There are a lot of confident assertions, all presented without any real evidence:
- "It is unlikely that the gap between neuroscientific stories of human behavior and the standard humanistic or common-sense narratives will be closed"
- "But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see."
- "neural activity is not about anything and so can be neither correct nor mistaken"
- "A consistent materialism should not allow for the possibility of memory, of the sense of the past"
And Tallis seems to have no understanding of what "information" is.
But most of the article seems to be gobbledygook. If Tallis were to try to come up with a rigorous definition of words like "about", he might make some progress. By his argument, it makes no sense to count tree rings to determine a tree's age, since tree rings are not "about" the age of the tree.
As Arthur C. Clarke noted, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."
