Customer Reviews

Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)

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This book is 3 chapters: an intro chapter, a chapter on free will & neurobiology, and a chapter on political power. The book was previously just two lectures Searle gave in 2001 at Sorbonne. Eventually, Searle's editor published these two lectures in France without Searle's involvement leading Searle to end a quaint story saying, "It is the first time in my life that I published a book I did not know that I had written" (pg. 2). Searle added the intro chapter for his edition. Although the first essay on free will is meager progress on what Searle says elsewhere (see Searle's Rationality in Action (Jean Nicod Lectures)), the 2nd chapter on political power is a promising addition to what Searle has already hinted at in The Construction of Social Reality and Mind, Language, and Society : Philosophy in the Real World (he admits this fact, see pg. 33).

SEARLE ON FREE WILL & NEUROBIOLOGY
Searle puts in the title "Reflections" because he admits to not giving answers, especially to the problem of free will. Instead Searle wants to muse: "I cannot give you a solution to the problem of free will, but I hope to be at least able to state the problem in a precise enough form so that we can see what possible solutions would look like (pg. 31).
Searle is frustrated by free will and neurobiology because free will seems to be a phenomenological experience that is irreducible to epiphenomena, yet how can we be free to will when conscious states are realized in neurological states which are "completely deterministic"? (pg. 38 see all 40). But the notion of the freedom of the will does not go away, according to Searle, "if you say to the waiter `Look, I am a determinist - che sará sará, I'll just wait and see what I order,' that refusal to exercise free will is only intelligible to you as one of your actions if you take it to be an exercise of your free will" (pg. 43).
At this point Searle offers 2 hypotheses: (1) free will is an illusion and the deterministic physical laws which govern our neurons also govern consciousness i.e. epiphenomenalism; (2) "we have to suppose that the logical features of volitional consciousness of the entire system have effects on the elements on the system. This is true even though the system is composed entirely of the elements" (pg. 63). Thus, "the passage from one state to the next is explained by the rational thought processes of the initial state of neurons/consciousness. At any instant the total state of consciousness is fixed by the behavior of the neurons, but from on instant to the next the total state of the system is not causally sufficient to determine the next state. Free will, if it exists at all, is a phenomenon in time" (pg. 65). Searle's struggle to make free will somehow a feature (is "feature the right word, Searle sometimes says "realized" but we might want to ask for clarity) of neurophysiology has been on difficult grounds since at least Thomas Nagel wrote that we can know everything about a bat except what it is like to be a bat (see "What is it like to be a bat?" in Nagel's book Mortal Questions (Canto)). Searle wants "Hypothesis 2" to be correct but he concludes that it is currently "a mess" (pg. 77).

SEARLE ON DEONTIC POWER
Before this essay, Searle never had anything to say about politics (this is not completely true: see little-known book "The campus war; a sympathetic look at the university in agony). Searle says, "When I was an undergraduate, it was widely believed that political philosophy was dead" (pg. 13). However, after writing about institutional reality as collective intentionality in "The Construction of Social Reality" he decided that this chapter "Social Ontology and Political Power" would apply his linguistic account of institutional reality to the "special problem of political power" (pg. 33).
Searle begins by saying that "our tradition of political philosophy" has been "unsatisfying" because it doesn't ask the proper questions first: instead of "What is a just society" we should ask "What is a society in the first place?" (pg. 80) Searle describes a group of numbered and ordered propositions which develop through his essay; I will quote them here in truncated form (hopefully without losing meaningfulness).
(1) All political power is a matter of social functions, and for that reason all political power is deontic power (2) Because all political power is a matter of status functions, all political power, though exercised from above, comes from below (3) Even though the individual is the source of all political power, by his or her ability to engage in collective intentionality; all the same, the individual, typically, feels powerless (4) The system of political status functions works at least in part because recognized deontic powers provide desire-independent reasons for action (5) It is a consequence...that there is a distinction between political power and political leadership (6) Because political powers are matters of status functions they are, in large part, linguistically constituted (7) In order for a society to have a political reality it needs several other distinguishing features:...a distinction between the public and the private sphere with the political as part of the public sphere,...the existence of nonviolent group conflicts, and...group conflicts must be over social goods within a structure of deontology (8) A monopoly on armed violence is an essential presupposition of government.

Anyone serious about studying the extensions of Searle's thought must buy this book primarily for the brief essay on political philosophy. His essay on free will, Searle admits, is largely conceptually at an impasse.

These essays are a low-voltage rehash of ideas set out in Searle's earlier books, where his one-mind concept of consciousness is set out much more lucidly. His musings on Free Will lack focus and clarity and the author ends up without taking a clear position on a topic where his brilliant philosophical studies should have allowed him to enlighten his readers.

In summary: Good read. Very short. Covers some interesting ground and best of all, poses interesting questions. Not very much neurobiology.

The only other complete work by Searle that I have read is "Mind: A brief introduction." This book is similar in style though much narrower in scope. His account of free will is the same as it was elsewhere; I am not sure about the short piece on political power. Both were notable mostly for how clearly they framed the questions and the issues to allow for further discussion, rather than providing definitive answers. The introduction was my favorite chapter as it outlined what Searle takes to be the most important questions in philosophy today and situates those questions in a very engaging (albeit brief) way. Overall it was an enjoyable book, though not nearly as comprehensive as his other works.

I might recommend this book to someone who is interested in the philosophy of free will or social institutions and wants an introduction to Searle's work that is longer (and less technical) than most journal articles, but shorter than most books.

You'd expect a book with this title to actually have some neurobiology in it, but you'd be disappointed. This slim volume consists of two diffuse philosophical essays, one about free will, and the other about political power. Both are simplistic, in my view, and don't bring any new ideas to the table. The essay on free will was the most interesting, but despite the book's title, the author doesn't bring in any neurobiology. Instead he basically says that neurobiology should be involved, and possibly quantum mechanical randomness, because that's the only nondeterministic mechanism he can think of that might be related to the nondeterminism of free will. That particular idea is explored much more deeply in Roger Penrose's book "The Emperor's New Mind," which despite its flaws, is a much deeper and more solid book.

I stumbled upon this book at an Atlanta retailer. It's not a lengthy piece, but it is aggressive. I will be reading more from Searle.

This book is a dense and yet fast read. The final chapter deserves to be read several times.

Chapter one is Searle trying to give a brief encapsulation of the themes that he has treated elsewhere. Heavy going, but surprisingly rapid reading.

In chapter two, Searle wrestles with the implications of neurobiology for "free will." He finds that he cannot decisively state whether humans have free will or not. Assuming that consciousness is a function of the physical brain, composed of neurons, glial cells, etc, he argues that either there is no free will (even though we must believe there is) and everything we do is deterministic, or else free will comes via the randomness of quantum fluctuations.

This dichotomy was so bad that I seriously entertained the thought of writing the author and demanding my money back. I finished this chapter before bed and then awoke around 0500 in an absolute panic attack because I could not readily refute Searle. I do not see randomly dictated behavior as any better than predetermined behavior. Neither one is freedom.

As I wrestled with my panic, I realized that the horror of either of Searle's two options comes from having a "Me" with intent and desire, who is then denied the ability to realize any intent or desire by fate or by random chance.

I think that the drastically self-referential, non-linear nature of the brain makes an independent sense of "Me" possible w/o invoking some mystical split between mind and brain. I do not see that it is impossible for this sense of "Me" to develop its own preferences in a way that is neither random nor predetermined.

The final chapter truly made the book worthwhile. It consists of a brief essay on political power. Searle compares deontic power and status functions with the brute power imposed by force. He finds the notion of political power completely foreign to the physicist's notions of power.

My hope was that this book was a good philosopher, musing seriously over a host of recent results on how the mind is constituted and works from fMRI and other neurobiology studies. Instead I got a good philosopher doing vague musings without any basis in fact, continuing 16th century metaphysical musings as he wishes, without being constrained by fact, truth, how brains work, what social psych knows about social modules, mirror neurons, consciousness bundlings, and everything else exciting in what we know now about us-ness.

One star is too much. This book is cleverly mis-named by its editors to sell. Anyone interested in the name the book now actually has will be severely, severely disappointed in the book, at any price, however cheap. This book is a waste of space and increasingly it looks like its author is something similar.