– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
The ways in which the neuroscientist turns to hermeneutical and semiotic terms is quite remarkable here. Not only is this a “translation hypothesis,” but Beauregard argues that trying to look at neurons to understand consciousness is like trying “to determine the meaning of messages in an unknown language (thoughts) merely by examining its writing system (neurons),” and this, I would add, while denying, in principle, that there is an unknown speaker to detect and decode at all. Basically, materialist neuroscience operates exactly like religious fundamentalism here: it denies the gap between meaning and text, between right-brain consciousness and left-brain culture, between intention or conscious cause and neural correlation. Now there is only the text, only the rational methods of the left-brain, only the neurons. Such a materialist view of the human being also, as Beauregard reminds us, completely denies the very possibility of human freedom, human responsibility, and moral agency. There is, after all, nobody in there, at all. The political implications of all of this border on the appalling.
Pp. 262-3