At Closer to Truth, host Robert Lawrence Kuhn recently interviewed Raymond Tallis on the familiar question of What Is Consciousness? (April 25, 2024, 7:10 min) — but he got some unfamiliar answers.

Tallis, a retired British physician and neuroscientist, is the author of Aping Mankind (Routledge 2016) and, more recently, Seeing Ourselves (Agenda 2019). Both books seek to reclaim our sense of self from pop science materialism.

The discussion got round to the question of whether consciousness is an illusion. On that view, the first person singular pronoun, “I,” as in “I think” or “I feel” is simply a construct that is created, perhaps accidentally, by thousands of mindless bodily processes. It represents no other underlying reality. Here is Tallis’s response:

Tallis: [4:09] It’s interesting that those who tried to dispose of the I are quite remarkable egos themselves. But even rather non-egocentric characters like David Hume ran into a lot of trouble when they tried to dispose of the I.

David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher famous for skepticism. In his essay “On Personal Identity,” he wrote, “I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” So he thought we cannot prove the existence of I.

Tallis: [4:22] When you think of the famous passage in his treatise on human nature and he says, when I look into the flow of my consciousness I see a succession of perceptions but I don’t see anything corresponding to I — right? That sentence has got at least three instances of I in it. So clearly the I that is David Hume is a real thing. But it isn’t just a mere percept and it isn’t just a particular mechanism in the brain. It isn’t a CEO as Daniel Dennett would say, acting within consciousness. It is something that is diffusely but really present.

Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) was the foremost Darwinian philosopher of our era. He pioneered the idea that human consciousness is an illusion: “We’re not just are robots”, he says. “We’re robots, made of robots, made of robots.” (BBC 2017)

Kuhn: [4:53] What does that mean, “diffusely but really present”? It sounds like if you go too diffuse, it’s not really present.

Tallis: [5:00] A lot of things are diffuse and real. My sense of the world around me is pretty diffuse but it is inescapably real. But this I that I am is an absolutely fundamental intuition.

It isn’t something that is reducible to [5:14] anything else that I am and that I am this person currently talking, this body from which I’m talking, is something that I cannot [deny] without self-refutation.

At this point, Kuhn, struggling to maintain an opposing viewpoint, if only for the discussion’s sake, starts to sound a little confused:

Kuhn: [5:28] I’m not sure that self-refutation refutes the refutation of the I, if that made any sense, because I’m not sure a logical flow of those words, because we’re using them, is a legitimate reason for saying that that I exists — because producing that thought could have been this combination of different brain states that engendered that.

Tallis: [5:54] But my speaking here today is part of a biography which makes sense to me, which I have a large part in bringing about. I wouldn’t be here today if what I was doing didn’t make sense in terms of my larger biography. In fact my simply being here, talking to you, draws on the four quarters of my consciousness, my long-standing interests, my projects, my particular interest in philosophy, and so on — all of those things are drawn upon in this minute, this moment in which we’re talking together. It wouldn’t make any kind of sense if it wasn’t drawing on the sense of I that has both temporal depth and extraordinary extension at any particular time.

In short, the I that is each one of us behaves at all times like a thinking entity with a history and intentions, aware of the environment. To suppose that unthinking processes can somehow produce a thinking entity as an illusion is a sheer act of faith — faith in materialism, yes, but faith, nonetheless.

Tallis goes on to stress that he doesn’t mean that our I is a “thing”: “Rather, as I’ve indicated [6:58], it is something that has temporal depth that is inseparable from its biography and from the world, which makes sense to it and to which it makes sense.”

It sounds as though he wants to separate his viewpoint from that of people who are looking for the consciousness spot or circuit in the brain. But he does not appear to want to commit himself fully to a non-materialist position — with all the hostility that that entails. — Still, he can clearly see what is wrong with a materialist one.

You may also wish to read: Was Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett the end of an era? Dennett’s image of the human mind as a user-illusion was very fashionable but it never made any sense. Who will assume Dennett’s role as the leading, world-famous Darwinian materialist philosopher? Will the position remain — tellingly — vacant?