marchartists

THE HANDSTAND

FEBRUARY2007

"In Philosophy the name of the game is disagreement "- John Searle

By Harvey Blume | February 4, 2007

"IN PHILOSOPHY," JOHN SEARLE told me, "the name of the game is disagreement." Searle, who has taught philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1959, shows no inclination to duck dispute. In The New York Review of Books, for example, where he functions as a sort of philosopher in residence, you can regularly find him at fierce loggerheads with a variety of contemporary thinkers -- including Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Ray Kurzweil, and Noam Chomsky -- over questions of mind, consciousness, and language.

Some of Searle's most serious intellectual brawls are over the question of whether the mind can be construed as a computer. He has argued strenuously that we need to resist the temptation to think of mental processes in terms of computation. "Defined as it is," he said, "by the manipulation of zeroes and ones," the computer model can tell us nothing about how our brains produce mind, consciousness, and a sense of self.

Searle's forte in these battles and in his 16 books, including his new "Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power" (Columbia), is his determination to see how science reformulates traditional questions of philosophy. In some cases -- but "unfortunately," he said, "not many" -- science succeeds in putting a vexed question to rest: The discovery of the double helix, for example, and other advances in microbiology, have made it unnecessary, he believes, to call on an "élan vital," or some other mystical force, to explain how life works.

But Searle recognizes that science can also deepen mystery, as it has with regard to free will. The more we know about a universe consisting, he writes, "entirely of mindless, meaningless...fields of force," the harder it is to justify the conception we have of "ourselves as conscious, mindful, free" -- unshakable as that self-conception might be. Searle does not, however, conclude that free will is an illusion. He maintains, instead, that at least for now, we are stuck with a paradox.

I reached John Searle by phone at his office in Berkeley.

IDEAS: You think that questions about the mind are at the core of philosophy today, don't you?

SEARLE: Right. And that's a big change. If you go back to the 17th century, and Descartes, skepticism -- the question of how it is possible to have knowledge -- was a live issue for philosophy. That put epistemology -- the theory of knowledge -- at the heart of philosophy. How can we know? Shouldn't we seek a foundation for knowledge that overcomes skeptical doubts about it? As recently as a hundred years ago, the central question was still about knowledge. But now, the center of philosophical debate is philosophy of mind.

IDEAS: Why the change?

SEARLE: We know too much. The sheer volume of knowledge has become overwhelming. We take basic findings from physics and chemistry about the universe for granted. Knowing much more about the real world than our ancestors did, we can't take skepticism seriously in the old way. It also means that philosophy has to proceed on the basis of all that we know.

The universe consists of matter, and systems defined by causal relations. We know that. So we go on to ask: To what extent can we render our self-conception consistent with this knowledge? How can there be consciousness, free will, rationality, language, political organization, ethics, aesthetics, personal identity, moral responsibility? These are questions for the philosophy of mind.

IDEAS: You call yourself a biological naturalist, and argue that there is a physical underpinning to consciousness.

SEARLE: The question of how it is possible for consciousness to exist in a world made entirely of physical particles is being transformed into a scientific question, much like any other. It's like the question that bothered our great-grandparents, namely how could inert matter be alive, how could life exist, in what is, after all, a bunch of chemicals. Now we have a much richer conception of biochemistry. We don't know all the details, but nobody can feel passionately today that you can't give a biochemical account of life.

How does the brain produce weird states -- consciousness, subjectivity, qualitativeness? That will receive a neurobiological solution. There's a lot of work on it now.

IDEAS: You've argued that no matter what science says, we're inclined to think of ourselves as free.

SEARLE: It isn't just that we're inclined. It's worse than that. You cannot escape the presupposition of free will. When you and I talk, or we order in a restaurant, or vote, we can only do these things on the supposition that we have a choice. We can't think away our own freedom.

IDEAS: Why do so many people find it appealing to think of the mind as a kind of computer?

SEARLE: People have always tried to find a mechanical analogy for the brain. I've come across a passage saying the brain is a telegraph system. Before that people said the brain was a Jacquard loom. In my childhood, people used to say the brain was a telephone system. It was inevitable they'd say the brain is a digital computer.

IDEAS: But you yourself maintain that the brain is a machine.

SEARLE: The brain is a machine, which by means of energy transfers causes and sustains consciousness.

Consciousness consists of private, subjective, qualitative states of feeling and awareness, starting when you wake from a dreamless sleep and continuing until you go back to sleep.

We don't yet know how the brain causes that. Maybe there's no reason why you couldn't produce consciousness in nonbiological phenomena.

IDEAS: Do you really think we can build a machine that has a full grasp of natural language, and has authentic consciousness?

SEARLE: That's a factual question, not a question you can answer by philosophical analysis. My point is that the ability to manipulate symbols, which is what today's computers do, is not the same as the ability to have consciousness.

IDEAS: Wait. You're saying machines can have consciousness. And our brains are machines that have consciousness. Well, a computer is a machine. Why can't it have consciousness?

SEARLE: Sure, the computer you buy in a store is a machine. But computation is not a machine process. Computation is not defined by energy transfer.

People think I'm saying the computer is too much of a machine to be capable of consciousness. That's exactly wrong. I'm saying it's not enough of a machine.

IDEAS: That's tricky.

SEARLE: Actually, it's ludicrously simple. Minds are defined by the possession of mental phenomena -- consciousness, intentionality. Computer operations are defined syntactically, in terms of formal symbol manipulation. And that's neither sufficient by itself for, nor constitutive of, consciousness.

The funny thing is that in all these years nobody's got that point.

IDEAS: Give me an example of the kind of question science doesn't help philosophy answer.

SEARLE: I'll give half a dozen examples. There are the questions that bothered the Greeks: What is the nature of a just society? What is the most satisfying form of life. What are the forms of love? There are questions about ethics and aesthetics. These may have a scientific base, but they're not scientific questions.

IDEAS: Given that many contemporary philosophers agree about the importance of science, why is disagreement among them often so vehement?

SEARLE: I don't worry too much about the fact that philosophers disagree.

Harvey Blume is a writer based in Cambridge. His interviews appear regularly in ideas.
E-mail hblume at world.std.com.

In July 2002 I wrote a Short Story that was on The Handstand that month. It seems that I was not inmaging possibilities. On Friday the 9th of February 2007 The Guardian published a front page article "The Brain Scan that Can Read People's Intentions."

The brain scans began the next day. One day I was calm and administrating as a controlling force a large region of agricultural development, and the next day a mere guinea pig in a research laboratory.

I had not even volunteered to take part in such action.

I had not even been consulted.

My office, a room I had used for fifteen years with it's well-used manifestations of maps, pin-ups, jokes notated and the large filing cabinets, had been transformed.

I afterwards realised that even the foyer, where I had first been taken by surprise, looked like a hospital consulting room. On my newly painted office walls there was now a magnificent array of medical profiles of the human brain and the skull. However, the medical personnel assembled in the room behaved more like the clerks and judiciary of a forensic trial.

Immediately, on entry, two stepped forward to usher me with a soft grasp on my elbows to a seat, and without uttering a word lowered over the top of my cranium a machine from which electric leads were drawn like magnets to the forehead and different areas of my brain pan. Now that we all adapted to the latest fashion of a well shaven skull for both men and women these leads, unimpeded, in their equally soft descent and adherence to skin surfaces was like the ascent, from a pool of water to the naked limb, of a host of leeches.

My emotions began an assault on my nerves, and ideas rushed in a torrent through my mind like the phenomena of a dream. I looked at the calm faces surrounding me with startled and no doubt beseeching glances. Those faces were like the impartial, even indifferent doubles of my own face I had seen over the years reflected in the mirrors of the office washroom.

The office door swung open repeatedly as others were brought in - by their subordinates it appeared - and guided to other seating and capsules of the same apparatus. I realised that not only men and women I worked with in recent times, government officials and civil servants, but something extraordinary, our President and his Minister of Finance were among them. Infact the President was placed in a seat directly opposite mine, and I began to observe that all of us were assembled in a great ellipse, and seated exactly in place as though in the Cabinet Offices, where we used to assemble round the magnificent mahogany table there.

Five hours later, with sweat pouring from our brows, glinting in its small patterned streams as it followed the different insignia of creases and swellings on individual features, we were each handed a sheaf of papers. Studying mine I found that I had single sheets each with coloured prints of photographs of the brain activity of each one of us.evidently supplied by the apparatus I wore, I could read not only the names of my fellow government officials but also the Cabinet and President at the head of individual reports. Preceding study of the coloured orifices, if one had the ability as yet denied me, were copies of a dialogue in which each of us had taken part during the past hours.The colour scans varied as one followed down the pages the responses to the dialogue.At the head of individual reports there was not only the brain scan but a photograph of each individual face, taken at the moment we first became seated and became aware of the electric contacts. These photos were obviously of intrinsic value to our President - I could see, checking each page briefly, he looked up at different individuals as if to identify them. Yes, I could see why.... these portraits revealed the astonishing phenomena of fear, naked fear trapped on the features. Indeed the face of the Minister of Defence appeared to have swollen to twice the familiar size, the eyes diminished to slits, and was this fury, ranged in the muscles round his mouth, as if he had been attempting to shout out ?

My own photo: I looked around apprehensively, wondering how many had noticed it yet... a man I had never seen, as it were, looked out at me. Indeed, at first I had checked the name at the page heading. Yes, this is my photograph, the striking pallor of my normally robust features seemed to have a green tinge as though I was dead - only my eyes belied this as the muscles, not contracted as if in rage, but released and abandoned as though fleeing the crime of sight, had left the orbs of my eyes fully extended, the pupils seemed to transmit a dull ochre flash that almost gave the appearance of cataracts. I could see damp hairs above my ears as though a sweat had already broken out, my nostrils were totally deflated as those of people who grovel before an interogator. Fear. Fear. Fear - yes, registering its mysterious qualities throughout all these well-known faces. What a revelation !

The President, from whom the apparatus had been elevated and withdrawn, like an intricate hair dryer, was the first to stand up. Indeed he seemed to almost lose his balance. He shifted his arms uneasily as if to confirm that none had grasped them again. He tossed his head with a kind of youthful arrogance, put his hands in his trouser pockets and began to walk around this great gathering. He did not look at his Ministers, his Councillors or his Regional Officials, for his gaze was to the ground before him and he scuffed aside, with impatience,.any electric lead in his path. Finally, raising his head, he approached one of the medical personnel - he smiled, almost pleasantly, but in a voice much altered from his usual smooth tones, he harshly demanded to know why his orders had not been followed to the letter. How was it that these "medical mercenaries"..... Yes, that is how he addressed them, as if an Army Officer. How had they "the effrontery to embroil him in this research - "research which, at best, had no roads and only many directions."