THINKING BY TRANSFERRED EPITHET

If you are persuaded that the neuro-evolutionary approach to human consciousness and human life is wrong, and obviously so, you may be baffled as to how it has managed to be so widely accepted. Much of the strength of the case for a Darwinian account of the human person and human society lies, as we saw, in the way language is used to anthropomorphize animal behaviour and animalize human behaviour. The case for the neuralization of consciousness and, in particular, human consciousness has also depended on the misuse of language, but with Neuromania the lexical trickery goes much deeper. While Darwinitis requires its believers only to impute human characteristics to animals (and vice versa), Neuromania demands of its adepts that they should ascribe human characteristics to physical processes taking place in the brain. This depends on a cavalier way with words that is now so universal as to have become almost invisible, making it quite difficult to see the unbridgeable gap between what happens in the brain and what people do. It illustrates the force of Wittgenstein's observation in the passage that forms the epigraph to this section: we are held captive by a picture of ourselves from which we cannot escape because it is written into the very language in which we think about our nature.