Thinking Outside the Brain Box

Aris Bos is a physician who now teaches philosophy of science and neurophilosophy at the University of Utrecht. In this wide-ranging book about why humans are not biological computers, he questions what he calls neurodeterminism and the materialistic assumption that brains produce consciousness. He argues in the first part that it is not his brain that thinks, also pointing out that our experience shapes our neural circuits. For him, while the body makes a decisive contribution to consciousness, consciousness exists in the whole organism. Taking things further, he considers the implications of near death experiences, drawing on the work of Sam Parnia to suggest that consciousness in this case is not supported by the physical brain - there are in fact other lines of argument that could have been brought in at this stage, as the NDE can only take you so far; it is not in itself a proof of survival. The second part is an argument for the integrity of the self as thinker, which fits in with his overall view that scientific materialism is a limited approach to reality and raises significant ethical problems by removing free will; "it has nothing to offer about the part of reality that has significance and value", while tending towards reification. He sees the way forward through bringing in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach while agreeing with Iain McGilchrist that we need to bring the two hemispheres back into balance.