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. (However, and this is important, having senses of things, being aware, is not similarly precluded by the absence of entity status. It's just that the entity will be seen as a physical system, not a mental one, since, even though the physical system has awareness of other physical phenomena, which awareness is part of a mental life, there need not be a separate mental entity present, too.)
Dennett, in fact, wants to tell us there is no mental entity per se, only various brain functionalities which combine in certain ways to build the subjectness that we experience as consciousness (including consciousness of self). 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. (That is Searle's Chinese Room Argument suffers from certain technical flaws including a suppressed premise as well as equivocation in some of its middle terms and a failure to elucidate certain key concepts on which the argument depends.)
Searle also takes on David Chalmers (
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind Series)
) 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. 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 the function of hearts, etc. But Searle thinks Chalmers falls into property dualism while he is simultaneously suggesting 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 further suggests that Chalmers holds a position which could, in principle, suppose that consciousness exists throughout the universe at every level, inanimate as well as animate (i.e., a variant of so-called panpsychism). 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 (
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind
) which he finds quite promising, etc. Because of the limitation of this amazon review format, unfortunately, 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, 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 as well as out of brains (the "causal" source of our own mental lives). His failure to see the weakness in his core claim, however, in the end undermines the strength of his criticisms of the other writers presented here.
SWM
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