Circling Round Explicitness

Raymond Tallis trained in medicine at Oxford University and at St Thomas’ Hospital London before becoming Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience. He retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer. His books have ranged across many subjects – from philosophical anthropology to literary and cultural criticism – but all are characterised by a fascination for the infinite complexity of human lives and the human condition. The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine lists him as one of the world’s leading polymaths.

• Overture: making explicitness explicitPart I The unholy trinity1. Looking in the mirror: a vision of the unholy trinity1.1 Introducing the unholy trinity1.2 The blob1.3 The beast1.4 The bloke1.5 Further reflections on being a reflection2. From things to persons: “emergence” as a non-explanation2.1 Getting from the thing to the person2.2 The appeal to emergence2.3 Emergence from what? “Everything is made of atoms” 1 the evaporation of atoms2.4 Emergence from what? “Everything is made of atoms” 2: an empty truism?2.5 Emergence within the material world2.6 A brief look at the emergence of organisms2.7 Concluding thoughts3. The received idea of the brain as the brewery of explicitness3.1 The myth of “easy” problems of consciousness3.2 Brain and consciousness: the standard story3.3 Naturalizing intentionality 1: causal theories of perception3.4 Naturalizing intentionality 2: tracking theory3.5 Taking the strain off the brain 1: paninformationalism3.6 Taking the strain off the brain 2: panpsychism3.7 The seductive metaphor of representation3.8 Collapsing the mind: functionalism3.9 Concluding reflections4. What-is as how much: cutting measurement down to size4.1 Metaphysics under siege from science4.2 Problems with physics as metaphysics4.3 Back to the beginning: measurement4.4 Measurement and the marginalization of phenomenal experience4.5 The heart of measurement: units4.6 The problematic relationship between measurement and consciousness4.7 The measurement problem4.8 Probability and possibility in quantum mechanics4.9 Towards quantum idealism4.10 From quantum idealism to mathematical idealism4.11 ConclusionPart II First-person explicitness: circling round the self5. Ambodiment: the marriage between (that) it is and (that) I am5.1 My body and I: the necessity for embodiment5.2 Our mode of being in space5.3 My body as the primordial object “in the weighty sense”5.4 Ontological democracy: my body and other objects5.5 A sideways glance at intercorporeality5.6 The miracle of the embodied subject: the twofold revelation of a world and itself5.7 Concluding thoughts6. Selfhood6.1 Introducing the self6.2 Denying the self6.3 An autocidal tendency in contemporary philosophy6.4 Welcoming back the self6.5 The slimmed down self: the subject as the owner of experiences6.6 Fattening the self: the unities revisited6.7 The external scaffolding of the self6.8 The embodied self6.9 The inconstant self6.10 The interrupted self6.11 Making ourselves6.12 Concluding thoughts7. Agency: explicitness in action7.1 The reality of agency7.2 Ordinary agency7.3 The ambodied subject as agent7.4 The point of agency7.5 What-is and what-ought7.6 Concluding thoughtsPart III Thought and possibility8. Free-floating explicitness: thinking about thinking8.1 Introducing the thinking animal8.2 Unwiring thoughts8.3 The phenomenology of thought8.4 “Inside” my head8.5 Tokens and types8.6 The expanding realm of pure explicitness: non-existent objects8.7 Further thoughts on thinking about thoughts8.8 A postscript on enactivism and embodied cognition9. Pure explicitness: possibility (and probability)9.1 Thought and possibility9.2 Possibility and actuality9.3 Possibility and probability9.4 Naturalizing probability9.5 The brain: not a Bayesian engine9.6 Concluding thoughtsPart IV Circling round what-is10. What-is, conceived as “reality” and “truth”10.1 Introduction10.2 Appearance as a veil10.3 Primary and secondary qualities10.4 Relational versus intrinsic properties 110.5 A glance at the givenness of the given10.6 Relational versus intrinsic properties 210.7 The interactive nature of any given10.8 How we overlook the interactive nature of what we count as “the given”10.9 Radical doubt: mediation implies hallucination10.10 Beyond doubt: reality as something lived10.11 Reality and truth10.12 Inconclusive conclusionsCoda: (In) Conclusion

This book gathers together and extends the many implications of Tallis’s core insight that the waning of Western culture’s humanism derives from its science-led failure to recognize how essential the non-eliminable and non-reducible human consciousness is to any and all claims to knowledge. If read understandingly by the intelligentsia of both our hard and soft sciences, it would lay a basis for a scientific revolution of the most humane and human sort.