These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
Non-Event Causation The US philosopher John
Searle makes a two-fold claim:
consciousness cannot be reduced to the neurological processes that cause it,
but is indeed a biological feature of the brain. Brains cause minds, in his
opinion, although we will not find feelings and emotions in the material
processes of the brain, because feelings and emotions are higher-order features
of the brain. Searle attacks the Cartesian tradition from the foundations: both dualism
and materialism make no sense. The
division of the world into matter and mind is arbitrary and counterproductive.
In his view, we simply have to face the facts: consciousness is caused by brain
processes, but consciousness cannot be reduced to those brain processes because
it is a "first person" phenomenon and the brain processes are
"third person" phenomena. To Searle, the mind-body problem has never
existed: Descartes invented a vocabulary, a terminology, not a real problem. In a similar vein to the
school of "supervenience", Searle compares the mind-body problem
to explaining how electricity arises from electrons or liquidity from
molecules. Searle is content with stating that
consciousness is a (causally) "emergent" property of systems, just
like electricity and liquidity. Searle realizes that liquidity can be predicted
from the properties of elementary particles, whereas consciousness cannot be
predicted from the properties of neurons. Searle realizes that Physics can
explain how the features of electricity correspond to the features of
electrons, whereas we can't explain (yet) how the features of consciousness
arise from the features of neurons. Physicists can explain why (and exactly
under which conditions) a set of molecules can achieve the phase transition to
liquidity, whereas neurologists can’t explain when exactly non-conscious matter
becomes conscious. Searle thinks that it is not just a limit of today's
neurophysiology (likely to change with time), but that this will always be the case,
that it is impossible to provide a material explanation of the features of
consciousness. Searle thus admits a crucial difference between consciousness
and electricity or liquidity or digestion: consciousness is special in that it
cannot be explained. Searle has nothing to offer other than
declare that mental life exists and that it emerges from neurons, which is
equivalent to saying that liquidity exists and that it emerges from liquids. Searle thinks that computers have no
minds because they are not brains, but he never proves the underlying
assumption: that they are not brains. In Searle's jargon, "brain" is
simply the "thing" that enables the mind. His entire theory can
therefore be viewed as a mere tautology: the mind is due to the thing that
causes it. What that thing is remains a mystery. Ultimately, Searle merely
states that the mind exists. If one has not defined what a brain is, it is hard
to claim that something is not a brain. Searle basically resurrects Thomas
Nagel's argument that consciousness cannot be explained. Thus, consciousness
is not an emergent process like liquidity, because liquidity, like all emergent
properties, is reducible to the physical process that creates it. Emergent
properties are normally predictable by science: we know when (and why and how)
a substance is a liquid and not a solid or a gas. If consciousness is indeed an
emergent property, why should it be the only one that we cannot predict and
explain? Searle is not baffled by the emergence
of conscious feelings from unconscious neurological processes of the brain. He
finds it perfectly understandable. And therefore he downplays and ridicules all
theories that tried to solve this paradox. But it is like somebody not being
puzzled by the fact that the sun rises and sets every day, and contenting
himself with the idea that it must be a feature of the Earth. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Consciousness: the Factory of Illusions" | Back to the index of all chapters |