Raymond Tallis on the Uniqueness of Human Consciousness

My guest in this episode could be described as a medical doctor who thinks we transcend our biology, or as a neuroscientist who thinks there is much more to us than our brains. Raymond Tallis spent many years as an NHS consultant and Professor of Geriatric Medicine, specialising in the neuroscience of strokes and epilepsy. He is also a prolific thinker, having published more than 20 substantial works of philosophy. Core to his outlook is the claim the human consciousness is utterly unique in ways that can’t be reduced to brains and biology. Unlike other animals we have a shared sense of the world enabling complex collaboration and meaning-creation and we have a rich sense of the past and the future. For Ray, neither of these features can be explained by looking at brains. Our discussion also covers why Ray thinks we have free will, why Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments are naive and misguided and why a future genius is needed to unravel the profound mysteries of the human mind.