Ray Tallis
speaker
16 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Ray Tallis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think it would lead to a picture of human beings as essentially the playthings of their evolved brains, not as conscious agents.
And that can lead to extreme pessimism about the hope of changing things for the better.
The trouble is those kinds of observations are made in highly artificial situations.
I mean, even when I make a snap decision, it has a non-snap hinterland.
I don't find myself going into a shopping mall in order to buy a can of beans and come out with a four-poster bed.
Neuroscience itself, fine.
And what we're learning about the workings of the brain, about brain damage and how the brain recovers, but the implication that this tells us a lot about persons and about society and about how we alter our affairs in society, that's where I draw the line.
This is, as it were, neuropaternalism.
It's the dream of developing policies that go with the grain of the people.
The people don't really know what they want, but the brains know what they want, so you really need to bypass the people and talk directly to their brains.
And by offering their brains policies that go with the grain of the brain,
the individuals who fall in with those policies will help them to do the right things that they wouldn't otherwise do.
I think it would lead to a picture of human beings as essentially the playthings of their evolved brains, not as conscious agents, not as embodied subjects who are independent points of departure in the world, but as entities that are somehow coupled into the material world.
And that can lead to extreme pessimism about the hope of changing things for the better.
Well, we certainly become more and more interested in brain science as brain science gets cleverer and cleverer.
I have to say at the moment we're in the position of such feverish enthusiasm about the meagre data we can get from our current methods of investigation, meagre in terms of their relationship to psychosocial phenomena, that I would be very surprised if the enthusiasm continues long enough for people to see the whole thing through so that it really perhaps delivers some minor advances in our self-understanding.
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