The mystery of consciousness

Anyone reading this book will agree with some of the points on each side, disagree with others, and probably form a conclusion that there is a frenzied world of public argument and abuse between different philosophers out there. A world of argument that is only thinly masked by the pretty book covers and attempts to focus on subject matter.

Anyone who has read widely enough on the subject of consciousness will undoubtedly be annoyed by the 'isms and other jargon of philosophy of consciousness. This book is less "-ism'istic" than some, but at times it does descend into picking over aspects of arguments that (arguably) are not the main point.

Enough! - I'd better go and write my own book some more now.

I think that argument, by the way, while superficially right and useful (as a corrective to those with an overly mechanistic view of mind), ultimately misses the point because Searle presents it as a denial of what he calls "Strong Artificial Intelligence," the position that holds one can build minds, with the sort of consciousness we have, on computers using programs to accomplish this. Relying on the Chinese Room argument, Searle denies "Strong AI" by noting that programs are purely formal, or syntactical as he puts it, and that syntax cannot give meaning which requires a knowing, thinking, aware subject.

The problem with his argument is that the Chinese Room thought experiment -- while demonstrating that we do expect to see a knower at work in acts of "intelligence" (and that computers as presented in his thought experiment do not and cannot know anything) -- still does not demonstrate that computers that have been configured and programmed in certain ways cannot produce, at a "higher" level, just what he wants to deny them, consciousness. That is, syntax may indeed yield semantics in the same way that Searle tells us, elsewhere, that atomic structure can yield hardness or liquidness. But Searle seems never to notice this fundamental flaw in his case.

Searle remains fixated on his idea that consciousness is somehow not explainable via syntactical operations, as seen in computers, and this position keeps cropping up in criticisms of the various writers under review in this book. He's particularly hard on Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained), whom he takes to task for suggesting we are all zombie-like and so, says Searle, seems to be denying the qualitative nature of consciousness which the Chinese Room argument demonstrates. Of course, one can read Dennett's claim as being somewhat polemical since it is hard to take Dennett as saying there is no consciousness in the sense that neither he nor the rest of us have it. Dennett's point seems, rather, to be that consciousness is explainable in terms of non-conscious building blocks and that the sense of being a conscious entity that we get is only that, a sense of this.

In fact, Dennett wants to tell us there is no entity per se, only various brain functionalities which combine in certain ways to build the subjectness that we experience as consciousness. But Searle, taking Dennett literally, accuses him of actually arguing that we are all zombies, i.e., unconcious except that we happen to think we're conscious! Such a reading is, of course, a contradiction in terms as Searle suggests. But this does not seem to be a fair interpretation of Dennett's claims.

Searle's Chinese Room argument is right insofar as it shows that the idea of "intelligence" (what we mean by intelligence in creatures like ourselves) requires a subjective knower. But it is wrong insofar as Searle wants to say that it thereby demonstrates why a claim like the one Dennett makes, that consciousness can be built up on a non-organic machine platform (e.g., computers and their programs), is, itself, wrong. In fact, Dennett's claim looks better and better against the weaknesses of the Chinese Room argument when this argument is applied as an attack against "Strong AI" as Searle uses it.

Searle also takes on David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory) and attacks him for suggesting that consciousness is something that is, in principle, logically divorced from the physicality of the world. As it happens, Chalmers has offered a very useful analysis of the uses we make of mental terms in many cases, showing how we often have two things in mind: a reference to the operational aspects and a reference to the phenomenality that often accompanies the operational aspects, i.e., our experience of having experiences, our subjectness. That we often mean both or one or the other in different contexts seems, in fact, to be quite true. And Chalmers also seems to be right in noting that we often have trouble distinguishing what exactly we are referring to in many actual cases and that the referral function tends to slip and slide over this somewhat icy sheet.

However, Searle rightly suggests that while this may be true of our usages, it doesn't mean that mind and body are two parallel realms as Chalmers seems to be proposing. For Searle this is a matter of how we talk about the phenomena of our experience, i.e., that minds are the functions of brains just as digestion is the function of stomachs, pumping blood is the function of hearts, etc. But Searle thinks Chalmers falls into property dualism while suggesting, simultaneously, that consciousness is irreducible. Searle's position is that it is, indeed, irreducible in terms of levels of speech, but scientifically, he wants to say that we can certainly reduce it to a biological function of brains which, as yet, is beyond our understanding but not, perhaps, forever.

Searle thinks that Chalmers holds a position which could, in principle, suppose that consciousness exists throughout the universe at every level, inanimate as well as animate. Though Chalmers' rebuttal to this reading is included in the book, Searle does not accept the rebuttal as written and insists the conclusion remains implied in Chalmers' arguments.

Searle addresses other writers here as well, including Edelman's work on massively redundant brain processing which he finds quite promising, etc. Because of the limitation of this amazon review format, I can't go much further. But suffice it to say, this is a good book and a useful introduction to the ideas of these thinkers. Searle is a good expositor and has some useful points to make, though I think, in the end, that he has got some things quite wrong, particularly his claim that his Chinese Room argument puts paid to the notion of "Strong AI" which, he tells us, holds that minds can be built out of computers and their programs. His failure to see the weakness in this core claim of his in the end undermines the strength of his criticisms of the other writers presented here.
SWM

In this book, Searle discusses and critiques the work of a number of theorists and makes numerous observations related to these points, and I thought I'd add a few more. So I'll just make a few observations about the neuroscience for the road, since that's my specialty, including some interesting work related to the clinical side, since some of it is quite fascinating (especially the "orgasmotronic people" I discuss at the end). :-)

The first area I'd like to discuss relates to the area of emotions and specifically mood disorders, which has focused on the neurochemical and serotonin and dopaminergic issues, especially since these chemicals have a profound influence on the limbic system areas and the areas they connect with, such as the temporal, frontal, and prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is an older area of the mammalian brain that has profound effects on emotional behavior and many aspects of personality. It is well established that chemical imbalances and/or damage, such as through trauma and stroke and so on, can cause various syndromes, ranging from mood and emotional disorders to cognitive deficiencies. We still have a lot to learn about this, but the basic chemical pathways have been worked out. For example, deficits in long-term motivation (which many people have) have been found to be associated with the nerve pathways connecting the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system.

Another avenue of research that looks promising relates to schizophrenia, which is that what we call "consciousness" actually results from the integration of separate and diverse brain areas acting in concert, and that when this integration becomes impaired, there are problems. Of course, it remains to be seen if can be treated some way, but again, our understanding of the possible mechanism is continuing to progress.

Another example of how our emotional life depends on the brain is the finding that 70% of death-row inmates have been found to have abnormal EEGs and brain waves emanating from the amygdala, another important structure in the limbic system. The amygdala is involved in aggressive and even homicidal behavior. In one famous case, a formerly quiet, unassuming man developed an amygdalar tumor and shot 17 people and wounded 30 others before he was stopped. There are now drugs that treat abnormal electrical activity in the brain, and the hope is that someday they may even be able to detect and prevent situations like this.

For another fascinating example, take homosexuality, which many people still think is a form of psychopathology. Freud said it was because the boy didn't have a strong father figure, and so doesn't know better. For years homosexuals were treated with psychoanalysis with no effect. Then about 20 years ago, a scientist at Caltech made the amazing discovery that heterosexuals and homosexuals had different neurochemical and anatomical characteristics in one of the limbic areas known as the neurosecretory zone of the preoptic hypothalamic nucleus. In fact, he was able to get animals to display either heterosexual or homosexual behavior by diffusing neurosynaptic chemicals into the preoptic area. So much for the Freudian theory. This research proves that this aspect of our behavior is due entirely to how are brains are wired from birth, and has nothing to do with old notions of psychopathology.

One of the most fascinating cases I came across was a number of people who had been perfectly normal, but had recently become almost complete "vegetables" and had to be hospitalized. At least so they seemed on the surface. There was nothing wrong with them cognitively, they still had normal reasoning ability and could talk and socialize if they wanted to. They just had no interest in it. They progressively lost interest in their famlies, jobs, friends, everything, and eventually had to be hospitalized.

It was discovered that these people had developed an epileptic seizure focus in the orgasm center in the brain. If I remember right, it had the tongue-twisting name of the nucleus reticularis gigantocellularis. In any case, it was in one of the somatosensory processing areas in the thalamus, which is a structure just below the cortex but above the limbic system. Although this is technically a form of epilepsy, there are no convulsions associated with this syndrome (just as there aren't in the case of temporal-lobe epilepsy, which, since it occurs in the memory and associational area of the brain, can produce intense visions and memories, as well as emotional states).

Now it was obvious why these people weren't interested in anything else in their lives. They had orgasms that went on for several minutes, and due to the intensity of the electrical discharge, were probably 10 to 100 times as intense as a normal person's orgasms. And they kept having them. Especially the women patients said it was better than anything they could experience before. So they just sat there, waiting, yearning, hoping, for that next "seizure."

Anyway, just a few more interesting things to consider relating to our knowledge of the mind and brain. The above facts amply illustrate and further support Searle's theory that the mind is a function of the brain and that the classical mind/brain dichotomy is false.

I encourage you to read David Chalmers' response to Searle's response to Chalmers response to Searle's review of his book.. it's on the web: Above all... a great book by a great philosopher.

All in all, a small, but very clear and important critical book.

Searle's own stance is one of 'biological naturalism'. This view is best explicated in Searle's _The Rediscovery of the Mind_. It, roughly speaking, is a view that: 1) consciousness is a real, intrinsically first-person phenomena; 2) consciousness is brain-based - that is, it is physically based; and, 3) by virtue of #1 mind is not a reducible phenomena (since any third-person reduction destroys the essential 1st-person characteristic that makes consciousness what it is). Scientific study of the mind is not thereby discounted - such study need only take these points into account.

Regarding Edelman and Crick, Searle points out that despite that whatever neurological evidence and elaborations they may have come up with (in terms of neurological theories), neither presents a theory of consciousness per se. Whatever the 40Hz theory says, it can only claim a correlative relation, not a causitive relation, to consciousness at this point in its development.
[For my money, _I of the Vortex_ by Rodolfo Llinas is more interesting than Edelman or Crick, and Llinas is somewhat less hyperbolic about his claims.]

Penrose is just tragically out to lunch, poor guy. And, if anything, Searle is overly generous in his treatment of Penrose's Godelian / computational arguments. The role of algorithmic simulation and the Incompleteness Theorems of Godel are grossly misused by Penrose, and Searle lets most of it slide, although he acknowledges that many criticisms along "technical" lines have been posed against Penrose.
[A far more cogent understanding of the mind-brain problem in relation to Godel, simulation, and Church-Turing thesis, is in Robert Rosen's daunting _Essays on Life Itself_].

It is true that one could conceivably agree with Dennett that there is no consciousness and our sense of self-awareness is just illusion. But I think that such a view is neither common-sensically nor neurologically supported, or even suggested, for that matter. And Searle rightly flushes Dennett out from under the latter's evasive handwaving. I agree with Searle that Dennett's view is "pathological". There is a "lively" back-and-forth between the two. :)

Chalmers' supervenience view is next. And I think Searle rightly highlights the errors of this view. The reviewer who says that Searle is the one begging the question by disallowing Chalmer's zombie thought experiment (imagine a world with a physically identical zombie to a person in this world but with no consciousness) is mistaken, in my opinion. Since consciousness is not, a priori, fractionable from a person without causing some physical change in so doing, the onus is on Chalmers to show that such a fractionation is even theoretically possible in =this= world, =before= he poses a thought experiment where such a possible other world is presupposed. Otherwise, his thought experiment is just wishful thinking about some other fantasy world. To allow Chalmers to make such a claim without evidence is to let Chalmers presume his own conclusion.

Finally. the reviewer who commented that Searle implies that biological naturalism says consciousness is only a property of "biological matter", and another reviewer who similarly comments on the "privileged" status of only biological organisms as possibly conscious, both slightly miss Searle's point. Searle says that biological systems are =causally sufficient= to have the property of consciousness: only brains produce consciousness because those are precisely the only systems we know of that have consciousness. He in fact says, "Perhaps it is a feature we could duplicate in silicon or vacuum tubes. At present, we just do not know." (p.203) So, "biological matter" is not somehow privileged per se, or vitalistic in any sense.

Part of the problem is that Searle's own view is presented only in a very compact, piecemeal form in this book. The interested reader will find that reading _The Rediscovery of the Mind_ will make Searle's own theory much clearer, and as a result will also make clearer Searle's objections to the other theories presented in this book of reviews.