The Mystery of Consciousness

by John Rogers Searle

Book Overview

It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences" What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body?

In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0940322064
• ISBN13: 9780940322066
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.8" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

A gentleman reviews the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

John Searle believes consciousness is a result of the biological properties of the human brain. To quote him exactly: "biological brains have a remarkable biological capacity to produce experiences, and these experiences only exist when they are felt by some human or animal agent." That does not seem like a controversial statement, but Searle has been subject to merciless ad hominem attack because of that and some of his other contributions to the discussion of consciousness. In this book he not only deftly defends himself, he leaves his chief critic, the squid-like philosopher Daniel Dennett, writhing in the dust in a most satisfying manner. Searle is a philosopher, not a scientist, so his concern is to help the scientists keep their metaphysics straight. With that in mind, he reviews six leading theories of consciousness, including Dennett's, and clearly explains their virtues and deficiencies. His deft and gentlemanly demolition of Dennett is particularly satisfying, but all the essays are interesting. He packs an enormous amount of information and insight into this deceptively simple little book. Consciousness is a difficult subject to approach scientifically because it is a subjective experience. What we can observe and measure about it are only the external manifestations of consciousness - the observer can never get "inside" the experience of another - at least not yet. That doesn't mean that consciousness will never be understood scientifically, Searle believes, just that we aren't there yet, and getting there will require humility and clear thinking. He believes consciousness will eventually be understood when we understand exactly and in detail how the brain works. We are very far from that point today, but Searle points the way forward.

Great book on some key figures in mind/brain debate

Searle's articles on some of the main people involved in the modern mind/brain debate are mostly short and descriptive, though of course he gives them his own spin. The debate with Dennett is interesting if only to hint at the acrimony often substituted for real arguments in this sometime bitter debate between materialists, dualists, idealists and other colours of the rainbow. Searle is gentle on Penrose, and rightly so - others are scathing while not fully understanding Penrose's position. E.g. Churchland's " Gaps in Penrose's toilings" tends to latch onto the speculative microtubule theory whilst ignoring the more general arguments for non-algorythmic processes in the mind/brain. In this sense Penrose is a fan of Plato. Penrose in his book (Emperor's new mind) quotes Searle and his Chinese room argument - which has never fully been refuted, despite what Dennett says. Searle is also right to criticise the 40 hz hypothesis of the late Crick and still living Koch, as well as Edelman's re-entrant feedback as being no more than neural correlates of consciousness - they don't explain the real mysteries - namely the binding problem (processes all over the brain come together to give a seemless whole in our conscious experience) and the "hard problem" of how subjective consciousness, or the view from inside, arises from objective brain processes. I agree with the reviewer who likes Llinas' analysis in " I of the vortex" - in the latter book the author concludes that subjective consciousness is a major evolutionary driver and may be present right down to single-celled organisms. Penrose might agree as he highlights the case of Parameciium, a protozoan who seems capable of learning tricks and other things though it lacks a brain! Chalmers deserved a mention, as he has done more than most to popularise the consciousness debate - with his term the 'hard problem' and his experiment with black and white Mary. But Chalmers like many others falls down when he puts his cards on the table as to what the true nature of consciousness is. His idea that it is merely an outcome of information processing is rather disappointing, as is Searles's own conclusion: The one thing I didn't like was how Searle near the end revealed his own preference for naturalism and the emergence of consciousness from the complexity of the brain. Particularly revolting was his comparison to digestion emerging from the biological activity of the intestines with the way that consciousness emerges from the brain's processes - as if our thoughts were petty excretions. Digestion is an objective or outer process. Consciousness is a subjective, inner processes. It seems as if Searle also suffers from what Keith Sutherland amusingly terms 'homuphobia'- fear of the inescapable conclusion that there is someone watching the internal TV screen - the little man/woman or humunculus. It's either that, infinite regress or deny the existence of subjective consciousness. At least Searle doesn't

A Cogent Defense of Naive Naturalism

Another excellent polemic by Searle. His contention that "consciousnes" is observable along a two-fold structure is substantively true: (1) from the scientific materialist point of view of the independently verifiable third-person perspective, and (2) from the immaterialist point of view of the unverifiable first-person perspective of things like "pain." But unlike most other contemporary theories of consciousness, Searle's it's not either/or, but and/both, and almost no one else is taking note of this. Those philosophers that are, are coming up with preposterous theories along the way. Searle wants to reposition them back into the life science of neurobiology, not their arcane logic, bogus epistemology, or reductivist materialism. Let's begin with the obvious. Both perspectives are "verifiable" from the first-person point of view: We all know and agree that the first-person experience of pain, the notions of governments, the rules of inference, and other subjective "qualia" occurs ("qualia" is just a marker for individual conscious experiences). While we can and do measure some mental phenomena by (1) their third-party reports, such as someone carrying an umbrella likely thinks it's going to rain, we have trouble when we come (2) to first-person sort of qualia, e.g., what it is like to feel "pain," what one means by the phrase "good government," who is the "best painter," what I mean by "red" house, I feel depressed, etc. According to the scientific materialist, "only" those third-party reports qualify scientifically. You know the scientific paradigm: Only that which is verifiable and not falsified is true. That's fine, except what does one do when the "activity" that people report is going on in that amorphous, first-person, thing called "consciousness?" Do we deny that people have it, such "pain," that we don't have a conception of the "best government," that we don't know what they mean when they say "I feel depressed," etc.? Well, according to Searle, one has to accept this consequence if the current theories of consciousness are on track. According to the current paradigms, all first-person reportage is spurious or nonsense or (in the case of Dennett) non-existent. Searle's defense of "naive naturalism" is a defense of all our basic intuitions. Per Searle, most of what has been written recently is contrary to these intuitions, and Searle exposes them all. It's not a pretty picture in how Searle portrays others, and they evidently have not taken to kindly to it. But it is a defense of what we think to be basically true. Upended are a myriad of characters, some lightly, some not so lightly. Besides Dennett, there's Chalmers, Penrose, and Churchland. Searle may be tactically off to the wrong start, but he's definitely on the right track. There is definitely something wrong with postulations that "consciousness" does not even exist (Dennett), or that if it does exist (Chalmers), it does so in some extreme form that doesn't even mirror want w

Brilliant analyses.

This work is mainly a review of books by Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers and Israel Rosenfeld. The reviews are sometimes followed by not so polite exchanges between the authors and the reviewer.This book is an essential read because it sums up in a nutshell the different ways by which the consciousness problem is tackled today.More, I believe that prof. Searle's viewpoints that 'consciousness is a natural, biological phenomenon' and that 'the brain causes conscious experiences' are the only scientific approaches with a future.His critic of the materialistic viewpoints of Chalmers and Dennett are devastating. The mind is not just a computer program.This book also contains some very interesting comments on the distinction between natural and social sciences, the author's famous Chinese Room Argument, a critic of Gilbert Ryle, a profound comment on Penrose's book (brain processes do not guarantee truth) or Richard Dawkins' memes.All in all, a small, but very clear and important critical book.

Searle: Champion of the Materialists takes on the Dualists.

Think of the sight of lightening and the sound of thunder. The sight and sound are perfectly correlated, but without a causal theory, no explanation exists as to how each phenomenon is related to the other. John R. Searle has devoted his professional life to searching for the causal relation between brain and mind; the question he poses: "How do brain processes cause consciousness?"If it were not for consciousness we would hardly worry about what it is. But the debate has raged for thousands of years across the spectrum of numerous disciplines (philosophy, theology, psychiatry, neurology -- to name a few) and by all scholars estimation -- including Searle -- we are no closer today to achieving a consensus among the experts in the field as to how it is that a hunk of meat (the brain) comes to function as, say, an atomic scientist than we were three thousand years ago. I have been drawn to the debate as a curious onlooker and have yet to take sides with the intellectual combatants who face each other from the platform of either the "materialists" or the "dualists". Dualism, Professor Searle instructs us, is a historical mistake arising from the seventeenth century when Descartes and Galileo made a distinction between physical reality measurable by science and the unmeasurable mental reality of the soul. (Searle notes there was some utility in the mistake as it kept religious authorities off the scientists' backs.) But dualism, according to Searle has become an obstacle in the twentieth century, because it seems to place consciousness and other mental phenomena outside the ordinary physical world and thus outside the realm of natural science. Searle takes a firm stand in front of the materialists with whom he is aligned and declares: "In my view we have to abandon dualism and start with the assumption that consciousness is an ordinary biological phenomenon comparable with growth, digestion, or the secretion of bile."Searle is a careful writer who states his case about complex subject matter very lucidly. This book is especially useful to those not yet emersed in the debate between the materialists and dualists as to the essence of consciousness because the book is actually a compilation of book reviews Searle wrote for the New York Times Book Review during the `90's about books on the subject of consciousness written by others. Searle begins by clearly stating where he is coming from and concludes by telling you why he thinks he is right. In between he makes the case of many other experts in the field and then intelligently critiques them. In this format one gets the benefit of the views of many current protagonists regarding the subject of consciousness. Of particular interest was Roger Penrose (dualist-mathematician/philosopher) who does not think we live in one unified world but rather that there is a separate mental world that is `grounded' in the physical world. (Actually, he thinks we li