Customer Reviews

The Mystery of Consciousness

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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.

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

"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?"

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 we know to be true. It's either too scientistic or too dualistic, but whatever the method, it's on the wrong foot.

Searle's intuitions are certainly right, even if his modus operandi has begotten him ill-will (esp. Penrose). For those wholly unfamiliar with "consciousness" as Searle minimally conceives it, consult his "Rediscovery of the Mind." Even without that prefatory work, his arguments in this book still have cogent force and conviction. Searle's conception of what it is minimally to have "consciousness" may be off track "here and there," but his basic intuitions are obviously and instinctively on track.

For the sake of science, the understanding of the mind, and of what constitutes and explains "consciousness," I hope all Searle's detractors take this neurobiological polemic to heart. Searle is right to argue that methodology doesn't outweigh reality, and whatever the methodology for the study of consciousness, let's hope philosophers get in line behind neurobiologists, who, along with psychologists, know that "intrinsically first-person ontology" exists when it comes to consciousness -- even if scientifically, it doesn't fit the paradigm. It might not fit the classical materialist paradigm, but things like "life" and "consciousness" just don't. Densely, but articulately and cogently, argued. Highly recommended.

Though a better book to consult is his Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), this book is unique since it discusses specific works of major thinkers in this field. Better still, it contains direct responses from Dennett, Chalmers and paranthetically from Penrose. And those responses serve to reveal symptoms of communication failure. Perhaps rather more surprising is Searle's rather lame postscript in pp. 130-131 (in response to Dennett's letter). No, I take it back. It is scarcely suprising compared to his conception of the simulation. This he explains in his brief communication with Roger Penrose.

Another gem of this book is the part two of his conclusion, i.e. 10 FAQ's concerning his philosophical position. However, it would be far less than satisfying if you had expected it to clarify what he means by "biological naturalism". Why a biological organism would have a privilege in this consciousness business I do not understand. It slightly reminds me of vitalism, but Searle would fiercefully deny that. He also rejects dualism. And eliminative reductionism. Then he says, "We can, in short, accept irreducibility without accepting dualism." (p. 214) How? Where he stands I do not know.

Nonetheless, Searle's ideas are thought-provoking and quite indispensable in discussing philosophical implications of artificial intellligence. We are not talking about another New Age consciousness bluff here. This book overall gives an insight into this great thinker's style and attitude towards the matter. Plus, he never claims he is perfectly correct about all this.

Because, honestly, no one knows what consciousness is. Not even a clue.

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 live in three worlds: a physical world, a mental world, and a world of abstract objects such as numbers and other mathematical entities.) There are also the views of Francis Crick (materialist-neurobiologist): "`You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Reviews by others of Searle's work (this and others) by people far more knowledgeable about the subject matter than me, tend to project a "for him" or "against him" attitude. This I have come to learn comes with the territory, for the intellectuals that take up this subject all seem to have strong opinions that they hold with fierce proprietary interest. But for one new to the debate, I found this to be an excellent introduction to the scope of the controversy with some fascinating points of view held by the current scholars in the field.

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.

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 do the latter, but Dennett does.

The book was missing a piece on a major Idealist, e.g. Colin Mc Ginn, whose ' Mysterious flame - conscious minds in the material world' gives a wonderful description of the subjective side of things: thoughts have no location or size and we live in a subjective or phenomenological world, not an objecitve one ' out there' . The truth is in here, not out there!

This book will be of interest to anyone curious about Artificial Intelligence (AI) or the philosophy of mind. It consists of chapters that were originally reviews of books, somewhat rewritten and expanded for this book. Searle believes that consciousness is an emmergent property of the brain, but that, so far at least, AI and attempts to explain the brain as a sort of computer are failures.
Two chapters review the essence, I think of Searle's position. In his review/commentary on Roger Penrose's Shadows of the Mind, he takes issue with Penrose's position that computers cannot possibly be intelligent or conscious like humans or human brains. Penrose claim is based in part of Godel's famous proof that there will always be improvable theorems in any set of mathematical axioms. In short, any formal mathematical system is incomplete because there are true but unprovable statements in it. A computer, which in the final analysis can do nothing but binary addition and subtraction can never know Godel's Proof as we know it. We can understand this because our brains can do something other than arithmetic. Searle says that even if Penrose is right, and not too many experts are convinced by his logic, that it should be possible to program computers to simulate whatever it is that brains do that allows us to be able to comprehend Godel's Proof. These seems to me to be an empirical question, but I would think that a computer made of silicon should be able to duplicate whatever a brain, which is essentially made of Jell-O, can do.
In Consciousness Explained Daniel Dennett takes the position that there is no such thing as consciousness. When we thinkwe are conscious of a feeling of pain, we are mistaken! At least this is what Searle says that Dennett claims. Since Dennett wrote a reply to Searle, which is included in the book, and does not deny it, it would seem to be so. Dennett claims inner states are "unconfirmable" and "unverifiable" and therefore "just obscurantism." From the standpoint of scientific theory he may well be correct. Scientists suppose that human behavior can be explained as a result of brain functioning. It does not seem that a complete description of brain function needs anything more than a description of the parts of the brain and how they work. Everything I could hope to know about a brain would be equally true if the brain was no more conscious than my computer or chair. A scientist can say about consciousness what Laplaise said about God: I have no need of that hypothesis.
But the fly in the ointment is that I, at least, am conscious. And I will do you the courtesy of supposing you are also, but I cannot know that with the same certainty.
And that is the great mystery of consciousness. Is it an emergent property of brain function as Searle believes? Is it part of our immortal soul as most theologians claim? Is it part of the Mind of God as mystics experience it? There is really no way to know.

A good exposition, via a compilation of past book reviews by John Searle, published over the years in the New York Review of Books, of his views on consciousness and mind, he reiterates here, and in some ways strengthens, his famous Chinese Room argument in examining and denying the claims of the authors of the books under review in this volume.

I think that argument, by the way, while superficially right and useful (as a corrective to those with an overly mechanistic view of mind), ultimately misses the point because Searle presents it as a denial of what he calls "Strong Artificial Intelligence," the position that holds one can build minds, with the sort of consciousness we have, on computers using programs to accomplish this. Relying on the Chinese Room argument, Searle denies "Strong AI" by noting that programs are purely formal, or syntactical as he puts it, and that syntax cannot give meaning which requires a knowing, thinking, aware subject.

The problem with his argument is that the Chinese Room thought experiment -- while demonstrating that we do expect to see a knower at work in acts of "intelligence" (and that computers as presented in his thought experiment do not and cannot know anything) -- still does not demonstrate that computers that have been configured and programmed in certain ways cannot produce, at a "higher" level, just what he wants to deny them, consciousness. That is, syntax may indeed yield semantics in the same way that Searle tells us, elsewhere, that atomic structure can yield hardness or liquidness. But Searle seems never to notice this fundamental flaw in his case.

Searle remains fixated on his idea that consciousness is somehow not explainable via syntactical operations, as seen in computers, and this position keeps cropping up in criticisms of the various writers under review in this book. He's particularly hard on Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained), whom he takes to task for suggesting we are all zombie-like and so, says Searle, seems to be denying the qualitative nature of consciousness which the Chinese Room argument demonstrates. Of course, one can read Dennett's claim as being somewhat polemical since it is hard to take Dennett as saying there is no consciousness in the sense that neither he nor the rest of us have it. Dennett's point seems, rather, to be that consciousness is explainable in terms of non-conscious building blocks and that the sense of being a conscious entity that we get is only that, a sense of this.

In fact, Dennett wants to tell us there is no entity per se, only various brain functionalities which combine in certain ways to build the subjectness that we experience as consciousness. But Searle, taking Dennett literally, accuses him of actually arguing that we are all zombies, i.e., unconcious except that we happen to think we're conscious! Such a reading is, of course, a contradiction in terms as Searle suggests. But this does not seem to be a fair interpretation of Dennett's claims.

Searle's Chinese Room argument is right insofar as it shows that the idea of "intelligence" (what we mean by intelligence in creatures like ourselves) requires a subjective knower. But it is wrong insofar as Searle wants to say that it thereby demonstrates why a claim like the one Dennett makes, that consciousness can be built up on a non-organic machine platform (e.g., computers and their programs), is, itself, wrong. In fact, Dennett's claim looks better and better against the weaknesses of the Chinese Room argument when this argument is applied as an attack against "Strong AI" as Searle uses it.

Searle also takes on David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory) and attacks him for suggesting that consciousness is something that is, in principle, logically divorced from the physicality of the world. As it happens, Chalmers has offered a very useful analysis of the uses we make of mental terms in many cases, showing how we often have two things in mind: a reference to the operational aspects and a reference to the phenomenality that often accompanies the operational aspects, i.e., our experience of having experiences, our subjectness. That we often mean both or one or the other in different contexts seems, in fact, to be quite true. And Chalmers also seems to be right in noting that we often have trouble distinguishing what exactly we are referring to in many actual cases and that the referral function tends to slip and slide over this somewhat icy sheet.

However, Searle rightly suggests that while this may be true of our usages, it doesn't mean that mind and body are two parallel realms as Chalmers seems to be proposing. For Searle this is a matter of how we talk about the phenomena of our experience, i.e., that minds are the functions of brains just as digestion is the function of stomachs, pumping blood is the function of hearts, etc. But Searle thinks Chalmers falls into property dualism while suggesting, simultaneously, that consciousness is irreducible. Searle's position is that it is, indeed, irreducible in terms of levels of speech, but scientifically, he wants to say that we can certainly reduce it to a biological function of brains which, as yet, is beyond our understanding but not, perhaps, forever.

Searle thinks that Chalmers holds a position which could, in principle, suppose that consciousness exists throughout the universe at every level, inanimate as well as animate. Though Chalmers' rebuttal to this reading is included in the book, Searle does not accept the rebuttal as written and insists the conclusion remains implied in Chalmers' arguments.

Searle addresses other writers here as well, including Edelman's work on massively redundant brain processing which he finds quite promising, etc. Because of the limitation of this amazon review format, I can't go much further. But suffice it to say, this is a good book and a useful introduction to the ideas of these thinkers. Searle is a good expositor and has some useful points to make, though I think, in the end, that he has got some things quite wrong, particularly his claim that his Chinese Room argument puts paid to the notion of "Strong AI" which, he tells us, holds that minds can be built out of computers and their programs. His failure to see the weakness in this core claim of his in the end undermines the strength of his criticisms of the other writers presented here.
SWM