© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Editorial
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
As more is learned about how the healthy brain works, so it becomes tempting to push out the boundaries of what, within the spectrum of human behaviour, can nicely be reduced to ‘the integrative action of the nervous system’, leaving that which—for the while—must remain mysterious. Perhaps the most tantalising yet least tractable target for analysis-by-neuroscience is consciousness. Some resent this systematic invasion of privacy as the ruthless march of ‘neuro-scrutiny’ reduces every aspect of human culture and social structure—goodness and badness, law and order, economics and ethics—to mere collisions of the ‘soups and the sparks’ (see Brain 2007: 130; 299–302). In this issue we publish two book essays that explore these issues in some detail. Daniel Dennett is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, USA. His writings espouse the power of evolution to explain self, consciousness and free will, and—most recently, in Breaking the spell—he challenges those with
Cambridge