More Neuroscience

There is a very long article in the Observer this week called The brain… it makes you think. Doesn't it? It consistsw of a debate between David Eagleman, who thinks that consciousness can eventually be explained by neuroscience and Raymond Tallis who thinks that there is more to consciousness than simple brain processes. But as Thomas Nagel points out in What is it like to be a bat? no matter how subtle neuroscience becomes we cannot hope to understand the world from anything but a subjective point of view. 

Eagleman argues that most of our brain processes are beyond our conscious awareness and so our decision making is highly constrained; mere introspection will not get us very far. Tallis replies that claiming that the nuanced experiences of subjective thought, within communties of minds, are merely a series of brain processes reduces human beings to the status of automatons.