23. THE NEUROBABBLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE

Neurobabble damages us more than we know by making us distrust ourselves, and each other. This has a chilling effect on democratic participation. If our judgement cannot be trusted, if our consciousness is false, if we are anti-social killer apes whose homicidal instincts are barely restrained by a slender cortical add-on, then who are we to decide anything?

And what is the accumulated psychological effect of all this? No doubt our global depression epidemic has many causes, but it can’t help being told that your body is some sort of useless appendage, that your sense of self, ‘you’, your joys and sorrows are all an illusion and that you can be uploaded onto a thumb stick.

There are enough forces working to dehumanise us already, so why rush into the embrace of the neural dehumanisers? Why do we give our humanity away so easy? Is it because we are told it’s the scientifically correct thing to do? If so, that is desperately sad because the vast and belittling claims advanced by neurobabble are bad biology and will be until the tree frog appears on the brain scanner’s screen.

We are always told the excellent thing about scientific method is that it controls for bias. But it controls for some bias better than others. The ready uptake of ideas about uploading consciousness, say, or the acceptance of the fantastic notion that smiling evolved from snarling, have to do with the fact that the scientific imagination was primed for such a find, because such a find would confirm a lot of political and philosophical assumptions, the very assumptions which sent them to look for those things in that place and in that way. As Ray Tallis says: ‘[neuroscience] treats individuals as passive respondents to stimuli and then discovers that they are passive respondents to stimuli.’

This crude circularity elevates contempt to a scientific technique. If you reduce people enough then it becomes much easier to design quantifiable, measurable experiments. The only problem is that by the time you zoom the picture into such big-dot resolution, the contempt extends to science too, and what you are left with is a sort of positivist pseudo-science, which tends not to be able to explain very much.

A defining characteristic of the current crop of science popularisers, for example, is to swap explanatory complexity for scale. That is why they bang on about immense expanses of time and space. Never mind the quality feel the width. No astronomy program is complete without the roll-call of our insignificance, the tedious litany of a trillion trillion planets orbiting a trillion trillion stars. The vasty vastness of deep geological time is supposed to silence doubts about the explanatory thinness of the reptilian brain hypothesis. But scale is no substitute for exploration of the complex interactions of human behaviour.

A scientific consensus is emerging that we have wildly underestimated the degree to which the neural structures of the mind are environmentally and socially produced. This has major social implications. The world we build makes us. We’ve always known this of course, but there is now a scientific basis for saying that the damage done to the ecosystem is damage done to the soul.

Fantasies of evolving into ‘non-biological beings’ couldn’t come at a worse time. Now more than ever we need to understand how, deeply intertwined with the biosphere, there is no remedy for ecological collapse without this understanding.

When seawater gets above a certain temperature, coral expel their zooxanthellae, the photosynthetic algae that give the reef its colour. But if the world is colourless anyway, then what does it matter if the Great Barrier Reef’s coral is now polystyrene white for seven hundred miles? Aren’t we about to shuck off nature and become non-biological beings, anyway?

The way we look at the brain is the blowback of a particularly stunted and atomised way of looking at the world. The conceptual razing of the outside world in neuroscientific dogma is an offshoot of the physical razing of the living world by way of clear cutting, scallop dredging, soil skimming and coral bleaching. Neuroscientific dogma also echoes a widespread attack on people’s sense of agency and identity, both in the workplace and in public life in general.

The moral of this story is that brain-imaging is not the step-change we are being sold, not least because fMRI does not show our brains in action, or anything like it. Now is not one of those times, like when Galileo turned his telescope on the heavens and we swapped astrology for astronomy. Now is not a moment, like when van Leuwenhoek’s microscope revealed the secret world of bacteria. Now is in fact the very opposite of one of those times. Now is the last hurrah of an old philosophy that sees us as not really of the earth, as not belonging here, as being too good for this place. The last hurrah of the machine metaphor. The last hurrah of old-time sci-fi. The very moment when we think we see cold, hard reality, is the very moment that we are in fact at our most cloudy and mystical, least clear and scientific, while the world slips silently from sight, losing definition, colour, existence.

We face our greatest challenge in the long emergency of global warming, resource depletion and mass species extinction. The decisions we make in the coming years have a better chance of being good decisions if we have a clear understanding of who we are, who we are not, and of what we yet might be.