The Conscious Mind

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John Searle: Respecting the Facts of Consciousness

John Searle

Part One: Why all the most influential theories in the philosophy of mind are false. A brief history of error, from dualism, to behaviorism, to physicalism. Listen | Read Transcript

Part Two: The siren song of computer functionalism, and the case of the Chinese Room. Listen | Read Transcript

Part Three: Searle’s theory of “biological naturalism.” Also, what it’s like to be a bat, or possibly a thermostat, and David Chalmers’ epiphenomenalism. Listen | Read Transcript

Part Four: The problem of free will, and the nature of the self.
Listen | Read Transcript

Happily, we no longer commonly execute philosophers for irreverence, or we might miss the singular pleasure of a curmudgeonly John Searle discoursing on the philosophy of mind. Barely two pages into his recent book, Mind: A Brief Introduction, the long-time U.C. Berkeley philosopher declares tartly that “the philosophy of mind is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects, in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false.” The problem, as Searle sees it, is a set of stubbornly persistent historical categories for describing mental phenomena, from dualism to the many contemporary flavors of materialism. His prescription: if your categories don’t fit the facts, you need to change your categories.

In conversation, Searle moves briskly through this history of error, from Cartesian dualism (it “makes it impossible to give a coherent account of the world”), to behaviorism and physicalism (“grossly implausible for any normal human being”), to computer functionalism, or “strong artificial intelligence,” the view that the brain is a computer and the mind is the software, which Searle calls “profoundly mistaken.” Minds have semantics—thoughts, after all, are about something—computers have only syntax, therefore the mind is something more than a computer, a position he expounds in his well-known argument, the Chinese Room.

To understand consciousness, says Searle, we need to start with the facts: consciousness is a biological phenomenon, caused by the brain, with the essential property of subjectivity. It is a part of the natural world that just happens to have an “irreducibly first person ontology,” a view he calls “biological naturalism.” Conscious states—beliefs and desires and hopes and fears—are the causes of our voluntary behavior. Such a metabolically expensive trait as consciousness could never have evolved, Searle observes, if it had no effect on behavior. This leaves us, he admits, with the unsolved problem of free will. And careful students of Searle’s concepts may puzzle over a thing that is both “caused” by the brain and “irreducible” to it.

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