The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness

21 John Searle and His Ghosts

chapter twenty-one John Searle and His Ghosts With the obsolescence of traditional metaphysics and its attendant epistemology or “theory of knowledge,” the “transcendental ” reason that once enabled philosophers to solve cosmic problems from their armchairs without even looking out the window is now being supplanted by laboratories of cognitive scientists. And the information derived from them is becoming foundational for many other disciplines as well. One of the seemingly eternal dilemmas waiting for solution on the conveyor belt of this new epistemology is the problem of consciousness . What on earth is a thought and how does a body produce it? This crux—what is consciousness?—is “worried” (like a ball of yarn by a cat) by a whole range of contemporary disciplines. The cognitive neurosciences, represented by thinkers such as Gerald Edelman and Walter Freeman, give us highly technical maps of the brain showing neurons, electrochemical forces, inputs and outputs, recursive transmission paths, and so forth, but are always hitting, so to speak, the brick wall of consciousness . Professors of psychology, such as William Calvin, Steven Pinker, and David Barash, produce eminently readable books for more general audiences, fusing the disciplines of traditional psychology, physiology , and biology, with breakthroughs from the neurosciences and insights from the humanities. At the edge of this group is Daniel Dennett, a professor of philosophy with strong enough ties to the cognitive neurosciences to produce a book titled Consciousness Explained1 that candidly confesses its inability really to explain consciousness while it sheds all sorts of light nonetheless. Now John Searle, an analytic philosopher with roots in speech act theory leading to a series of books about “mind,” has produced Mind: A Brief Introduction.2 Although I have seen a description of this book as suitable reading on a transatlantic flight, I would suggest that a round trip from Chicago to New Zealand might be more ap247 propriate. The book is relatively “brief” but nevertheless requires the kind of serious attentiveness that takes real time. Searle, who writes a strikingly lucid prose of chatty informality, provides a rapid overview of the ways in which philosophers, principally Descartes, tried and failed to bridge the mind/body divide. From there he goes on to deal with the three main problems of contemporary philosophy of mind: consciousness, free will, and the self. As a “realist” philosopher who believes there is not only a real material world but that human beings are capable of saying true things about it, he is dedicated to providing spook-free explanations of these major problems of the cognitive sciences and philosophy. But as an analytic, “linguistic” philosopher, he depends very heavily on redefinitions of phenomena that tend to eliminate the problems he has set out to solve. As things turn out, carving “reality ” into highly finessed, albeit demotic, sentences can carry us only so far. And spooks kicked out the front door have a nasty way of sneaking in again from the rear. Since the aim of his book is to give a final blow to the age-old positions of dualism and materialism that he regards as obsolete, Searle wants to account for consciousness as produced from the same materials as everything else— i.e., physical microparticles of various types—while recognizing its unique character. Dualism posits immaterial spirits, souls, selves, and thoughts with the preposterous ability to initiate bodily actions and survive physical death (how can a thought move my arm—and what’s a “thought” anyhow?), while materialism reduces the mind to a computer executing built-in programs, eliminating consciousness altogether. Years earlier, Searle administered a devastating blow to fanciers of artificial intelligence who attempted to account for human consciousness in terms of computers. In his famous “Chinese Room” fable he imagined himself as a human being who could correctly answer in Chinese questions posed in that language even though he didn’t understand a word. He could perform this feat by using a rule book that showed him how to manipulate Chinese symbols without knowing what they meant. Contrasting this performance with his ability to answer questions in English, Searle remarks , “In English, I understand what the words mean, in Chinese I understand nothing. In Chinese, I am just a computer . . . The computer operates by manipulating symbols . . . whereas the human mind has more than just uninterpreted symbols, it attaches meaning to the symbols” 248 consciousness (90–91). Understanding is a function of consciousness, which is...