Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge, III: Dualism

SESSION I. Why Dualism (and Materialism) Fail to Account for Consciousness

5 S E S S I O N I Why Dualism (and Materialism) Fail to Account for Consciousness1 John R. Searle Iinterpret the statement of purpose by the organizers as implying that a primary aim of this series of meetings is to critically examine, and possibly overcome, a set of traditional philosophical categories. We were all brought up on these categories , but many of them appear to be obsolete and inadequate. In many cases the traditional categories become obstacles to our investigation rather than tools that we can fruitfully use in the investigation. I am thinking of such fundamental categories as dualism and monism, reductionism and emergentism, materialism and mentalism, determinism and randomness. I am constantly surprised by how pervasive these categories are. When I first began working in the philosophy of mind, I found that my fellow philosophers were very anxious to find some way to fit me into the usual pigeonholes. One reviewer said that I endorsed a “materialist ” position, and another reviewer of the same book described it as “property dualism.” Why do competent philosophers reading the same text interpret it so differently? I think part of the answer is that the categories in which they think force them to interpret any theory as fitting into the predetermined categories. Any theory of mind-body relations which was neither materialist nor dualist (nor idealist, etc.) would seem unintelligible to them. In this talk, I will trace some of the recent developments of the debates concerning materialism and dualism, and I will give special emphasis to my own work as it relates to these debates. My own strategy, when I first began working on these 6 problems, was to simply ignore the traditional categories. “Dualism” and “materialism ” may not name anything very definite, but consciousness and intentionality really do exist as real phenomena in the real world. So I tried to analyze them. We can state, and even in some cases solve, the philosophical problems without using the traditional categories. For the sake of simplicity, I will concentrate on consciousness, but similar remarks could be made about intentionality. My conclusion will be that both those who think of themselves as materialists and those who think of themselves as dualists are trying to say something true, but the persistence of the obsolete categories prevents the truth from coming out and covers it with falsehood. I will argue that we need to overcome the traditional categories. How then would one go about addressing the traditional mind-body problem without using the traditional categories? The traditional problem (concentrating on consciousness and ignoring intentionality for the moment) is simply: How exactly does consciousness relate to the so-called physical world, the world of our bodies and other material objects? And the bare bones of the answer to that question we already know: Conscious states are entirely caused by brain processes and they are realized in the brain. The two key phrases here are “caused by” and “realized in” and I will say more about these later. If you spell out these relations in some detail, as I tried to do in a number of works, then it seems to me that the problem can be turned over to the neurobiologists. The problems of how exactly brain processes cause conscious states, and how and where they exist in the brain, can then be treated as scientific questions like any other. In cases like this, in which the philosophical problem can be turned into a scientific problem, the philosophical task is to prepare the problem conceptually, to get it into a kind of shape where it admits of being treated as a scientific problem. Specifically, a large part of the philosophical task is to clarify the problem conceptually to the point that it admits of experimental testing. You have to know what you are testing for and what counts as a negative or positive result of the test. Once the philosophical job is over, the factual empirical issues should be solved by lab scientists. I 7 stuck by these principles and some years ago stopped working on the problem of consciousness. I felt I had said what I wanted to say, and, to my satisfaction at least, I had stated the problem so that it admitted of a scientific solution. I went to work on other problems, such as the structure of society (Searle 1995) and the nature of rationality (Searle 2002). Notice...