Searle has had a long battle against the Functionalist and "mind as computer" approaches to mind that have dominated Philosophy of Mind in the past few decades. I am sympathetic to Searle's call for "naturalism" within Philosophy of Mind because it leads towards paying greater attention to the brain. However, I also agree with the Functionalists who, knowing that there is nothing magical about brains, want to try to construct a more general theory of mind within which biological brain-based minds and robotic minds would be just two of many POSSIBLE physical instantiations of mind.

 My favorite example of the "possibilities" for instantiations of mind comes from Dug Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach. He creates a metaphor of mind as ant colony. The individual ants are stupid, but an entire ant colony has a high order of intelligence that "emerges" from the stupid activities of the individual ants. Hofstadter created a story in which an intelligent anteater has nice conversations with his friend, Aunt Hillary, an ant colony. The anteater can read Aunt Hillary's "thoughts" by watching the pattern of movements of the ants. Functionalists within the Philosophy of Mind want to find the general algorithm of mind that would apply to any particular physical instantiation of mind. Right now there is only one known human-level instantiation of mind, the minds produced by biological brains. However, Functionalists are perfectly happy with the idea of many other POSSIBLE physical forms that mind could take, such as a robotic brain (nobody takes Aunt Hillary seriously, it is just an illustrative metaphor of mind).

 I think many Cognitivists who have adopted the Functionalistic approach to mind have gotten a bit silly in their enthusiasm for the "mind as computer program" metaphor. Searle is deathly impatient with such Cognitivists and Artificial Intelligence researchers who endlessly play around with the computer metaphor and never manage to get close to producing a mechanical mind or a general theory of mind. Searle's alternative is "naturalism" by which I think he means that Functionalist and Cognitivists should pay more attention to the only existing source of mind: human brains. In this, I agree entirely with Searle. I usually agree with 95% of what Searle has to say. However, there is always the remaining 5% where Searle seems to fall off of the edge of my mental model of the world and the realities of mind. My complaints against Searle are given below, after some discussion of the relation between Searle's and Wittgenstein's approaches to mind.

 Wittgenstein died before the computer craze took over Philosophy of Mind. It is a challenge for me to try to imagine how Wittgenstein would have reacted to the dominance of Functionalism and Cognitivism that exists today. I suspect that Wittgenstein would be entirely uninterested in the childish attempts that have been made so far to make computers that can use human language. I think he would be equally uninterested in the attempts being made by biologists to understand how neuronal circuits in the brain generate human language capacity and behavior. Wittgenstein seemed locked into an analysis of language at its purest level of functional holism as made accessible to us all through our daily personal experience of language. This is an approach to language that most philosophers have ignored or warped into unrecognizable forms. Functionalists do a lot of talking about the transformation of Folk Psychology into something more scientific, but Wittgenstein's was the only approach I know of that could have evolved into a system for modernizing Folk Psychology and uniting it with more scientific (objective, materialistic) approaches to mind. It would have been interesting if Wittgenstein had been around for another 30 years and had the chance to integrate his approach into the other parts of Philosophy of Mind that flowered in the later half of this century. If nothing else, Wittgenstein might have had a chance to have dinner with Edelman.....now that is a hypothetical event for which I would dearly love to be a fly on the wall.
 
 

What does Searle offer as the key to a rediscovery of mind?

First, Searle wants to show that there is something fundamentally wrong with materialism, that materialists are just "cognitive dualists" and mistaken in their approaches to mind.

Second, Searle claims that the proper road to understanding mind is by way of what he calls "biological naturalism" which Searle seems to have invented, and mysteriously (at least Searle claims to mystified), which seems to have only one adherent, Searle himself.

Third, where would the proper appreciation of these first two claims get us? Searle’s main concern, as always, is that it would allow everyone to finally agree that Searle is correct in saying that the mind is not a computer program.

I think Searle is wrong to claim that all materialists are dualists and I think that there are excellent reasons for trying to follow a materialistic road to understanding of mind. I will try to explain a way out of Searle's blanket condemnation of materialism. However, I do not attempt to claim that materialistic approaches to mind have solved the mind/body problem. Materialistic approaches to mind are part of a broader scientific research program aimed at a materialistic understanding of all aspects of life.

I will attempt to make sense of Searle's "biological naturalism", which I believe is well intentioned and contains some useful elements, but which also seems contaminated by a newfangled type of dualism. Thus, there is the very real danger that Searle and I are incapable of communicating successfully and any dialog between us would just degenerate into us saying to each other, "You’re the dualist, not me!"

As for the third issue, Searle's antagonism against artificial intelligence research and any aspect of philosophy of mind which seems to Searle to be tainted by Strong AI, I have to confess a certain amount of sympathy. However, from my perspective that the materialistic science of mind is still in its infancy, it makes little sense at this point to offer blanket condemnations of fledgling research strategies. After 50 years of AI research, it is still an open question as to what the ultimate accomplishments of AI will be and it is still an open question as to how philosophers will ultimately judge the influence of AI upon philosophy of mind. I suspect that Searle is premature in his blanket condemnation of the influence of AI on philosophy. What is going on here? Is Searle just smarter than the rest of us, somehow able to see through to the end game and visualize the ultimate inadequacy of AI in particular and materialism in general? The alternative is that it is Searle who is wrong.

Searle’s argument against materialism is rather contorted; he seems to throw every complaint he can imagine against the wall, hoping that something will stick. Searle himself does suggest that "the crux of the matter" is the issue of how materialists view the non-physical. Searle's claim is that it is an ingrained part of the materialistic tradition to assume that anything mental is non-physical. When you combine this with the fact that materialists tend to believe that only physical things exist, Searle suggests that materialists are programmed to reject the mental. I agree with Searle that this is a poor line of reasoning for a materialist to follow. However, I think Searle confuses it with a closely related but perfectly valid research strategy: let's try to understand as much as we can about the mind without involving things like qualia and the details of subjective experiences. This type of research strategy is used all the time in science. When confronted with a tough problem, try to break the problem down into subproblems which can be more easily dealt with. The simple subproblems will fall first. Eventually we need to get around to consideration of all of the subproblems, but invariably in science, once we solve some of the simpler subproblems our perspective on what we original perceived to be the harder subproblems changes. Amazingly, some of the “hard” problems can now seem much easier, maybe they are just variations of the easier subproblems. More amazingly, some of the "hard" problems turn out to have been non-problems, they just go away. I confess that I have a real problem with philosophers like McGinn, Chalmers, and Searle who like nothing better than to first go to the "hard" problems of philosophy of mind, quickly conclude that there is no obvious solution, and then reach bizarre conclusions such as: we can never know, we need new ways of studying mind, or materialism is obviously incoherent because it cannot solve the problem of mind. I cannot escape the suspicion that such views only persist because they offer consolation to the long suffering dualists who feel that were materialism to succeed in reducing mind to brain, then all would be lost, life would be pointless.

How does all this relate to the first issue, Searle’s claim that materialists are dualists? This claim rests on Searle’s assertion that materialists cannot include mental phenomena in their theories of mind out of fear of introducing non-physical elements into their theories. This is not true. What is true, is that materialistic theories of mind are only just beginning to work their way up from the details of brain physiology to the intricacies of higher brain functions like consciousness. I only know of one materialistic theory of mind, that produced by Gerald Edelman. There are a few other theories that are less ambitious, such as Crick’s theory of visual awareness. As limited and tentative as these materialistic theories are, they demonstrate the ways by which materialists can try to explain mental phenomena in terms of physical brain processes. Conclusion: even if some materialists have avoided putting consciousness or subjectivity or intentionality or whatever key mental phenomenon you care to name into their materialistic theories of mind, this does not mean that is the end of the story. Materialists have put these "hard" problems to the side initially, and are only now beginning to confront them.

The second issue is Searle's "naturalistic biology of mind". This is Searle’s idea that subjectivity is an ontologically distinct aspect of mind, distinct from and irreducible to the physicality of brains (or circuits and programs in a robot). As a materialist, I find Searle's position on subjectivity to be little more than a novel form of Dualism. For me, the identification of ontological categories is the job of physics. Saying that subjectivity defines an ontological category that can only be accepted as an irreducible fundamental element of physics is just like saying that there is a vital force. Searle must also believe that there is a “subjective force” by which subjectivity exercises its causative powers in a way that cannot be reduced to the other (non-subjective) physical aspects of brains. If Searle were correct, his would be the most startling discovery of the century, even eclipsing the revolutionary advances in cosmology, quantum mechanics, particle physics, biology, and computer science. For what Searle proposes is nothing less than the emergence of an irreducibly fundamental aspect of physics from the material structure of brains. If such ontological emergence were possible, it would revolutionize all of science. Unfortunately for Searle, there is no compelling reason for anyone to join Searle in believing that such emergence is possible. It is far easier to simply label Searle as a believer in "emergent dualism" and get on with the job of trying to figure out how subjectivity can be reduced to physical brain processes. It is far easier to view Searle's trouble with subjectivity as a problem in epistemology, how it is a simple fact of the way brains are constructed that their contents are not equally accessible of all observers. Searle offers nothing to keep us from thus ignoring his belief that subjectivity is something ontologically special that materialism fails to deal with. Searle is clearly frustrated that this is the response of materialists to his views. I think his only hope is that he will someday examine his own assumptions as carefully as he has examined those of others. I suspect that he is capable of rationally over-coming his faith that subjectivity in not reducible to physicality. However, the debate over vitalism taught us that some people will wait until the bitter end before joining the materialists.

Finally, we come to what seems to be Searle's White Whale: the idea that the mind is a computer program. I think that most materialists view mind-as-computer-program as a useful analogy for either trying to understand biological brains or for constructing functionalistic descriptions of minds. AI researchers take mind-as-computer-program as the basis for their research program, the attempt to make intelligent artifacts. I agree with Searle that it is silly to imagine that saying the mind is a computer program can in some way be the end of philosophy of mind. Even when philosophers like Dennett claim that we can understand mind in terms of the computer analogy, all he is saying is that it is a powerful analogy that explains much. Even Dennett would not claim that it is the end of the story. I think that Functionalists like Rey have reached the point where they realize that it is not a complete story of mind to just wave your hands and say the mind is produced by computations. What remains is completion of the reductive program, showing how those elements of mind that seem computational in nature can be accounted for in terms of brain physiology. What remains for AI is all the hard work of showing just what kind of complex robotic system must be constructed in order to produce an artifact with what even Searle would admit is a mind. Searle seems to lack the patience for the long haul of reductionism and AI. He thinks he has an easy out, just "facing the fact" of subjectivity as an elemental aspect of mind. Unfortunately, his biological naturalism of the mind is only fancy, not fact.

 Go here for some comments on emergence in the context of Searle's views on consciousness.

If nothing else, this book gives us a closer look into John Searle's mind. I think I can begin to understand where his thinking diverges from mine. In the Preface, Searle fairly clearly describes what he means by these words: naturalism, reductionism, eliminativism, dualism. Searle thinks that reductionism implies eliminativism with respect to consciousness. This is wrong, but it explains why he wants to call his position naturalism rather than reductionism. Another divergence comes with Searle's use of the word "causation". As far as I am concerned, the word causation SHOULD be restricted to what Searle calls "event causation". Causation concerns sequences of "events" in time. What Searle calls "non-event causation" should be called "reductive dependence". When we talk about a forest we are willing to admit that the many components of the forest and their interactions account for the properties of the forest. We do not say that the trees cause a forest, we say that the forest can be understood in terms of its components, the trees.

Searle on Crick
Searle's dislike of the word reductionism leads him to quibble with Francis Crick's reductionistic approach in "The Astonishing Hypothesis". Just because we can understand a forest in terms of its components does not mean that we suddenly stop being aware of or wanting to talk about the forest. Searle's problem is that he is too quick to want to call minds and forests "emergent phenomena", as if that tells us something more useful than an anlysis of reductive dependence.

Another problem Searle has with Crick is the endless debate over qualia. Crick's position is that if we understood consciousness then we would be in a good position to understand qualia, so Crick gives qualia little attention. This is a common method in science, simplify matters and focus on what is most accessible to experiments. What seem like the trickier issues will suddenly turn out to be easy once we get under way. Searle states the situation more bluntly than Crick dared to: qualia and consciousness are really two names for the same problem, the main difference being that since philosophers love paradox they love to wonder about things like how it is that we will ever know if we all share exactly the same experience of REDNESS. Crick is correct to focus on the more accessible issue of visual awareness as a sensible starting place for experiemntal investigation of consciousness.

What Crick proposes in his book "The Astonishing Hypothesis" is a research program that will lead us towards an understanding of how brain function creates human conscious experience. Searle complains about the poor quality and confusing nature of Crick's explanation of consciousness. This is typical of the impatience of philosophers towards science. In particular, Crick openly admits that we are only in the first round of a science of consciousness. Science seeks correlations between observations before moving on to the details of causal mechanisms. Searle seems to think it is a major discovery that "correlations by themselves would not explain anything". It is ironic to watch a philosopher who imagines that a scientist of Crick's magnitude does not know this.

Searle has other quibbles with Crick's use of terminology such as "symbolic description". Basically, since Crick does not use the jargon of Philosophy of Mind in the way that Searle prefers, Crick is to be ridiculed as a philosophical bozo. This kind of quibble over semantics is a huge waste of time. My arguments over Searle's use of terminology (above) is another example of this problem. Scientists and philosophers have to work together, not just point out how everyone is ignorant of the other guy's use of jargon. In the end, Searle and Crick are on the same team, eager for better tools and better information about how the components of the human brain produce human consciousness.

Searle on Edelman
Searle correctly identifies Edelman's theory of consciousness as the most complete in existence. Of course, that is not saying much. Edelman's theory is an outline of some of the elements that will eventually lead us to a more detailed and coherent theory. Searle does a reasonable job of listing the key elements of Edelman's theory. In the end, Searle must complain that it just is not clear why human brain function produces human consciousness. This is exactly the same complaint that the Vitalists had about Life: "It just is not clear how a bunch of molecules bouncing around in cells makes Life!" Of course, clarity comes in the details. We still have many details of brain function to fill in. However, it is clear that Searle has more of a problem than impatience. Searle is philosophically biased against a reductionist explanation of mind. Searle accepts the mistaken idea that "a brain might have all these features [those that can produce consciousness] and still be totally unconscious". This is the same argument that the Vitalists used to use: "No matter what you tell me about molecules, that will never tell me why a particular collection of molecules is alive!" In Edelman's theory, the normal function of global maps is the production of consciousness. There is no extra magic ingredient that you add in on top of the global maps, just as there is no additional "life force" needed to vitalize the molecules of cells. Life is chemistry. Consciousness is a form of brain activity. Searle cannot accept such a reductionistic view, just as Vitalistic philosophers would not accept a molecular description of life until most of the details were filled in. This is all fine, but it just means that in order to get to the end game, we need less talk and more brain science, and that is Searle's final comment on Edelman. I wonder why Searle has so little to say about Edelman's attempt to build a bridge from neuroscience to philosophy of mind.

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