Return to sanity

John R. Searle's book "The Mystery of Consciousness" is a curious book. On the one hand, the theory of consciousness it presents seems breathtakingly trivial. On the other hand, it's equally breathtakingly controversial! One wonders why? Personally, I used to believe in a "theory" pretty much like the one presented in the book most of my life. Today, I'm more sympathetic to dualism and panpsychism, two of the notions criticized in this book. Perhaps naively, I assumed that something like Searle's position (which he calls biological naturalism) was the standard materialist position, save a few fringe elements, at least after the death of the last behaviourist, which I assumed took place long before I was born.

But no...

Searle even says that his views on the problem of consciousness (biological naturalism, remember?) elicits more hysterical protests from strict materialists who believe the brain is a computer program, than it does from religious groups, who presumably aren't naturalists at all!

So what is Searle's position? Of course, it's not *really* trivial (that was just my gut feeling) and his arguments are often subtle, but the main ideas are the following. Consciousness is a biological process, much like digestion and photosynthesis. It's caused by the brain. However, it's not identical to material brain states. The relationship between brain states and mental states is a causal relation between two different phenomena. It's not a relation of identity. Hence, consciousness cannot be reduced to brain states, although it emerges from them. The whole is larger than the sum of its parts. We don't yet know how the brain causes consciousness, but we do know that it does.

Searle believes that the traditional split between dualists and monists, or between dualists and materialists, doesn't help us solve the issue of consciousness. On the one hand, we live in *one* world, not in two, three or twenty-seven worlds. Hence, dualism is erroneous. On the other hand many phenomena in our world aren't "material" in the strict sense of the term: political opinions, the value of money, aesthetics, etc. Some have objective properties. Others are subjective states. That consciousness is both non-material, subjective and yet part of our world, isn't therefore as strange as it may seem at first glance. (Actually, Searle sarcastically writes that undergraduates always grasp this point, graduate students only with difficulty, and philosophers never! He may be on to something there.) By standard definitions, Searle is a materialist, since he believes that material processes in the brain cause consciousness, but since most other materialists have a more reductionist position, I can understand why he wants to avoid the traditional terms. On Wikipedia, Searle is called "emergent materialist", but his own preferred term is "biological naturalism".

In this book, Searle criticizes the positions of Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. (He also reviews the ideas of Crick, Edelman and Rosenfield, but this is more of a sideshow). The material in the book is based on book reviews Searle penned for the New Tork Times Review of Books.

So who are Searle's opponents? Penrose is a self-declared Platonist who believes that the physical, the mental and the mathematical are three different worlds or dimensions. Thus, he could be described as an ontological dualist or pluralist. Dennett is a reductionist materialist, who denies that there are any conscious states at all (!). His views are rooted in behaviourism and positivism. Chalmers' ideas are the most curious of all: a combination of materialism, dualism and panpsychism. However, they have been discussed more or less seriously at scientific and philosophical conferences. "The Mystery of Consciousness" contains extensive reviews of books by these authors, plus an exchange of views (or insults) with Dennett and Chalmers. One problem is that the original essays Dennett and Chalmers are responding to have been expanded upon by Searle in the book, while the correspondence stands as it was originally written. At least, the work states *Searle's* position clear enough.

One serious criticism could be levelled at Searle's biological naturalism, perhaps by dualists. It could be argued that biological naturalism isn't really an *explanation* of the mystery of consciousness, but simply an empirical *description* of the problem that needs to be solved. Nobody denies that brain states and mental states are correlated. Nor does anybody deny that the mental and the material at least *seem* different. But so what? That still doesn't really explain the hard problem of consciousness. Indeed, Searle himself admits that we don't yet know how brains cause conscious states. However, he obviously believes that our best science has showed that brains causes consciousness, and a certain frustration shines through when he debates Chalmers, whose ideas he clearly regards as absurd. But then, he is pretty frustrated with Dennett as well, since ideas which deny consciousness are obviously self-refuting.

"The Mystery of Consciousness" isn't an easy read. True, it's simpler than the more scholarly tomes on the mind-body problem. However, the general reader might nevertheless find some of the chapters difficult to follow. I think the book is best suited for advanced students of philosophy or science. In many ways, John R. Searle's book acts like a reality check. It may not be "trivial" in the everyday sense, but it sure feels like a return to sanity. At least when it critiques reductionist materialism...