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The Great Debate at Newcastle Science Festival


Whatever Happened to the Subject?
Proceedings by Caspar Hewett and David O'Toole

Panel Discussion: Thursday 18th March 2004, 7-9pm
International Centre for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne

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Speakers: Rita Carter, James Heartfield, Raymond Tallis
Chair: Caspar Hewett

The chair, Caspar Hewett, gave a short introduction in which he asked the questions: Are we masters of our destiny? Can we really influence the direction of change?

Since the Enlightenment the idea of the subject has had a central place in thought about the special nature of humanity. This is a description of human beings as active agents doing things for reasons and shaping the world to their own ends. Yet, in recent years, fields as diverse as neuroscience, literary criticism and Evolutionary Psychology have converged on a very different vision of what we are. The postmodern era has brought us the end of history and the death of intention. Evolutionary theory and philosophy have brought us a vision of humans as machines; zombies experiencing the illusion of choice and intentionality. Why is this? Has the subject really disappeared in a puff of logic or are these interpretations more to do with the way we view ourselves today?

Rita Carter He went on to introduce the speakers:

Rita Carter is a medical writer, contributing to, among others, The Independent, New Scientist, Daily Mail and Telegraph. She was twice awarded the Medical Journalists' Association prize for outstanding contribution to medical journalism. She wrote the best selling Mapping the Mind, the first illustrated guide to the brain, and more recently Consciousness in which she ponders the nature, origins and purpose of consciousness.

Raymond Tallis Raymond Tallis is a Professor of Geriatric Medicine at University of Manchester, a position he has held since 1987, and is a Consultant in Health Care of Older People at Salford Royal Hospitals Trust. He has been awarded many prizes and Visiting Professorships, including most recently the Dhole-Eddleston Memorial Prize for his medical writing about the care of older people. He has published fiction, poetry and over a dozen books in the fields of the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, and cultural criticism. His books offer a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of consciousness, the nature of language and of what it is to be human. His most recent book The Hand: A Philosophical Enquiry Into Human Being argues that the nature of difference between human beings and other animals is the result of a complex sequence of events which began several million years ago with the evolution of the human hand.

James Heartfield James Heartfield is a writer and lecturer who has written books on Need and Desire in the Postmaterial Economy, the creative industries in the new economy and The Death of the Subject Explained in which he explores the ways in which the attack on subjectivity in modern theory reflects the diminished role of the individual in society.

Rita Carter introduced the commonly held idea that a person who and autonomous human being is a free agent. The alternative would be a beast, a zombie, an amoral agent. Such a being is generally thought to be something less than human. For Carter however, the subject is an illusion and never existed. The notion of agency is rooted in the belief that we are not purely mechanistic. This is sometimes described as the 'ghost in the machine' or the 'soul'. If the human will is something which can cause things to happen but is not caused what sort of thing could this will be? Carter argued that an understanding of brain mechanics leads to the conclusion that there is no room for freedom. Cause and effect are physical processes. She questioned if there is any evidence for the non-mechanistic bit of human nature. The problem is that we cannot get our heads around the fact that the brain is just a very, very complicated system. She drew attention to the historical connection between the words conscience and conscious which implies a voice from outside. This is a form of Cartesian Dualism.

To back up her argument she pointed to the fact that there are people who have lost the ability to will freely. She asked; are people who have a tick or epilepsy less than human? To be a part of the natural world is not something to be ashamed of. Carter suggests that our assumption that we are separate from nature is mere arrogance.

Her closing comment was that we are not free but that we have a deeply embedded notion that we are which motivates and drives us and it is this which makes us loathe to give up the idea of free will.

Raymond Tallis was very enthusiastic about Rita Carter’s Mapping the Mind and opened with a long quote from it on the question of free will. However, he did not buy into the idea of a lack of free will. Not everything can be understood in terms of neuroscience. There are a number of ways in which the state of the brain can be altered from drinking beer to a knock on the head to a new experience. Reasons and thoughts are about something other than themselves. Rita Carter misses human intentionality in her argument. Unlike Carter, for Tallis it does make sense to distinguish between conscious and unconscious acts. The epileptic who accidentally hits another person due to a fit cannot be equated with someone who deliberately attacks someone. Although it makes scientific sense to think of both acts in the same way (as a result of brain processes) to us as humans it is not at all reasonable. Tallis pointed to the complicated chain of decisions that lead to any deliberate act, using the example of attending this debate. It was initiated by receiving an email from Caspar Hewett inviting him to speak. He considered the subject matter and the line-up of speakers before agreeing to take part. He looked at his diary. Having decided to come he performed a series of actions over a number of months which culminated in him standing there at that moment speaking. This is a perfect example of the reality of agency.

Tallis argued that agency is made out of mechanical objects but is not of them. There is a distinction between the mechanics of the brain and the intention of the human who decides to perform an act. Humans have abstract goals and this seems to be missing from Carter’s view. We know what we want to do and do it for reasons. This is not imposed from without. He closed by asking how we uniquely become agents and how we become free.

James Heartfield said that we should not be frightened of the soul. The soul is not so bad a thing. He questioned why we ask where it is. At different points in history people have theorised that it resides in the brain, the heart and the pineal gland. In fact the mind partly resides in notes in the margin of a page and the memory of a laptop. We put decision-making into the world when we set an alarm clock. Responsibility is very complicated - sometimes it means having no choice rather than free choice. As Martin Luther said "Here I stand. I can do no other." Heartfield is firmly of the opinion that we stand outside nature. He used the phrase 'super nature' to describe the way we use artefacts and materials of our own creation such as trains an petrol which clearer do not occur in nature.

Heartfield identified a tendency to retreat from responsibility using the example of the novel Prozac Nation which he described as 'the slacker novel'. The protagonist sees herself as a loser and steps back from responsibility. Yet as the story unfolds it is apparent that she is a successful journalist and not the failure that she imagines herself to be.

For Heartfield some of the interpretations of neuroscience give an excuse to abdicate our responsibilities and our actions. They represent a retreat from agency. Today there is a fake agency. Our grandparents lived in a world of heroes and we laugh at this. We are uncomfortable with heroes. Instead we have celebrities. It makes us feel OK about our failure. There is something of this in our reaction to terror. Terror is a sense of diminished agency. We don’t say "you ratbags" when an act of terror is performed, we ask what made them do this? We do not like to judge. The phrase "you are very judgmental" is used as a criticism. But our refusal to judge people is actually dismissive. It means that they do not count.

A lively discussion followed with a number of engaging questions from the floor. The theme of responsibility was a major one throughout the debate. Rita Carter conceded that there is a massive difference between a deliberate act and a reflex action. However, she argued that knowledge is not the same as responsibility; we observe ourselves in the action of acting. We gain the illusion of deciding and miss the fact that we are mere observers of our own acts.

Carter drew attention to the experiments of Ben Libet who showed that there is a delay between the moment that a person makes a decision and when they become conscious of that decision. Carter considers that this backs up her view that free will is an illusion but the rest of the panel and some of the audience did not agree with this interpretation. A decision has to be initiated somewhere in the brain and there will inevitably be a time delay between that moment and the ability to report it.

On the question of whether animals have consciousness Heartfield made the point that we have a conscience, which animals do not. He argued that early people’s consciousness must have been very different to ours and drew attention the break after the Renaissance in the way that we view ourselves. It is in this period that the idea of the subject first appeared. Tallis argued that many beasts have sentience but no knowledge and thus could not be described as having consciousness. He expanded the idea of free will saying that the purest expression of free will was when the action became entirely reflex as a consequence of training. When a cricketer catches a ball it is a reflex action but the skill has been acquired as the result of a conscious decision to invest in years of practice.

On the question of "whatever happened to the subject?" Carter is firmly of the view that the subject does not and never did exist. Heartfield’s view is that the diminished subjectivity of today is a consequence of the political and social climate and does not reflect what we actually are. Tallis, as a humanist, is not convinced that modern neuroscience should alter our view of subjectivity and is with Heartfield in his conviction that we do possess agency, consciousness and free will.

The chair thanked the speakers and audience for their contributions. In closing he thanked the Centre for Life for hosting The Great Debate at Newcastle Science Festival 2004 and gave special thanks to Joanna Rooke for her patience, good humour and hard work behind the scenes.

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© C J M Hewett, 2004