<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis" target="nsarticle"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"></span><br>
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<p>Apologies if this has already been covered, but I've been thinking
for a little while about uploading and the attendent reduction of
selfhood to brain processes. The following review (from New Scientist)
makes some points which I think present the most compelling case
against the viability of uploading. That is, that the self (and
specifically, thoughts) are not something located in or identical with
the brain - they are a facet of an entire entity, dependent just as
much on the whole body and the social processes of which we are a part.
Robert Pepperell puts it well in his book the Posthuman Condition when
he says "Consciousness is the function of an organsm, not an organ".</p>
<br>
<p>I wonder, how do the proponents of uploading argue against these ideas?</p><br><p>Mike<br></p><p><br></p><p>--<br></p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis" target="nsarticle"><br></a></p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis" target="nsarticle">RAYMOND TALLIS</a>
has thought long, deeply and in a practical way about life, death and
consciousness: he is a recently retired professor of geriatric medicine
specialising in clinical neuroscience. He is also a philosopher and
author of published fiction and poetry. His writings on the mind and
body display an intellectual breadth and distinctive style bordering on
that of a polymath.</p><br>
<p>In his latest book, <i>The Kingdom of Infinite Space</i>,
Tallis has decided to explore the head. Not the brain, but the head;
this is not another book about consciousness, and only the final
chapter deals with it explicitly. Neuroscience and brain scans are
conspicuously absent. Its subject is the head as a whole, and the way
that heads relate to selves.</p><p><br></p>
<p>In
fact, Tallis is exasperated by brain worship and the excessive claim
that consciousness emerges exclusively from the firing of neurons.
"Selves require bodies as well as brains, material environments as well
as bodies, and societies as well as material environments," Tallis says
in a fighting foreword. "That is why, despite the hype, we won't find
in the brain an explanation of ourselves."</p><p><br></p>
<p>The
book gets the reader to think afresh about everyday experiences such as
staring in the mirror, vision, breathing, speaking, hearing, face
recognition, laughter, tickling, yawning, sweating, eating, spitting,
smoking, vomiting, sleeping, ageing, sex and death. The pages burst
with an entertaining mixture of intriguing facts and thought-provoking
observations.</p><p><br></p>
<p>On
eating, for example, Tallis disagrees with writers such as Richard
Dawkins, who treat hunger as nothing more than a biological drive. We
must eat to survive, but there is a social dimension to stuffing our
faces that Darwinians tend to minimise. The contrast between the raw
and the cooked is the difference between nature and culture, as
structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out. Cultural
culinary codes can be elaborate and confusing to outsiders.</p><p><br></p>
<p>On
blushing, Tallis wonders why we do it, since it clearly draws attention
to our vulnerability. He describes an attempted scientific study of the
blush in young females. The aim was to prompt blushes under controlled
conditions by exposing the subjects to suggestive material. The
experiment failed totally, yet when the researcher thanked the women
for participating, they apologised for their uncooperative cheeks and
blushed scarlet.</p><p><br></p>
<p>And
on thinking, Tallis muses: "Earwax is in my head. Mucus is in my head.
My brain is in my head. But are my thoughts in my head?" There follows
an accessible disquisition, influenced by the philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle" target="nsarticle">Gilbert Ryle</a>,
on whether thought and meaning are the kinds of things that occupy
space. "When, as I did from time to time, I applied a stethoscope to a
patient's skull, I sometimes heard the bruit of the angioma I was
listening for but never even the slightest rumour of the thoughts that
I knew were ceaselessly passing through his mind," Tallis writes.</p><p><br></p>
<p>While
reading the book, one cannot help wishing that the digressions and
detours were shorter. Without them, Tallis would not be Tallis, but the
book would nevertheless have benefited from sympathetic, firm editing.
It will not do to plead, as he does, that all worthwhile journeys
involve frequently getting lost.</p><p><br></p>
<p>Does <i>The Kingdom of Infinite Space</i>
shed new light on the question of how physical processes in the brain
give rise to subjective experience (the infamous "hard problem" of
consciousness which neuroanatomist David Bainbridge recently dismissed
as a "deceitful spectre" in <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BAIBEY.html" target="nsarticle">Beyond the Zonules of Zinn</a>)?
Not really. But it enjoyably persuaded me that we need to attend more
to our heads than to our brains if we are to explain our selves to
ourselves.</p></div></div><br>
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