Tallis’s Anti-Neuromania Skepticism

Philosopher and humanist Raymond Tallis, a former geriatric neurologist and clinical neuroscientist, has a baffling yet coherent and penetrating perspective on consciousness (my [RLK] highest compliment) (Tallis, 2011a). He is anti-reductionist in principle, not just in practice, asserting, “We have failed to explain how consciousness equates to neural activity inside the skull because the task is self-contradictory in that we cannot access qualitative, subjective consciousness by means of an objective, often quantitative approach.” There is an inevitable failure to explain consciousness in terms of neural activity because there is nothing in such activity that can “explain the ‘aboutness’ of mental entities, the simultaneous unity and multiplicity of the moments of consciousness, the explicit presence of the past, the initiation of actions that point to an as yet non-existent future, the construction of self” (Tallis, 2010).

Limits of Neural Explanations

Nor can we explain “appearings,” Tallis argues, because we are constrained by “an objective approach that has set aside appearings as unreal and which seeks reality in mass/energy that neither appears in itself nor has the means to make other items appear. The brain, seen as a physical object, no more has a world of things appearing to it than does any other physical object” (Tallis, 2010).

Tallis dismantles “the notion that there is close correlation between neural activity and aspects of consciousness.” The more carefully you look at it, he says, “the less impressive it is, despite all the advances in recent neuroscience.” And correlation, anyway, does not amount to causation or identity. “When you see neural activity in the brain, is that really identical with conscious experience? Let me take a simple example. I'm looking at a yellow object. That will correspond to neural activity in my occipital cortex, at the back of the brain. That neural activity is quite unlike the phenomenal appearance of a yellow object. Yet, according to those who believe in ‘neurophilosophy,’ the actual phenomenal appearance of the yellow object—my experience of yellowness—is identical with neural activity in the back of the brain. Now, if those two things really were identical, well, at least you might expect them to look a little bit like each other, and of course, they don't. So, to engender conscious experience, there must be something more than neural activity.” The brain is no doubt necessary, according to Tallis, but it is certainly not sufficient (Tallis, 2011a).

Tallis runs down the list of potential explanations. He dismisses “naturalistic explanations”—which ultimately means materialistic explanations—“[because they] leave consciousness, self-consciousness, the self, free will, the community of minds and the most human features of the human world unexplained” (Tallis, 2009).

Skepticism and Open Possibilities

What then is Tallis's solution to the mind-body problem? God? Dualism? Panpsychism? “The notion of an entity—God—that is not only unexplained but usually contradictory”? (Tallis, 2009). Tallis is an unrepentant atheist and does not subscribe to any known theory of consciousness. He thinks Cartesian dualism is a lost cause, and panpsychism fails to explain how universal mind-dust gathers itself up into a conscious subject (Tallis, 2011b).

“The foundations of phenomenal consciousness and knowledge elude us,” Tallis states. “So, some kind of skepticism, justifying an inquiry that enables us to question the all-too-obvious, the glass wall of our everyday thinking about everyday life, seems entirely in order” (Tallis, 2009). “We atheists have good reason to be ontological agnostics and to believe that anything is possible” (Tallis, 2011b).

As Tallis concludes one of his always-elegant, always-enlightening columns in Philosophy Now magazine, "Better to acknowledge that materialism, dualism(s). idealism, and panpsychism don't work, that ontology is a mess, and that neuro-ontology doesn't tidy it up" (Tallis, 2026).