Louisville Process Theology Network

Neurotrash

Raymond Tallis, a physician and clinical scientist in the UK,
reasons that “Our bodies are generated by natural processes and … eventually the
natural world closes over us. But, between birth and death we inhabit a
community of minds, a human world that goes beyond nature.”

So, Tallis objects to the idea that human experience “is
identical with activity in the brain,” Yes indeed, some experiences appear to
correlate with brain activity, Tallis allows. Even so, those correlations do not
disprove the possibilities of other mechanisms.

Memory, says Tallis, has no specific connection to brain
activity. Biologists cannot account for what philosophers call “intentionality”
or the “awareness unique to humans of the otherness of the word around them.”
Human consciousness is multi-faceted and spontaneous.

People lead lives, he says, “regulating them by shared and
individual narratives.” We are not just driven by the “laws of the biosphere.”
We make thoughtful choices.

Those who study the workings to brain, exclusively, are
missing too much. They are striving too hard to press the artistic, religious,
and ethical practices of human beings into deterministic explanations of
“evolutionary usefulness,”

From “Neurotrash” by Raymond Tallis

“Prospect”, June, 2011.