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49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very good intro to the "Mind-Brain Problem", November 21, 2002
This review is from: The Mystery of Consciousness (Paperback)
Searle is certainly not timid in this collection of essays, based on reviews he wrote in the New York Review of Books. However, Searle is not really combative either - he is rather very straightforward in his argumentation. That, combined with the back-and-forth responses between Searle and some of the reviewed authors is very instructive to introducing one to some of the various philosophical stances toward consciousness and the mind-brain problem. Searle's own stance is one of 'biological naturalism'. This view is best explicated in Searle's _The Rediscovery of the Mind_. It, roughly speaking, is a view that: 1) consciousness is a real, intrinsically first-person phenomena; 2) consciousness is brain-based - that is, it is physically based; and, 3) by virtue of #1 mind is not a reducible phenomena (since any third-person reduction destroys the essential 1st-person characteristic that makes consciousness what it is). Scientific study of the mind is not thereby discounted - such study need only take these points into account. Regarding Edelman and Crick, Searle points out that despite that whatever neurological evidence and elaborations they may have come up with (in terms of neurological theories), neither presents a theory of consciousness per se. Whatever the 40Hz theory says, it can only claim a correlative relation, not a causitive relation, to consciousness at this point in its development.
[For my money, _I of the Vortex_ by Rodolfo Llinas is more interesting than Edelman or Crick, and Llinas is somewhat less hyperbolic about his claims.] Penrose is just tragically out to lunch, poor guy. And, if anything, Searle is overly generous in his treatment of Penrose's Godelian / computational arguments. The role of algorithmic simulation and the Incompleteness Theorems of Godel are grossly misused by Penrose, and Searle lets most of it slide, although he acknowledges that many criticisms along "technical" lines have been posed against Penrose.
[A far more cogent understanding of the mind-brain problem in relation to Godel, simulation, and Church-Turing thesis, is in Robert Rosen's daunting _Essays on Life Itself_]. It is true that one could conceivably agree with Dennett that there is no consciousness and our sense of self-awareness is just illusion. But I think that such a view is neither common-sensically nor neurologically supported, or even suggested, for that matter. And Searle rightly flushes Dennett out from under the latter's evasive handwaving. I agree with Searle that Dennett's view is "pathological". There is a "lively" back-and-forth between the two. :) Chalmers' supervenience view is next. And I think Searle rightly highlights the errors of this view. The reviewer who says that Searle is the one begging the question by disallowing Chalmer's zombie thought experiment (imagine a world with a physically identical zombie to a person in this world but with no consciousness) is mistaken, in my opinion. Since consciousness is not, a priori, fractionable from a person without causing some physical change in so doing, the onus is on Chalmers to show that such a fractionation is even theoretically possible in =this= world, =before= he poses a thought experiment where such a possible other world is presupposed. Otherwise, his thought experiment is just wishful thinking about some other fantasy world. To allow Chalmers to make such a claim without evidence is to let Chalmers presume his own conclusion. Finally. the reviewer who commented that Searle implies that biological naturalism says consciousness is only a property of "biological matter", and another reviewer who similarly comments on the "privileged" status of only biological organisms as possibly conscious, both slightly miss Searle's point. Searle says that biological systems are =causally sufficient= to have the property of consciousness: only brains produce consciousness because those are precisely the only systems we know of that have consciousness. He in fact says, "Perhaps it is a feature we could duplicate in silicon or vacuum tubes. At present, we just do not know." (p.203) So, "biological matter" is not somehow privileged per se, or vitalistic in any sense. Part of the problem is that Searle's own view is presented only in a very compact, piecemeal form in this book. The interested reader will find that reading _The Rediscovery of the Mind_ will make Searle's own theory much clearer, and as a result will also make clearer Searle's objections to the other theories presented in this book of reviews.
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56 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Searle: Irreducibly Dogmatic, as usual, April 24, 2000
This review is from: The Mystery of Consciousness (Paperback)
Searle's new book is a compilation of articles previouslypublished in The New York Review of Books, from 1995-1997. While thearticles are self-contained, there is a definite theme that runsthrough them: that recent attempts to explain consciousness are either based on conceptual confusion or offer solutions that are at best promissory notes. Among those singled out for conceptual confusion are Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, and David Chalmers. Those who are in the right ballpark but do not deliver on their claims are Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, and Israel Rosenfeld. Or, to put it more succinctly, the former group is conceptually confused since they do not share Searle's view that consciousness is an irreducible biological property of the brain. The latter group fails to deliver because, while they correctly treat consciousness as a biological phenomenon, they do not explain consciousness in the sense of giving an account of how the brain actually causes conscious states. Searle's merciless criticisms of recent approaches to consciousness are based on his own original viewpoint proposed in his books Minds, Brains, and Science (1984) and The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). According to Searle, consciousness is both an irreducibly subjective mental phenomenon and a biological feature of the brain. Searle compares consciousness to digestion in the stomach or the sharpness of a pain, higher-level features of physical structures which are at the same time caused by lower-level micro-features of these structures. The mind/body problem is solved when we repudiate the dogmatic assumption that all properties are exclusively mental or physical. This forced dichotomy has led many philosophers to advocate either dualism, where the mental and the physical are separate phenomena, or materialism, where the mental gets completely eliminated in favor of the physical. Dualism leads to the insoluble problem of mind/body interaction, while materialism ignores the simple fact that we are conscious (most of the time, at any rate), and that consciousness "is the condition that makes it possible for anything to matter to anybody." (xiv) By countenancing consciousness as both mental and physical, Searle delivers us out of this problematic. As a mental phenomenon, consciousness is an irreducible property which is given to us in moments of sentient awareness; and as a biological property, we can (in principle) explain consciousness in terms of the methods of the natural sciences. From this vantage point, any view that posits a form of materialism or dualism will be accused of conceptual confusion, a failure to see that the "mental" need not stand in opposition to the "physical." Thus Searle is led to dismiss the views of Chalmers (the property dualist) and Dennett (the materalist) without much difficulty. However, Searle's dismissive approach fails to appreciate that these views advance powerful arguments against Searle's own precarious double-aspect view. Take Chalmers' argument first. Chalmers argues that there is a logically possible zombie world physically identical to our own but without any conscious properties... It is clear that it is Searle who is begging the question by just assuming that consciousness is a physical fact and then plugging his ears to Chalmers' thought-experiment based on this assumption. This kind of argumentation is characteristic of Searle's entire book. He sets up the debate in his way-- the "right" way-- and then refuses to consider the force of any argument that does not adhere to his own agenda. The treatment of Dennett is symptomatic in this regard. Searle's basic criticism is that Dennett "denies the existence of the data" (p.99) for a theory of consciousness, and hence whatever Dennett is doing, it is not explaining consciousness but rather explaining it away. But Dennett is hardly denying the existence of the data, the phenomenology of pain, vision, thinking, and so forth . What he denies is a false ontological interpretation of this data, that these states refer to independently real entities, "given" to awareness in a self-standing Cartesian realm. Searle assumes that the "data" are the full-blown ontological realities of mental states, but this begs the question against Dennett, who argues that these so-called ontological realities are not the raw data but rather interpretations-- bad interpretations of the data. Characteristically, Searle's entire argument against Dennett rests on wheeling out his own view that a first-person ontology of mental states is consistent with treating the mind as part of the natural order. He writes: Dennett has a definition of science which excludes the possibility that science might investigate subjectivity, and he thinks the third-person objectivity of science forces him to this definition. But that is a bad pun on `objectivity.' The aim of science is to get a systematic account of how the world works. One part of the world consists of ontologically subjective phenomena. (p.114) This fails to even address Dennett's project, for Dennett devotes 511 pages to working out the possibility of a view where "subjective phenomena" get explained as benign user illusions, similar to treating a face in a mirror as a "real" face, or the game on television as a "real" game. In order for Searle's objection to have any weight against Dennett, he must enter into the details of Dennett's project, and show how these details fail to make the case against the ontological validity of phenomenological states. He cannot simply assume that subjective mental phenomena are ontologically objective and then use this assumption to dismiss Dennett's project. One might think that Searle would be more sympathetic to projects which do not deny the ontological facts of consciousness and yet try to explain these facts in terms of the neurophysiological workings of the brain. Indeed, Searle maintains that consciousness is a biological property of the brain and so should be studied just like any other biological phenomenon. One might think that, but one would be wrong. For Searle appears equally dismissive of recent projects within the natural sciences to explain consciousness. In his section on Francis Crick, Searle criticizes Crick's hypothesis that consciousness arises from synchronized firings of neurons in the 40 hertz range. Even if Crick were right, the most he has shown is that conscious facts are "correlated" with such neuron firings. What we need to be shown, Searle insists, is some "mechanism" that will explain consciousness in terms of lower-level properties of the brain. As he puts it, Even if Crick's speculation turns out to be 100 percent correct we still need to know the mechanisms whereby the neural correlates cause the conscious feelings, and we are a long way from even knowing the form such an explanation might take (p.34). It seems that, no matter what neurophysiological processes are offerred as explanations for consciousness, t
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting debate on consciousness wrapped around book reviews, January 21, 2006
This review is from: The Mystery of Consciousness (Paperback)
"The Mystery of Consciousness" is simply an expansion and revision of a series of book reviews from the mid 90s. Searle has added a first and last chapter in which he expounds his own views and included the written responses of a couple of the authors to his original reviews. Essentially then, the book is a work of criticism with a dash of the author's own views.
The book is well-written and interesting. Searle can tear an argument into its constituent pieces, summarize it and raise objections as clearly as anyone. It also provides an excellent survey of some important authors on the subject: Crick, Penrose, Dennett, etc. However, as usual with unsolved philosophical problems, it is far easier to tear down the arguments of others than to make a clear, correct argument yourself. Further, it becomes obvious that the authors (including Searle) are talking past each other...using the same words with different meanings.
The problem is illustrated at the very beginning. On page 5, Searle writes:
"One issue can be dealt with swiftly. There is a problem that...does not seem very serious to me, and that is the problem of defining "consciousness" .... if we distinguish between analytic definitions, which aim to analyze the underlying essence of a phenomenon, and common-sense definitions .... it does not seem to me at all difficult to give a common-sense definition of the term: 'consciousness' refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again"
And hence come many difficulties, because the other authors Searle is studying are not all using this definition. They are not all even using their own common-sense definitions, but may be using analytic definitions. Thus Searle's comments like "consciousness is irreducible" are obvious to him, using his exact definition, but not all obvious if consciousness is defined some other way. Further, science and mathematics are littered with common-sense definitions that turned out to be useless or wrong, for example the assumption that light consisted of waves and matter of particles, and the absolute monistic nature of each as one or the other. His mantra that "Consciousness is a biological phenomena like digestion or photosynthesis" is tautological if we are referring to his intuitive definition, but flatly false if defined in other ways.
Thus the weakest part of this book: the exchanges between Searle and Dennett and between Searle and Chalmers. In the Searle/Dennett debate both end up shouting past each other, pointing out the absurdity of the other's positions and the obviousness of their own, because they are using different definitions of not only "consciousness" but "mind", "qualia", "artificial intelligence" and even such basic terms as "subjective" and "objective". The Chalmers conversation is a little less acrimonious, but just as unsatisfactory...Chalmers at least comes across as more of a gentleman than Dennett or Searle.
The final chapter, Searle's summary of his own position, is excellent. It is more balanced and self-critical than his remarks in the original reviews, and offers an excellent Q&A that anticipates the objections to his views and answers them. Nonetheless, as Searle himself recognizes, the book leaves us mostly with questions, and I believe we will eventually find even the questions are wrong. For example, the question "How does the brain generate consciousness?" may ultimately turn out to be as misguided as "How many epicycles are involved in the orbit of Mars?"
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