear distinction between the experimental and control
groups. Usually there is substantial overlap, meaning that some individual
experimental brains look like individual control brains and vice versa. For
example, suppose the experimental hypothesis is that task X will cause brain
region Y to be activated. After controlling for other variables that might cause Y
to be activated in both the experimental and control conditions (the “subtraction”
method), the investigators discover that there is still a difference: Y is activated
statistically significantly more in the experimental subjects. Nonetheless, some
experimental subjects will not have Y activated by X and some control subjects
will. Therefore, one could not predict perfectly from the brain image whether the
subject was an experimental or a control. The question would always be how
much overlap there was between the two groups. The greater the overlap, the more
difficult it would be to predict that subject’s experimental or control status from
the image.

[rug]

11. That's an excellent paper.

The forensics of neurology is a fascinating topic with a far more immediate impact on defendants than on the determination of human nature.

[Jim__]

14. Is neuroscience commonly used in courts now?

Based on the paper, my understanding is that in Roper v Simmons while neuroscientific information was entered as evidence, the court did not cite this as having any effect on its decision - although, of course, that doesn't mean that it didn't. Is this type of evidence usually admitted as exculpatory for defendants?

[rug]

17. The few times I've dealt with it was as an adjunct to psychiatric evidence.

One kid in particular had fetal alcohol syndrome and its effect on his brain development augmented the psychiatrist's view of his criminal responsibility. I haven't dealt with it in any civil context though.

[bananas]

16. fMRI's are the modern equivalent of phrenology. nt

[struggle4progress]

12. The Patricia Churchland quote indicates she doesn't know some basic history:

the realization that light is an electromagnetic wave isn't a 20th century innovation; the great physicist JC Maxwell convincingly deduced that in the 1860s

[Jim__]

13. I take what she said differently than you do.

Yes, many unanswered questions persist. But these are early days, and neuroscience remains immature, says Churchland, a professor emerita of philosophy at University of California at San Diego and author of the subfield-spawning 1986 book Neurophilosophy. In the 19th century, she points out, people thought we'd never understand light. "Well, by gosh," she says, "by the time the 20th century rolls around, it turns out that light is electromagnetic radiation. ... So the fact that at a certain point in time something seems like a smooth-walled mystery that we can't get a grip on, doesn't tell us anything about whether some real smart graduate student is going to sort it out in the next 10 years or not."

I don't think she's saying it was a 20th century innovation.

Of course, if we can't agree on the meaning of the written quote from Churchland, that's a good indication that Tallis is wrong about Of Grammatology.