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Title: The Mystery of Consciousness by John R. Searle ISBN: 0-940322-06-4 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: September, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (16 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Searle: Irreducibly Dogmatic, as usual
Comment: 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
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant analyses.
Comment: This work is mainly a review of books by Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers and Israel Rosenfeld. The reviews are sometimes followed by not so polite exchanges between the authors and the reviewer.
This book is an essential read because it sums up in a nutshell the different ways by which the consciousness problem is tackled today.
More, I believe that prof. Searle's viewpoints that 'consciousness is a natural, biological phenomenon' and that 'the brain causes conscious experiences' are the only scientific approaches with a future.
His critic of the materialistic viewpoints of Chalmers and Dennett are devastating. The mind is not just a computer program.
This book also contains some very interesting comments on the distinction between natural and social sciences, the author's famous Chinese Room Argument, a critic of Gilbert Ryle, a profound comment on Penrose's book (brain processes do not guarantee truth) or Richard Dawkins' memes.
All in all, a small, but very clear and important critical book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent discussion of the issues
Comment: I'm almost in complete agreement with Searle on his position that the mind depends completely on the brain and that the dichotomy between mind and brain in philosophy is false. Although one must be careful not to subscribe to a simple mind/brain psychophysical isomorphism, nevertheless, it is quite obvious at this point as a result of the research of the last 75 years in the brain sciences that the mind depends on, and results from, brain mechanisms and processes.
In this book, Searle discusses and critiques the work of a number of theorists and makes numerous observations related to these points, and I thought I'd add a few more. So I'll just make a few observations about the neuroscience for the road, since that's my specialty, including some interesting work related to the clinical side, since some of it is quite fascinating (especially the "orgasmotronic people" I discuss at the end). :-)
The first area I'd like to discuss relates to the area of emotions and specifically mood disorders, which has focused on the neurochemical and serotonin and dopaminergic issues, especially since these chemicals have a profound influence on the limbic system areas and the areas they connect with, such as the temporal, frontal, and prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is an older area of the mammalian brain that has profound effects on emotional behavior and many aspects of personality. It is well established that chemical imbalances and/or damage, such as through trauma and stroke and so on, can cause various syndromes, ranging from mood and emotional disorders to cognitive deficiencies. We still have a lot to learn about this, but the basic chemical pathways have been worked out. For example, deficits in long-term motivation (which many people have) have been found to be associated with the nerve pathways connecting the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system.
Another avenue of research that looks promising relates to schizophrenia, which is that what we call "consciousness" actually results from the integration of separate and diverse brain areas acting in concert, and that when this integration becomes impaired, there are problems. Of course, it remains to be seen if can be treated some way, but again, our understanding of the possible mechanism is continuing to progress.
Another example of how our emotional life depends on the brain is the finding that 70% of death-row inmates have been found to have abnormal EEGs and brain waves emanating from the amygdala, another important structure in the limbic system. The amygdala is involved in aggressive and even homicidal behavior. In one famous case, a formerly quiet, unassuming man developed an amygdalar tumor and shot 17 people and wounded 30 others before he was stopped. There are now drugs that treat abnormal electrical activity in the brain, and the hope is that someday they may even be able to detect and prevent situations like this.
For another fascinating example, take homosexuality, which many people still think is a form of psychopathology. Freud said it was because the boy didn't have a strong father figure, and so doesn't know better. For years homosexuals were treated with psychoanalysis with no effect. Then about 20 years ago, a scientist at Caltech made the amazing discovery that heterosexuals and homosexuals had different neurochemical and anatomical characteristics in one of the limbic areas known as the neurosecretory zone of the preoptic hypothalamic nucleus. In fact, he was able to get animals to display either heterosexual or homosexual behavior by diffusing neurosynaptic chemicals into the preoptic area. So much for the Freudian theory. This research proves that this aspect of our behavior is due entirely to how are brains are wired from birth, and has nothing to do with old notions of psychopathology.
One of the most fascinating cases I came across was a number of people who had been perfectly normal, but had recently become almost complete "vegetables" and had to be hospitalized. At least so they seemed on the surface. There was nothing wrong with them cognitively, they still had normal reasoning ability and could talk and socialize if they wanted to. They just had no interest in it. They progressively lost interest in their famlies, jobs, friends, everything, and eventually had to be hospitalized.
It was discovered that these people had developed an epileptic seizure focus in the orgasm center in the brain. If I remember right, it had the tongue-twisting name of the nucleus reticularis gigantocellularis. In any case, it was in one of the somatosensory processing areas in the thalamus, which is a structure just below the cortex but above the limbic system. Although this is technically a form of epilepsy, there are no convulsions associated with this syndrome (just as there aren't in the case of temporal-lobe epilepsy, which, since it occurs in the memory and associational area of the brain, can produce intense visions and memories, as well as emotional states).
Now it was obvious why these people weren't interested in anything else in their lives. They had orgasms that went on for several minutes, and due to the intensity of the electrical discharge, were probably 10 to 100 times as intense as a normal person's orgasms. And they kept having them. Especially the women patients said it was better than anything they could experience before. So they just sat there, waiting, yearning, hoping, for that next "seizure."
Anyway, just a few more interesting things to consider relating to our knowledge of the mind and brain. The above facts amply illustrate and further support Searle's theory that the mind is a function of the brain and that the classical mind/brain dichotomy is false.
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Title: The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind Series) by David J. Chalmers ISBN: 0195117891 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: November, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett ISBN: 0316180661 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 20 October, 1992 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Rediscovery of the Mind (Representation and Mind) by John R. Searle ISBN: 026269154X Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 08 July, 1992 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness by Roger Penrose ISBN: 0195106466 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination by Gerald M. Edelman, Giulio Tonomi, Giulio Tononi ISBN: 0465013775 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 06 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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