Mind: A Brief Introduction (Fundamentals of Philosophy)

Rating:
Summary: Clear and incisive
Review: One of my favorite philosophical sayings is from Berkeley: "The philosophers kick up the dust and then complain they cannot see." John Searle is not this kind of philosopher. Rather, he draws on science and common sense to render ostensibly complex issues simple. The central issue of the book is the mind-body problem. He rejects dualism, materialism, epiphenomenological and functionalist approaches, among others. Rather, he argues that the mind is part of nature, a product of biological evolution, and hence part of the physical world. The mind, he says, is simply the operation of the brain from an organizational point higher than the neuron and synapse, the same as we might say that a computer is the operation of electronic devices, viewed at a level higher than the bit and the byte.

How very simple! Why is this pellucid view more acceptable today than a century or a millennium ago? The answer is that modern science has made Searle's answer credible. First, we now can chart the development of mind in animals, and we can be quite certain that many vertebrates are conscious beings. Therefore consciousness and mind are products of biological evolution. Second, modern science is quite at home with the stunning inscrutability of the natural world. Einstein, a Twentieth century scientist with a Nineteenth century aesthetic and morality, never accepted quantum mechanics, considering it just too, too weird. Complexity theory, revealed mathematically and through the power of the computer, allows us to understand the concept of emergence, in which a higher level of complexity supports the emergence of properties that cannot be predicted or analyzed completely from component parts.

It used to be thought that science is reductivist, but now we know that sciences is a dynamic tension between reducing wholes to their parts, and recognizing that at critical points, the whole is a complex, nonlinear, dynamical system that transcends it parts.

If you understand how profoundly weird the laws of nature are, and if you appreciate how stunningly beautiful and unexpected are the products of evolution, then you will have no trouble accepting Searle's thesis. The human mind is an entity of completely, utterly, overarchingly inscrutable functioning. But, for all that, there is no reason to cast mind out of the realm of the physical, into some other mysterious never-never land. This is Searle's message.

All of Searle's positions flow from the above insight. For instance, he resolves the issue of free will vs. determinism by asserting that since mind is part of the physical world, and since physical entities can cause physical events to occur (Searle rejects Humean skepticism concerning causation), then psychological causes are possible, and hence free will is possible, at least at our current level of understanding of mental events.

Searle replaces philosophical questions with scientific questions. If mind is part of physical reality, and if free will is possible, then there must be something radically missing from physics and chemistry, which cannot explain mind. But, of course, physics and chemistry cannot explain life, either in the deepest, most mysterious sense of ontological being, or in the most mundane sense of biological theory. It does not help to know the quantum state of a frog. Similarly, the fact that physics cannot explain consciousness in no way means that mind is something other than part of nature.

The last sentence of the book says it all. "There is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it."


Rating:
Summary: Freewill pseudoscience
Review: Poor John Searle. He'll cling to freewill mysticism no matter how much empirical evidence renders the concept nonsensical. He goes to great lengths to describe the evolutionary and biophysical aspects of brain functions but then throws it all out the window by invoking some vague notion of emergence as if it can somehow displace large-scale neurological activity. So how does an interconnected system of neurons generate freewill and hence destiny-controllability? Searle has no idea. He basically just says it pops out of nowhere. Neurons require activation, at what point do they start magically activating themselves spontaneously to generate freewill? The answer is they don't and the sum body of neurological research bears this out. Herein lies the critical issue. Without freewill humans become nothing more than highest-order primates and the concept of "morality" and "moral choice" are totally negated. "Choices" now become neurological reactions. Human beings become no more responsible for their behavior than any other biological organism. The moral concept of "individual responsibility" is displaced by the causality of complex genetic and environmental variables which determine the patterns of human social behavior. Freewill-lovers like Searle are deeply afraid of these implications. Searle is disturbed by the notion that he can no longer hold others morally accountable for their unwanted behaviors. Conservative economists can no longer blame the poor for being poor because they aren't using their freewill to become economically productive. And of course, the religious community becomes apoplectic at the thought of not being able to morally condemn the heathens. Searle's pontifications under the guise of intellectualism are nothing more than an attempt to cover up his fear of his own total lack of destiny-controllability. Even the word "free" itself is an absurdity. There is nothing in the known world that conforms to the concept of being "free". All known phenomena have causal relations to other events and just because an abstruse phenomena lacks a detailed explanation does not mean it has become "free" from causal relationships. There is no freewill, no free market and no free lunch, neoclassical economic theory notwithstanding. Searle is afraid that without the concept of freewill society will degenerate into some sort of anarchic hell (just ask him). Searle along with the other philosophical preists of freewill are on the verge of extinction. It is only a matter of time before developments in neuroscience render the concept of freewill in league with the concept of a flat earth, probably within the next 50 years.
Get used to it John you have no choice, literally.


Rating:
Summary: Interesting and Controversial
Review: This is a relatively short book by Searle devoted to the philosophy of mind. This book is something of a hybrid. It is intended as a short introduction to the major themes in the philosophy of mind and does contain an introductory material on this topic. It is, however, largely a presentation of Searle's thinking on this topic. Readers familiar with Searle's work will find repetition of ideas he has presented previously, notably his work on consciousness, the Mind-Body problem, and intentionality. These ideas, however, are presented on a background of other approaches to these problems. The core of the book is an explication of the Mind-Body problem and Searle's distinctive approach to this problem. Briefly, Searle claims to have 'solved' this problem, though like many clever solutions to difficult problems, the answer is a less a solution per se than a redefinition that makes the whole situation more tractable to analysis. Searle's central point is that the first person nature of consciousness is not reducible to material events but is part of the natural world in a causal sense. He finds the mind/body dichotomy to be false. As is true of all his work, this book is written clearly, is without a lot of technical language (though readers need to know the meanings of epistemic and ontologic), and he defends his position vigorously. Searle goes on to examine a number of other issues in the philosophy of mind, including intentionality, free will, the nature of self, and perception. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that Searle highlights certain issues, like the question of free will and the nature of the self, as poorly understood and as targets for future research.
In terms of explicating and defending Searle's point of view, this is an excellent book. It is less good on the historic background and alternative approaches to these questions. I suspect Searle's critics will find his discussion of alternatives unsatisfactory, and I suspect some of these complaints will be justified. In my amateur opinion, for example, I think Searle is not fair in his discussions of Hume's treatment of induction and perceptions. In a book that is supposed to be an introduction for a broad reading public, inadequate presentation of other prespectives is a drawback. There is some bibliography but it is not extensive or annotated. A better guide to further reading would have been worthwhile.