Searle's weird theory of consciousness

[gib]

@gib

I’m listening to a lecture series on the philosophy of [mind] by John Searle from Berkeley University (I seriously recommend them–Searle is incredibly entertaining and funny–anyone who finds philosophy dry won’t after listening to his free iTunes-downloadable pod casts).

I didn’t want to re-type this, so I’m quoting myself. It’s as good an intro for this threads as it was for this one.

John Searle has an interesting, and very strange, theory of consciousness which I’d like to debate. It goes as follows:

He says consciousness is causally reducible to brain processes, but not ontologically reducible. That is, the physical processes in the brain are enough to cause consciousness (and that’s good enough to explain how consciousness arises from the brain), but what consciousness exists as is a first-person entity, and that makes it incompatible with an ontological reduction to any third-person entity such as the brain. So while you can say that brain processes cause consciousness, you cannot say that consciousness is just brain processes.

Yet, at the same time, Searle is not a dualist. He’s not saying that consciousness is something separate from the brain. He maintains that consciousness is to the brain as the solidity of a rock is to the molecular structure and activity of that rock.

I’m finding this difficult to wrap my head around. I don’t quite understand how the link between consciousness and the brain can be likened to that between the solidity and the molecular structure/activity of a rock without being a form of ontological reduction. I’m hoping we can flesh this out in this thread. But I should say a few more things about how Searle explains this before we begin:

Searle talks about different kinds of causal relations: You have causal relations through time–where one event causally brings about a subsequent event. You have cotemporaneous, but spatially separate, causal relations–where the actions of one object cotemporaneously affect the actions of another object, like the Earth’s gravity keeping the Moon in its orbit. And you also have reductive causal relations–where properties or activities on a higher level are caused by events on a lower level, like the interactions between molecules causing solidity at a higher level.

The latter kind of causal relation is what Searle thinks is going on in the mind/brain relation. Thus, he calls it causal reduction. But he says that in science, we typically go a step further and make an ontological reduction. We go from saying that solidity is caused by molecular interactions, to saying that solidity is molecular interactions. This further step, he says, is a redifinition of our original terms. We redifine “solidity” as “a certain kind of molecular interaction”.

He says that we can’t do this for consciousness. He says that to redefine “consciousness” as “certain kinds of brain processes” is to defeated the whole point of having the term “consciousness”. The point of having the term, he says, is to refer to this entity as having a first-person mode of existence, and if we redefine it in materialist terms (as brain processes), it will then denote an entity as having a third-person mode of existence. We will thereafter need a new term to refer to this (same?) entity as having a first-person mode of existence, but in that case, why not go back to the term “consciousness”?

He’s not entirely clear as to whether he thinks this is also a problem for things like the relation between molecular interactions and solidity, but he does make the distinction between what he calls “eliminative reduction” and his aforementioned “causal reduction”. Eliminative reduction is the kind of reduction you do on a phenomenon that, in effect, gets rid of that phenomenon. He sites sunsets and rainbows as examples. We now know that the Sun never really “sets” (in the sense of the Earth being still and the Sun “going down” below the horizon). And we also know that rainbows don’t actually exist as material (or etheral?) objects in the sky. Light just behaves differently as it passes through rain drops, and at certain points in the sky and at certain angles, we get the optical illusion of a colorful arch in the sky. But consciousness is real, Searle says, just as solidity is real. Just because we’re able to carry out a causal reduction on a phenomenon, it does not follow that we’ve eliminated it. He also talks about the dinstinction between solidity as redefined in terms of molecular interactions and solidity as a macroscopic and sensual property of some objects (“our good old friend solidity” he says). The latter, he says, is still real, but it isn’t clear whether he thinks the redefining of this kind of solidity in terms of molecular interactions poses the same kind of problem as the redefining of consciousness in terms of brain processes. In either case, we would still need to retain a word to refer to the original kind of phenomenon (first-person consciousness or “our good old friend solidity”), but in the case of “our good old friend solidity,” that’s still a third-person thing, so go figure.

A few other things Searle says: He says he agrees with a certain watered-down version of emergentism but not the mainstream kind that most emergentists identify themselves with. He agrees with the latter up to a point–namely, that consciousness can be thought of as an emergent property of brain process, but he disagrees with them when they say that, once consciousness emerges, it “takes on a life of its own” (which is essentially a form of dualism, and in my mind is incompatible with the concept of consciousness as an emergent property since that would effectively make it a whole entity unto itself).

He also says that he thinks of nature as “wildly contingent” (or was it “radically contingent”?), which is to say that sometimes in nature, cause/effect regularities are not at all necessary, that if it happens that certain brain processes result in these subjective first-person experiences that comprise consciousness, that’s just a brute fact about nature. If we don’t understand how that happens, too bad for us. He even goes so far as to say that it need not be the case that there is some necessary way by which nature brings this about and it’s just that we are incapable of understand it, for he thinks that nature can be, at times, inherently contingent (he sites Hume as an example of how he thinks about this).

This is a subtle, but major, point of confusion for me–I’d go so far as to say it is the crux of the problem–for it seems odd to say that consciousness is not separate from the brain even though we can’t do an ontological reduction from consciousness to the brain, especially if he thinks there need not be any necessary connection between consciousness and the brain. After all, one could understand Searle’s prohibition against ontological reduction as a kind of conceptual difficulty. That is, he might mean that we cannot conceptualize a first-person entity as being ontologically identical as a third-person entity, but if the reality is that they are ontologically the same thing, then one would think there must be a necessary connection between them (Isn’t that just Aristotle’s first law: all things are identical with themselves?). But if he’s saying that nature is intrinsically contingent at times, then there is no necessary connection between consciousness and brain processes even in nature (not just in our minds). Doesn’t that mean they have to be separate things?

I have no doubt that this all makes sense to Searle, but to me it’s kind of a mess. I’m hoping we can sort it out in this thread.

[Hobbes_Choice]

@gib

@gib

I’m listening to a lecture series on the philosophy of [mind] by John Searle from Berkeley University (I seriously recommend them–Searle is incredibly entertaining and funny–anyone who finds philosophy dry won’t after listening to his free iTunes-downloadable pod casts).

I didn’t want to re-type this, so I’m quoting myself. It’s as good an intro for this threads as it was for this one.

John Searle has an interesting, and very strange, theory of consciousness which I’d like to debate. It goes as follows:

He says consciousness is causally reducible to brain processes, but not ontologically reducible. That is, the physical processes in the brain are enough to cause consciousness (and that’s good enough to explain how consciousness arises from the brain), but what consciousness exists as is a first-person entity, and that makes it incompatible with an ontological reduction to any third-person entity such as the brain. So while you can say that brain processes cause consciousness, you cannot say that consciousness is just brain processes.

Yet, at the same time, Searle is not a dualist. He’s not saying that consciousness is something separate from the brain. He maintains that consciousness is to the brain as the solidity of a rock is to the molecular structure and activity of that rock.

I’m finding this difficult to wrap my head around. I don’t quite understand how the link between consciousness and the brain can be likened to that between the solidity and the molecular structure/activity of a rock without being a form of ontological reduction. I’m hoping we can flesh this out in this thread. But I should say a few more things about how Searle explains this before we begin:

Searle talks about different kinds of causal relations: You have causal relations through time–where one event causally brings about a subsequent event. You have cotemporaneous, but spatially separate, causal relations–where the actions of one object cotemporaneously affect the actions of another object, like the Earth’s gravity keeping the Moon in its orbit. And you also have reductive causal relations–where properties or activities on a higher level are caused by events on a lower level, like the interactions between molecules causing solidity at a higher level.

The latter kind of causal relation is what Searle thinks is going on in the mind/brain relation. Thus, he calls it causal reduction. But he says that in science, we typically go a step further and make an ontological reduction. We go from saying that solidity is caused by molecular interactions, to saying that solidity is molecular interactions. This further step, he says, is a redifinition of our original terms. We redifine “solidity” as “a certain kind of molecular interaction”.

He says that we can’t do this for consciousness. He says that to redefine “consciousness” as “certain kinds of brain processes” is to defeated the whole point of having the term “consciousness”. The point of having the term, he says, is to refer to this entity as having a first-person mode of existence, and if we redefine it in materialist terms (as brain processes), it will then denote an entity as having a third-person mode of existence. We will thereafter need a new term to refer to this (same?) entity as having a first-person mode of existence, but in that case, why not go back to the term “consciousness”?

He’s not entirely clear as to whether he thinks this is also a problem for things like the relation between molecular interactions and solidity, but he does make the distinction between what he calls “eliminative reduction” and his aforementioned “causal reduction”. Eliminative reduction is the kind of reduction you do on a phenomenon that, in effect, gets rid of that phenomenon. He sites sunsets and rainbows as examples. We now know that the Sun never really “sets” (in the sense of the Earth being still and the Sun “going down” below the horizon). And we also know that rainbows don’t actually exist as material (or etheral?) objects in the sky. Light just behaves differently as it passes through rain drops, and at certain points in the sky and at certain angles, we get the optical illusion of a colorful arch in the sky. But consciousness is real, Searle says, just as solidity is real. Just because we’re able to carry out a causal reduction on a phenomenon, it does not follow that we’ve eliminated it. He also talks about the dinstinction between solidity as redefined in terms of molecular interactions and solidity as a macroscopic and sensual property of some objects (“our good old friend solidity” he says). The latter, he says, is still real, but it isn’t clear whether he thinks the redefining of this kind of solidity in terms of molecular interactions poses the same kind of problem as the redefining of consciousness in terms of brain processes. In either case, we would still need to retain a word to refer to the original kind of phenomenon (first-person consciousness or “our good old friend solidity”), but in the case of “our good old friend solidity,” that’s still a third-person thing, so go figure.

A few other things Searle says: He says he agrees with a certain watered-down version of emergentism but not the mainstream kind that most emergentists identify themselves with. He agrees with the latter up to a point–namely, that consciousness can be thought of as an emergent property of brain process, but he disagrees with them when they say that, once consciousness emerges, it “takes on a life of its own” (which is essentially a form of dualism, and in my mind is incompatible with the concept of consciousness as an emergent property since that would effectively make it a whole entity unto itself).

He also says that he thinks of nature as “wildly contingent” (or was it “radically contingent”?), which is to say that sometimes in nature, cause/effect regularities are not at all necessary, that if it happens that certain brain processes result in these subjective first-person experiences that comprise consciousness, that’s just a brute fact about nature. If we don’t understand how that happens, too bad for us. He even goes so far as to say that it need not be the case that there is some necessary way by which nature brings this about and it’s just that we are incapable of understand it, for he thinks that nature can be, at times, inherently contingent (he sites Hume as an example of how he thinks about this).

This is a subtle, but major, point of confusion for me–I’d go so far as to say it is the crux of the problem–for it seems odd to say that consciousness is not separate from the brain even though we can’t do an ontological reduction from consciousness to the brain, especially if he thinks there need not be any necessary connection between consciousness and the brain. After all, one could understand Searle’s prohibition against ontological reduction as a kind of conceptual difficulty. That is, he might mean that we cannot conceptualize a first-person entity as being ontologically identical as a third-person entity, but if the reality is that they are ontologically the same thing, then one would think there must be a necessary connection between them (Isn’t that just Aristotle’s first law: all things are identical with themselves?). But if he’s saying that nature is intrinsically contingent at times, then there is no necessary connection between consciousness and brain processes even in nature (not just in our minds). Doesn’t that mean they have to be separate things?

I have no doubt that this all makes sense to Searle, but to me it’s kind of a mess. I’m hoping we can sort it out in this thread.

Can you provide a LINK to the lectures?
Without listening to more I can’t say more, but from what you are saying about his theory, it seems to be thoroughly pragmatic and wonderfully descriptive. I can’t think of a better way to start.
Understanding is always about metaphors and descriptions of what it is like to be. Human circulation was never understood until we had water pumps to describe the action of the heart. Galen employed an agricultural metaphor - he talked of the blood irrigating and draining through the tissue to nurture them as rain nurtured plants.
Consciousness has always been problematic as there is nothing outside our experience to explain it. It’s no wonder we are now tending to use the metaphor of a computer to aid us.
But I like the idea that consciousness is what brains do. being strong and doing nothing is what rocks do. Rocks are not conscious.

[gib]

@Hobbes Choice

Can you provide a LINK to the lectures?

I can tell you to look it up on iTunes U:

Philosophy 132, 001|Spring 2012|UC Berkeley

It’s an entire university course, and you’ll have to wade through about 7 or 8 lectures before you actually get to Searle’s theory.

@Hobbes Choice

Consciousness has always been problematic as there is nothing outside our experience to explain it. It’s no wonder we are now tending to use the metaphor of a computer to aid us.
But I like the idea that consciousness is what brains do. being strong and doing nothing is what rocks do. Rocks are not conscious.

Sounds like you’re a functionalist. I don’t know if it would make you happy or disappoint to hear that Searle’s against functionalism (you’re probably indifferent ). The closest he comes to any known “ism” in the philosophy of mind is probably emergentism, but again, I have to stress that Searle shies away from the label mostly because of what mainstream emergentists actually believe (that consiousness, as an emergent property of the brain, ends up taking on a life of its own)–but emergentism, sans the “life of its own” bit, is probably a good label for Searle.

Now, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that Searle’s ex-nay on ontological reduction must be a merely conceptual/lingual issue. I don’t know if this properly paraphrases Searle or not, but you could probably argue the case as follows:

There are two sets of terms/phrases that consciousness uses to refer to things in the world–those that refer to first-person things, and those that refer to third-person things. The chief difference between the two is that the first functions as self-referencing terms–terms like consciousness, thought, sadness, perception–terms that consciousness uses to refer to itself or aspects of itself. The second functions as other-referencing terms–terms that refer to things that are (I’m inclined to say, by definition) not the self. (after all, “first-person” just means the pronoun “I” whereas “third-person” just means the pronouns “he,” “she,” it," etc.).

So to say that consciousness is not ontologically reducible to brain processes is just to say that something which is myself is not ontologically redicible to something which is not myself–and then it’s obvious.

It’s also obvious that this is just a linguistic or conceptual problem–so we can still say that in reality, consciousness and the brain are the same thing, and this might be how Searle gets away with saying he’s not a dualist. It’s still a question in my mind, however, what he means when he talks about contingencies in nature. Is it contingent that this is just the way we have evolved to think about the mind/brain relation? That we are stuck with a kind of language and/or conceptual framework with which there is no way of making an ontological reduction from consciousness to brain processes? Or is he saying that even in nature herself, the link between consciousness and brain processes, although identical, is just contingent, that nature just so happens to bring it about that brain process are the same thing as consciousness states?

[zinnat]

A have read a lot of Searle some years back and found that his idea of consciousness is much closer to the target than most of the others, especially who have been worked on AI.

But, still he is very much confused. The problem with him that his mind says one thing and his heart says another and being unable to discern between the two, he opted for merging both view-points and makes a mess of it.

When he argued about the AI, it is very much evident that he assumes consciousness as an non-materialistic entity, which cannot be reproduced or artificially made by the humans. That is precisely why he is against the Strong AI. But, on the other hand, he accepts the possibility of weak AI.

His perception is that brain causes minds and mind causes consciousness which is far from the truth. Actually, the real process is the exactly reverse.

Consciousness causes minds or rather it should be said that consciousness feels all that happens in the mind. Mind does not feel anything by itself. It just looks into and analyze all the input data provided by the organic brain and present all that to consciousness. Consciousness is innocent but sticky by nature so it uses to stick to the most deepest or prominant thought and imotion at any given moment. It is a default process and we cannot change it but mind can be taught to focuss on desired issues so that it could not highlight unimportant issue in front of consciousness.

There are three entities- Brain (organic), Mind and Consciousness. They use to co-exist all the time. Brain acts as a meaditor between defferent organs and mind. But, the most important thing to understand is that all these three entities operates in three different dimensions.

It can be understood through a simple analogy. Organic Brain is a hardware of computer while Mind is just like the software and Consciousness is precisely a spectator who is looking at the screen.

We cannot change the inputs which are constantly flowing in in the form of experiences and also cannot change even the hardware (body and organic brain). And, the spectator (consciousness) is not going to leave the screen even for a moment. The only discreation we have is the altration of the software so that the unnecessary data could not be displayed at the screen.

This very concept is the crux of all religions and spiritual schools.
But, the problem is that it is hard to believe and accept too.

One has either has to discern very wisely between the available knowledge or depend on trial and error method. The former way is very risky as odds are in the favor of being misguided while the later route is very lenthy process and requires herculean effort and extraordinary patience.

But, still i feel that the second choice deserves a chance.

with love,
sanjay

[gib]

@zinnat13

When he argued about the AI, it is very much evident that he assumes consciousness as an non-materialistic entity

Well, to be more precise, his beef with AI is that he thinks there’s more to the mind than simply being a computational or algorithmic process. At the heart of his argument is the assertion that syntax (which is all that a computer has) is not enough to get semantics (which the mind has).

@zinnat13

His perception is that brain causes minds and mind causes consciousness which is far from the truth. Actually, the real process is the exactly reverse.

Consciousness causes minds or rather it should be said that consciousness feels all that happens in the mind. Mind does not feel anything by itself. It just looks into and analyze all the input data provided by the organic brain and present all that to consciousness. Consciousness is innocent but sticky by nature so it uses to stick to the most deepest or prominant thought and imotion at any given moment. It is a default process and we cannot change it but mind can be taught to focuss on desired issues so that it could not highlight unimportant issue in front of consciousness.

I don’t remember Searle ever making a distinction between consciousness and mind.

@zinnat13

We cannot change the inputs which are constantly flowing in in the form of experiences and also cannot change even the hardware (body and organic brain). And, the spectator (consciousness) is not going to leave the screen even for a moment. The only discreation we have is the altration of the software so that the unnecessary data could not be displayed at the screen.

Did you know that consciousness simply “looking at the screen” can change the hardware? Assuming, that is, that you believe thinking is an active process on the part of consciousness.

[zinnat]

@gib

I don’t remember Searle ever making a distinction between consciousness and mind.

If my memory is not fooling me then i am quite sure of that. But, it was many years back.

@gib

Did you know that consciousness simply “looking at the screen” can change the hardware?

No. Consciousness does not change the hardware or software.

@gib

Assuming, that is, that you believe thinking is an active process on the part of consciousness.

Once again no.

Thinking is not the job of consciousnes. It is done by mind and these cogitations are presented to the consciousness.
consciousness is not a doing entity but mind is. Consciousness is just a feeling entity. It does not herself even choose between the various thoughts going on in the mind. It has to go with the most prominant one by default.

Just imagine that you are driving and the music system is on too. Your favourate song is on air are you are enjoying it too. Right now that is most prominant thought in your mind so your consciousness is attached to it. Now, all of a sudden, your tyre bursts and immidieately you forget about the song. Your entire focus comes on driving and you stop the car within some seconds; say 10 seconds.

Now, you cannnot remember what lines were played during those 10 seconds. The song was very much there and your ears also so those sound waves must have gone to your brian and mind as well. But, you heard nothing. Why? Because, that song became secondary thought and consciousness focussed on driving as it overtook the hearing of song.

Comsciousness is like an innocent child and can be fooled easily.

When a child of some months weeps, his mother distracts his attention by a toy and child forgets about weeping. That is the state of consciousness.

with love,
sanjay

[gib]

@zinnat13

Once again no.

Thinking is not the job of consciousnes. It is done by mind and these cogitations are presented to the consciousness.
consciousness is not a doing entity but mind is. Consciousness is just a feeling entity. It does not herself even choose between the various thoughts going on in the mind. It has to go with the most prominant one by default.

Just imagine that you are driving and the music system is on too. Your favourate song is on air are you are enjoying it too. Right now that is most prominant thought in your mind so your consciousness is attached to it. Now, all of a sudden, your tyre bursts and immidieately you forget about the song. Your entire focus comes on driving and you stop the car within some seconds; say 10 seconds.

Now, you cannnot remember what lines were played during those 10 seconds. The song was very much there and your ears also so those sound waves must have gone to your brian and mind as well. But, you heard nothing. Why? Because, that song became secondary thought and consciousness focussed on driving as it overtook the hearing of song.

Comsciousness is like an innocent child and can be fooled easily.

When a child of some months weeps, his mother distracts his attention by a toy and child forgets about weeping. That is the state of consciousness.

with love,
sanjay

I’m respectfully skeptical about this, Sanjay.

Even though you weren’t paying attention to the music when your focus turned to the tire, I’ll bet there were some changes in the way your brain processes the audio input. Typically, in these cases, we don’t remember the lyrics or rhythm of the song while we weren’t paying attention. That means the information wasn’t being stored in memory. If you were paying attention to it, it would be more likely to be stored in memory. That implies different kinds of neuro-chemical processing.

I also wonder how you know all this about consciousness. Presumably, if you’re saying all this to me, you believe it, you think it. That’s something you’re mind is doing, right? How did your mind figure it out? What gave it the clue that consciousness exists? If it had some clue that there was this consciousness examining it, consciousness must have had some effect on it–either directly or indirectly–so it couldn’t be completely passive.

[James_S_Saint]

Most people, educated or not, have trouble with the hardware-software ontological dualism issue. Most hardware only people have hell trying to related to low level software issues and visa-versa.

Mind and consciousness are a software ontology and brain is hardware (wetware) ontology. Each has its own understanding (ontology) even though they are talking about the same physical item. Searle is probably getting those issues confused and/or conflated.

Sanjay uses an East Indian version of the mind and consciousness ontology and thus what he says doesn’t seem to make sense to Westerners.

[zinnat]

@gib

I’m respectfully skeptical about this, Sanjay.

I expect and accept your skeptism too. It is always wise to be skeptical and it pays but one should be skeptical in true sense that- Be skeptical about himself also in the same way as about others. Furthermore, we have not had any direct conversation so far barring one or two posts in Feminism and Sexism and even those were not addressed to you.

@gib

Even though you weren’t paying attention to the music when your focus turned to the tire, I’ll bet there were some changes in the way your brain processes the audio input. Typically, in these cases, we don’t remember the lyrics or rhythm of the song while we weren’t paying attention. That means the information wasn’t being stored in memory. If you were paying attention to it, it would be more likely to be stored in memory. That implies different kinds of neuro-chemical processing.

Let me try to clear the issue more.

Imagine that you are sitting in a dark room and there were two lights in front of you, say night bulbs of 10 watts. Right now you can see both of those or in other words you can choose which one is worthy of your attention. Now, if one 1o watt bulb is replaced by a 100 watt bulb, it would be difficult for you to concentrate on the other one. And, what if a halogean light of 2000 watts is placed for 100 watt bulb? You cannot see the other night lamp, no matter how hard you try. So, it is not about the paying attention but on the prominance of the issue. You cannot overrule the default process of falling for bigger and more important issue. Yes, the available remedy is to switch off the halogen so that you can focus on other small lighr bulb easily.

The important thing to realize here is that small light bulb is still lighting and its light is falling your ratina and that means that its signals are still going to brain and it is being processed there too. So, technically you are stll seeing the small light but practically not. Why? That theory is true to all of our sense organs; ears, nose, skin.

It other words we can say that is rule, law or fact.

Gib, the same phenomenon happens during the interaction between mind and consciousness. Mind always produces different kinds of thoughts all the time but, being a watcher, consciousness can handle only one thought at a time. If brain or mind can feel then we would be able to feel multiple feeling at a time but we cannot.

That is simple but enough reasoning that neither brain nor mind feel but it is done by some other entity. This phenomenon revels one more very important fact also that memory is not stored in the mind but in consciousness.

And, that is precise reason why we use to remember all significant (good and bad) incidents of our lives ever while forget others. Mind can access the memory stored in consciousness if required and ordered. But, it depends on the level of intimacy between the two and that differs from person to person. Furthermore, this capacity is not static or fixed but can be altered through effort.

Gib, this phenomenon of falling or attaracting for bigger things is not applicable only to abstract things like thoughts but to all articles present in the universe. This concept is the cornerstone of gravity too as without it gravity could not be materialized.

Actually, there is no difference between the behaviour of physical matter and abstract matter (thoughts). The building blocks of all matter is the same so they are bound to same and certain rules. The only difference is that different types of matter correspond to different realms or dimensions. Yet, all of those are still matter. That applies to all three different types of matter those consitute our cosmos; physcical matter, abstract matter (mind) and eternal matter (consciousness) too.

@gib

I also wonder how you know all this about consciousness. Presumably, if you’re saying all this to me, you believe it, you think it. That’s something you’re mind is doing, right? How did your mind figure it out? What gave it the clue that consciousness exists?

Well, My friend, that is a long and complicated story thus, i cannot explain it here in some words.

All i can say that these cogitations are very less to do with traditional philosophy (books). I learned things in slightly different way. If you are interested then these two threads may give you some hint that how i learned and what cogitated.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=181854
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=181981

@gib

If it had some clue that there was this consciousness examining it, consciousness must have had some effect on it–either directly or indirectly–so it couldn’t be completely passive

[b]Consciousness cannot effect mind and even mind can not effect consciousness. Consciousness is eternal, constant and unchangeable. Nothing can ever cause any intrution in it. That is out of the question.

In a normal state of mind, it does not have any clue of consciousness. Actually, even consciousness does not aware of its own existence and it can never realize its own existence too on its own.That is a bit strange but true.

It is only mind that changes and can realize the existence of consciousness. This process of change (ontologies) can be in different ways but the cornerstone of all ontologies is concentration because mind can have access to the consciousness only in highly concentrated stages. These ontologies are called religions and this achievement of mind (and also remain so forever) is enlightenment.

The reason is that, as i said earlier, that consciousness is not a doing entity. Thus, it needs some outside help to rediscover itself. And, there is no one to help in this course other than mind. Because, the mind is its only companion. So, mind can be its best friend and worst enemy too. All depends how we use it[/b].

Gib, it looks a bit complicated but if you go through those threads i mentioned, i am quite sure that you would easily understand what i am trying to say.

with love,
sanjay

[Moreno]

@gib

@gib

I’m listening to a lecture series on the philosophy of [mind] by John Searle from Berkeley University (I seriously recommend them–Searle is incredibly entertaining and funny–anyone who finds philosophy dry won’t after listening to his free iTunes-downloadable pod casts).

I didn’t want to re-type this, so I’m quoting myself. It’s as good an intro for this threads as it was for this one.

John Searle has an interesting, and very strange, theory of consciousness which I’d like to debate. It goes as follows:

He says consciousness is causally reducible to brain processes, but not ontologically reducible. That is, the physical processes in the brain are enough to cause consciousness (and that’s good enough to explain how consciousness arises from the brain), but what consciousness exists as is a first-person entity, and that makes it incompatible with an ontological reduction to any third-person entity such as the brain. So while you can say that brain processes cause consciousness, you cannot say that consciousness is just brain processes.

Yet, at the same time, Searle is not a dualist. He’s not saying that consciousness is something separate from the brain. He maintains that consciousness is to the brain as the solidity of a rock is to the molecular structure and activity of that rock.

It seems like he is saying properties are caused by the objects that have them.

I’m finding this difficult to wrap my head around. I don’t quite understand how the link between consciousness and the brain can be likened to that between the solidity and the molecular structure/activity of a rock without being a form of ontological reduction. I’m hoping we can flesh this out in this thread. But I should say a few more things about how Searle explains this before we begin:

Searle talks about different kinds of causal relations: You have causal relations through time–where one event causally brings about a subsequent event. You have cotemporaneous, but spatially separate, causal relations–where the actions of one object cotemporaneously affect the actions of another object, like the Earth’s gravity keeping the Moon in its orbit.

Is the earth’s gravity an action?

And you also have reductive causal relations–where properties or activities on a higher level are caused by events on a lower level, like the interactions between molecules causing solidity at a higher level.

The things cause this. The interactions cause this. The things are the interactions. I wonder which one.

The latter kind of causal relation is what Searle thinks is going on in the mind/brain relation. Thus, he calls it causal reduction. But he says that in science, we typically go a step further and make an ontological reduction. We go from saying that solidity is caused by molecular interactions, to saying that solidity is molecular interactions. This further step, he says, is a redifinition of our original terms. We redifine “solidity” as “a certain kind of molecular interaction”.

He says that we can’t do this for consciousness. He says that to redefine “consciousness” as “certain kinds of brain processes” is to defeated the whole point of having the term “consciousness”.

yes, that makes sense, since we could just use a neuroscience term. Neuronal/glial cascade or something.

He’s not entirely clear as to whether he thinks this is also a problem for things like the relation between molecular interactions and solidity, but he does make the distinction between what he calls “eliminative reduction” and his aforementioned “causal reduction”. Eliminative reduction is the kind of reduction you do on a phenomenon that, in effect, gets rid of that phenomenon. He sites sunsets and rainbows as examples. We now know that the Sun never really “sets” (in the sense of the Earth being still and the Sun “going down” below the horizon). And we also know that rainbows don’t actually exist as material (or etheral?) objects in the sky. Light just behaves differently as it passes through rain drops, and at certain points in the sky and at certain angles, we get the optical illusion of a colorful arch in the sky. But consciousness is real, Searle says, just as solidity is real.

This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t see these as even analogous. Perhaps because the firstpersonness seems qualitatively radically different from solidity. But I have to mull. I can get it on a more abstract level - like as emergent phenomena - but not the way he is presenting it.

Just because we’re able to carry out a causal reduction on a phenomenon, it does not follow that we’ve eliminated it. He also talks about the dinstinction between solidity as redefined in terms of molecular interactions and solidity as a macroscopic and sensual property of some objects (“our good old friend solidity” he says). The latter, he says, is still real, but it isn’t clear whether he thinks the redefining of this kind of solidity in terms of molecular interactions poses the same kind of problem as the redefining of consciousness in terms of brain processes

. Right, it seems to me one can make that reduction, unless one is talking about experienced solidity, which then makes it not two examples - solidity and consciousness - but just two examples of consciousness, one with a specific object.

In either case, we would still need to retain a word to refer to the original kind of phenomenon (first-person consciousness or “our good old friend solidity”), but in the case of “our good old friend solidity,” that’s still a third-person thing, so go figure.

A few other things Searle says: He says he agrees with a certain watered-down version of emergentism but not the mainstream kind that most emergentists identify themselves with. He agrees with the latter up to a point–namely, that consciousness can be thought of as an emergent property of brain process, but he disagrees with them when they say that, once consciousness emerges, it “takes on a life of its own” (which is essentially a form of dualism, and in my mind is incompatible with the concept of consciousness as an emergent property since that would effectively make it a whole entity unto itself).

Are properties entities? But that said I am not sure it has to be a dualism. It could simply be a new form of matter. I don’t believe this, but I see no reason why a dualism has to be in place. We have other examples of emergent physical ‘things’, and obviously these do not entail dualisms, just that a higher order phenomenon arises from other ones and cannot be explained on the terms of the lower order phenomena. Unless every new property is a new substance, but he certainly seems to acknowledge new properties.

He also says that he thinks of nature as “wildly contingent” (or was it “radically contingent”?), which is to say that sometimes in nature, cause/effect regularities are not at all necessary, that if it happens that certain brain processes result in these subjective first-person experiences that comprise consciousness, that’s just a brute fact about nature. If we don’t understand how that happens, too bad for us. He even goes so far as to say that it need not be the case that there is some necessary way by which nature brings this about and it’s just that we are incapable of understand it, for he thinks that nature can be, at times, inherently contingent (he sites Hume as an example of how he thinks about this).

I think I understood that, but that seems like a kind of disconnection between causes and results.

This is a subtle, but major, point of confusion for me–I’d go so far as to say it is the crux of the problem–for it seems odd to say that consciousness is not separate from the brain even though we can’t do an ontological reduction from consciousness to the brain, especially if he thinks there need not be any necessary connection between consciousness and the brain.

I agree. It seems like he is saying that anything could emerge. Any property. How would one know this? though to be fair, how do we know only consciousness could emerge?

After all, one could understand Searle’s prohibition against ontological reduction as a kind of conceptual difficulty. That is, he might mean that we cannot conceptualize a first-person entity as being ontologically identical as a third-person entity, but if the reality is that they are ontologically the same thing, then one would think there must be a necessary connection between them (Isn’t that just Aristotle’s first law: all things are identical with themselves?). But if he’s saying that nature is intrinsically contingent at times, then there is no necessary connection between consciousness and brain processes even in nature (not just in our minds). Doesn’t that mean they have to be separate things?

It could be a bit like some conceptions of QM. But instead of effects being probablistic or in any case not determined, emerging properties are probablistic or in any case not determined. Perhaps complicated nervous tissue could have entailed the power of transportation directly from separate points, but in fact it turned out to result in consciousness.

I have no doubt that this all makes sense to Searle, but to me it’s kind of a mess. I’m hoping we can sort it out in this thread.

I somehow doubt I will make that easier, but I will peek in and see if I don’t feel too gremlin like in context.

[gib]

@Moreno

It seems like he is saying properties are caused by the objects that have them.

In a sense, yes.

@Moreno

Is the earth’s gravity an action?

Well, it’s not a set of physical objects undergoing some kind of motion, but I definitely think there is something happening to bring about the mutual attraction of the Earth and the Moon.

But in any case, it’s just an example (perhaps a bad one) that’s supposed to get the idea across.

@Moreno

The things cause this. The interactions cause this. The things are the interactions. I wonder which one.

Which one what? Which statement is true? I would think all of them (though I’m not sure it helps to call an interaction a “thing”).

@Moreno

This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t see these as even analogous. Perhaps because the firstpersonness seems qualitatively radically different from solidity. But I have to mull. I can get it on a more abstract level - like as emergent phenomena - but not the way he is presenting it.

Well, it could be bad presentation on my part.

@Moreno

This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t see these as even analogous. Perhaps because the firstpersonness seems qualitatively radically different from solidity. But I have to mull. I can get it on a more abstract level - like as emergent phenomena - but not the way he is presenting it.

Yeah, I’m not sure whether Searle would agree or disagree with you about how radically different consciousness is from solidity vis-a-vis either one’s relation to their molecular constituents, but I do know there is a radical difference that Searle sees between them of this sort: whereas we can understand how the molecular activity of some solid object necessarily gives rise to the object’s solidity, it ain’t that way for the brain and consciousness. Though he maintains that consciousness is a kind of emergent properties of brain activity, the relation between the two is nevertheless contingent. ← If you find this strange, you’re not alone.

@moreno

Right, it seems to me one can make that reduction, unless one is talking about experienced solidity, which then makes it not two examples - solidity and consciousness - but just two examples of consciousness, one with a specific object.

Yes, because solidity as a set of sensual properties like durable, cold, smooth, impenetrable, etc. is just that: sensation.

@Moreno

Are properties entities?

No, and that’s the point. If you’re saying consciousness, as a property, takes on a life of its own, then it’s no longer a property.

@Moreno

But that said I am not sure it has to be a dualism. It could simply be a new form of matter. I don’t believe this, but I see no reason why a dualism has to be in place. We have other examples of emergent physical ‘things’, and obviously these do not entail dualisms, just that a higher order phenomenon arises from other ones and cannot be explained on the terms of the lower order phenomena. Unless every new property is a new substance, but he certainly seems to acknowledge new properties.

See, the problem is not whether emergentism (with consciousness taking on a life of its own) counts as a form of dualism or not, but that it essentially says that consciousness ends up being independent of the brain–which really doesn’t seem true from a neuroscientific point of view.

@Moreno

I think I understood that, but that seems like a kind of disconnection between causes and results.

I agree. I’m not 100% sure how Searle thinks of this, so I don’t quite know how to interpret him.

@Moreno

I agree. It seems like he is saying that anything could emerge. Any property. How would one know this? though to be fair, how do we know only consciousness could emerge?

I suppose we don’t. What I’m unsure of here is whether Searle talks about the contingency of the relation between the brain and the mind in an epistemic sense or an ontological sense. I think in order to make any sense out of this, he would have to mean it in an epistemic sense–with the added caveat that we may not ever, nor may it even be possible to figure out a necessary connection between the mind and the brain.

@Moreno

It could be a bit like some conceptions of QM. But instead of effects being probablistic or in any case not determined, emerging properties are probablistic or in any case not determined. Perhaps complicated nervous tissue could have entailed the power of transportation directly from separate points, but in fact it turned out to result in consciousness

I think Searle has something like this in mind.

@Moreno

I somehow doubt I will make that easier, but I will peek in and see if I don’t feel too gremlin like in context.

Please do.

[Moreno]

I found a commentary on his position on consciousness online here…
human-brain.org/searle.html
I may bring this into the discussion.

Edit: as far as objects causing their properties. I don’t think that makes sense. It is as if the object is separate from its properties. The chair causes its mass is as if there is the chair without the mass (somewhere, somehow). The chair includes its mass and solidity and temperature and so on. It’s like objects have no intrinsic qualities.

My arm is causing my hand.
My body is causing its weight

@gib

@Moreno

It seems like he is saying properties are caused by the objects that have them.

In a sense, yes.

I think that is problematic. It seems like saying an apple causes its mass is confusing. Or ice causes its solidity. What about temperature?

@Moreno

Is the earth’s gravity an action?

Well, it’s not a set of physical objects undergoing some kind of motion, but I definitely think there is something happening to bring about the mutual attraction of the Earth and the Moon.
[/quote]
I agree I’m just not sure it’s an action. or that it is the earth ‘doing something’. ACtually I am not sure what actions are in the world of objects.

I suppose we don’t. What I’m unsure of here is whether Searle talks about the contingency of the relation between the brain and the mind in an epistemic sense or an ontological sense. I think in order to make any sense out of this, he would have to mean it in an epistemic sense–with the added caveat that we may not ever, nor may it even be possible to figure out a necessary connection between the mind and the brain.

It seems like according to the link above he is avoiding saying.

Just going to react to a couple of things from that link - this will partly indicate my own position (which is not fleshed out) and maybe bring me back to the issues you are focusing on.

By “consciousness” I mean those states of sentience or awareness that typically begin when we wake up in the morning from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until we fall asleep again.

I think we are conscious during sleep, but we do not remember. We can feel vestiges of the pleasure of sleep and who is it having this pleasure. But then also this comes from my own experience. After meditating for a number of years, I found I could stay awake not just in REM sleep - lucid dreaming - but also be awake in non-rem sleep, hear myself snoring and all that.

I believe in panconsciousness. That everything is conscious, but that memory and other types of cognition require complexity. It is usually assumed that complexity is necessary for consciousness, but to me this is mere speculation and biased the way we are to see things like us as alive. The kind of active memory and other kinds of cognition, I think come in with complexity. In sleep, I think we are in fact aware, but we do not remember most of sleep because we are not ‘writing it down’ like we do our daily experiences.

The essential features of consciousness, in all its forms, are its inner, qualitative, and subjective nature in the special sense of these words that I explain in a moment.

I do not think it is necessarily ‘inner’. I think this is imposed on consciousness after the scientific model of perception is in place and so it seems obvious or given.

He summarises his position on p.53:

Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes. It has therefore a first-person ontology.
Because it has a first-person ontology, consciousness cannot be reduced to third-person phenomena in the way that is typical of other natural phenomena such at heat, liquidity, or solidity.
Consciousness is, above all, a biological phenomenon. Conscious processes are biological processes.
Consciousness processes are caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain.
Consciousness consists of higher-level processes realised in the structure of the brain.
There is, as far as we know, no reason in principle why we could not build an artificial brain that also causes and realises consciousness.

Here he seems to be saying it is different from solidity.
Which again seems to imply a kind of dualism which is what the commentator in the link seems to think also.

[117938Aa]

@gib

@gib

I’m listening to a lecture series on the philosophy of [mind] by John Searle from Berkeley University (I seriously recommend them–Searle is incredibly entertaining and funny–anyone who finds philosophy dry won’t after listening to his free iTunes-downloadable pod casts).

I didn’t want to re-type this, so I’m quoting myself. It’s as good an intro for this threads as it was for this one.

John Searle has an interesting, and very strange, theory of consciousness which I’d like to debate. It goes as follows:

He says consciousness is causally reducible to brain processes, but not ontologically reducible. That is, the physical processes in the brain are enough to cause consciousness (and that’s good enough to explain how consciousness arises from the brain), but what consciousness exists as is a first-person entity, and that makes it incompatible with an ontological reduction to any third-person entity such as the brain. So while you can say that brain processes cause consciousness, you cannot say that consciousness is just brain processes.

Yet, at the same time, Searle is not a dualist. He’s not saying that consciousness is something separate from the brain. He maintains that consciousness is to the brain as the solidity of a rock is to the molecular structure and activity of that rock.

I’m finding this difficult to wrap my head around. I don’t quite understand how the link between consciousness and the brain can be likened to that between the solidity and the molecular structure/activity of a rock without being a form of ontological reduction. I’m hoping we can flesh this out in this thread. But I should say a few more things about how Searle explains this before we begin:

Searle talks about different kinds of causal relations: You have causal relations through time–where one event causally brings about a subsequent event. You have cotemporaneous, but spatially separate, causal relations–where the actions of one object cotemporaneously affect the actions of another object, like the Earth’s gravity keeping the Moon in its orbit. And you also have reductive causal relations–where properties or activities on a higher level are caused by events on a lower level, like the interactions between molecules causing solidity at a higher level.

The latter kind of causal relation is what Searle thinks is going on in the mind/brain relation. Thus, he calls it causal reduction. But he says that in science, we typically go a step further and make an ontological reduction. We go from saying that solidity is caused by molecular interactions, to saying that solidity is molecular interactions. This further step, he says, is a redifinition of our original terms. We redifine “solidity” as “a certain kind of molecular interaction”.

He says that we can’t do this for consciousness. He says that to redefine “consciousness” as “certain kinds of brain processes” is to defeated the whole point of having the term “consciousness”. The point of having the term, he says, is to refer to this entity as having a first-person mode of existence, and if we redefine it in materialist terms (as brain processes), it will then denote an entity as having a third-person mode of existence. We will thereafter need a new term to refer to this (same?) entity as having a first-person mode of existence, but in that case, why not go back to the term “consciousness”?

He’s not entirely clear as to whether he thinks this is also a problem for things like the relation between molecular interactions and solidity, but he does make the distinction between what he calls “eliminative reduction” and his aforementioned “causal reduction”. Eliminative reduction is the kind of reduction you do on a phenomenon that, in effect, gets rid of that phenomenon. He sites sunsets and rainbows as examples. We now know that the Sun never really “sets” (in the sense of the Earth being still and the Sun “going down” below the horizon). And we also know that rainbows don’t actually exist as material (or etheral?) objects in the sky. Light just behaves differently as it passes through rain drops, and at certain points in the sky and at certain angles, we get the optical illusion of a colorful arch in the sky. But consciousness is real, Searle says, just as solidity is real. Just because we’re able to carry out a causal reduction on a phenomenon, it does not follow that we’ve eliminated it. He also talks about the dinstinction between solidity as redefined in terms of molecular interactions and solidity as a macroscopic and sensual property of some objects (“our good old friend solidity” he says). The latter, he says, is still real, but it isn’t clear whether he thinks the redefining of this kind of solidity in terms of molecular interactions poses the same kind of problem as the redefining of consciousness in terms of brain processes. In either case, we would still need to retain a word to refer to the original kind of phenomenon (first-person consciousness or “our good old friend solidity”), but in the case of “our good old friend solidity,” that’s still a third-person thing, so go figure.

A few other things Searle says: He says he agrees with a certain watered-down version of emergentism but not the mainstream kind that most emergentists identify themselves with. He agrees with the latter up to a point–namely, that consciousness can be thought of as an emergent property of brain process, but he disagrees with them when they say that, once consciousness emerges, it “takes on a life of its own” (which is essentially a form of dualism, and in my mind is incompatible with the concept of consciousness as an emergent property since that would effectively make it a whole entity unto itself).

He also says that he thinks of nature as “wildly contingent” (or was it “radically contingent”?), which is to say that sometimes in nature, cause/effect regularities are not at all necessary, that if it happens that certain brain processes result in these subjective first-person experiences that comprise consciousness, that’s just a brute fact about nature. If we don’t understand how that happens, too bad for us. He even goes so far as to say that it need not be the case that there is some necessary way by which nature brings this about and it’s just that we are incapable of understand it, for he thinks that nature can be, at times, inherently contingent (he sites Hume as an example of how he thinks about this).

This is a subtle, but major, point of confusion for me–I’d go so far as to say it is the crux of the problem–for it seems odd to say that consciousness is not separate from the brain even though we can’t do an ontological reduction from consciousness to the brain, especially if he thinks there need not be any necessary connection between consciousness and the brain. After all, one could understand Searle’s prohibition against ontological reduction as a kind of conceptual difficulty. That is, he might mean that we cannot conceptualize a first-person entity as being ontologically identical as a third-person entity, but if the reality is that they are ontologically the same thing, then one would think there must be a necessary connection between them (Isn’t that just Aristotle’s first law: all things are identical with themselves?). But if he’s saying that nature is intrinsically contingent at times, then there is no necessary connection between consciousness and brain processes even in nature (not just in our minds). Doesn’t that mean they have to be separate things?

I have no doubt that this all makes sense to Searle, but to me it’s kind of a mess. I’m hoping we can sort it out in this thread.

Searle is bascially a physicalist and he just asserts that the first person ontology exists. It’s a contradiction and it also contradicts the same position he advocates in the Chinese Room.

[gib]

@Moreno

Edit: as far as objects causing their properties. I don’t think that makes sense. It is as if the object is separate from its properties. The chair causes its mass is as if there is the chair without the mass (somewhere, somehow).

Nonsense! When I go for a jog, I acquire the property of “being very sweaty”–and my body caused that. For a property like solidity, we could explain it in terms of molecular interactions instead of the object itself. I’m not sure what Searle would say about a property like mass, but neither am I sure he thinks that all properties are a matter of the object somehow causing them. Maybe he only means it for emergent properties.

@Moreno

It seems like according to the link above he is avoiding saying.

I haven’t gone through the whole link. I will if I have time.

@Moreno

After meditating for a number of years, I found I could stay awake not just in REM sleep - lucid dreaming - but also be awake in non-rem sleep, hear myself snoring and all that.

I’m jealous of people like you.

@Moreno

I believe in panconsciousness. That everything is conscious, but that memory and other types of cognition require complexity. It is usually assumed that complexity is necessary for consciousness, but to me this is mere speculation and biased the way we are to see things like us as alive. The kind of active memory and other kinds of cognition, I think come in with complexity.

I believe something similar. If you were to ask me, the reason why cognition and memory require a complex neurochemical infrustructure is because it requires something complex in order to have the kind of experience (read: the quality of experience) necessary for survival in our environment. IOW, it is in virtue of how thoughts and memories feel to us that they can be used to analyze the world and predict outcomes.

@Moreno

I do not think it is necessarily ‘inner’. I think this is imposed on consciousness after the scientific model of perception is in place and so it seems obvious or given.

Yes, I agree. There is a sense in which our mental content is “inner,” but this to me only makes sense in terms of set theory: if “my mind” is a set, then all its content is “inside” the set–but this is very different from a spatial kind of “inner”.

Incidentally, you should know that Searle is steadfast against idealism. This is where I get my angst about “inner”. My views are a mix of idealism and, like you, panpsychism. But Searle hates both of these (and “hate” is not much of an overstatement). The alternative, then, is some form of naive realism (although such views don’t have to be literally naive, they do bank on a separation between perception and reality). So he would feel comfortable talking about “inner” mental content.

@Moreno

Here he seems to be saying it is different from solidity.
Which again seems to imply a kind of dualism which is what the commentator in the link seems to think also.

Searle denies he’s a dualist though he is often accused of being one. I think he’s right–if you really understand his theory, you see he’s a monist (if anything, I would think he’s a closet case physicalist, though he denounces mainstream physicalism–probably on the charge of the whole ontological reduction thing). What he says about the analogy to the reduction of solidity to molecular activity is that in both cases–consciousness/brain and solidity/molecules–it is a matter of causal reduction. But of course, solidity isn’t a first-person phenomenon, which makes the redefinition of “solidity” in terms of what it reduces to causally (i.e. molecular interactions) unproblematic–which may be the difference you’re noting.

@117938Aa

Searle is bascially a physicalist and he just asserts that the first person ontology exists. It’s a contradiction and it also contradicts the same position he advocates in the Chinese Room.

If you think that’s a contradiction, you don’t know physicalism.

[omar]

@gib

@gib

I’m listening to a lecture series on the philosophy of [mind] by John Searle from Berkeley University (I seriously recommend them–Searle is incredibly entertaining and funny–anyone who finds philosophy dry won’t after listening to his free iTunes-downloadable pod casts).

I didn’t want to re-type this, so I’m quoting myself. It’s as good an intro for this threads as it was for this one.

John Searle has an interesting, and very strange, theory of consciousness which I’d like to debate. It goes as follows:

He says consciousness is causally reducible to brain processes, but not ontologically reducible. That is, the physical processes in the brain are enough to cause consciousness (and that’s good enough to explain how consciousness arises from the brain), but what consciousness exists as is a first-person entity, and that makes it incompatible with an ontological reduction to any third-person entity such as the brain. So while you can say that brain processes cause consciousness, you cannot say that consciousness is just brain processes.

Yet, at the same time, Searle is not a dualist. He’s not saying that consciousness is something separate from the brain. He maintains that consciousness is to the brain as the solidity of a rock is to the molecular structure and activity of that rock.

I’m finding this difficult to wrap my head around. I don’t quite understand how the link between consciousness and the brain can be likened to that between the solidity and the molecular structure/activity of a rock without being a form of ontological reduction. I’m hoping we can flesh this out in this thread. But I should say a few more things about how Searle explains this before we begin:

Searle talks about different kinds of causal relations: You have causal relations through time–where one event causally brings about a subsequent event. You have cotemporaneous, but spatially separate, causal relations–where the actions of one object cotemporaneously affect the actions of another object, like the Earth’s gravity keeping the Moon in its orbit. And you also have reductive causal relations–where properties or activities on a higher level are caused by events on a lower level, like the interactions between molecules causing solidity at a higher level.

The latter kind of causal relation is what Searle thinks is going on in the mind/brain relation. Thus, he calls it causal reduction. But he says that in science, we typically go a step further and make an ontological reduction. We go from saying that solidity is caused by molecular interactions, to saying that solidity is molecular interactions. This further step, he says, is a redifinition of our original terms. We redifine “solidity” as “a certain kind of molecular interaction”.

He says that we can’t do this for consciousness. He says that to redefine “consciousness” as “certain kinds of brain processes” is to defeated the whole point of having the term “consciousness”. The point of having the term, he says, is to refer to this entity as having a first-person mode of existence, and if we redefine it in materialist terms (as brain processes), it will then denote an entity as having a third-person mode of existence. We will thereafter need a new term to refer to this (same?) entity as having a first-person mode of existence, but in that case, why not go back to the term “consciousness”?

He’s not entirely clear as to whether he thinks this is also a problem for things like the relation between molecular interactions and solidity, but he does make the distinction between what he calls “eliminative reduction” and his aforementioned “causal reduction”. Eliminative reduction is the kind of reduction you do on a phenomenon that, in effect, gets rid of that phenomenon. He sites sunsets and rainbows as examples. We now know that the Sun never really “sets” (in the sense of the Earth being still and the Sun “going down” below the horizon). And we also know that rainbows don’t actually exist as material (or etheral?) objects in the sky. Light just behaves differently as it passes through rain drops, and at certain points in the sky and at certain angles, we get the optical illusion of a colorful arch in the sky. But consciousness is real, Searle says, just as solidity is real. Just because we’re able to carry out a causal reduction on a phenomenon, it does not follow that we’ve eliminated it. He also talks about the dinstinction between solidity as redefined in terms of molecular interactions and solidity as a macroscopic and sensual property of some objects (“our good old friend solidity” he says). The latter, he says, is still real, but it isn’t clear whether he thinks the redefining of this kind of solidity in terms of molecular interactions poses the same kind of problem as the redefining of consciousness in terms of brain processes. In either case, we would still need to retain a word to refer to the original kind of phenomenon (first-person consciousness or “our good old friend solidity”), but in the case of “our good old friend solidity,” that’s still a third-person thing, so go figure.

A few other things Searle says: He says he agrees with a certain watered-down version of emergentism but not the mainstream kind that most emergentists identify themselves with. He agrees with the latter up to a point–namely, that consciousness can be thought of as an emergent property of brain process, but he disagrees with them when they say that, once consciousness emerges, it “takes on a life of its own” (which is essentially a form of dualism, and in my mind is incompatible with the concept of consciousness as an emergent property since that would effectively make it a whole entity unto itself).

He also says that he thinks of nature as “wildly contingent” (or was it “radically contingent”?), which is to say that sometimes in nature, cause/effect regularities are not at all necessary, that if it happens that certain brain processes result in these subjective first-person experiences that comprise consciousness, that’s just a brute fact about nature. If we don’t understand how that happens, too bad for us. He even goes so far as to say that it need not be the case that there is some necessary way by which nature brings this about and it’s just that we are incapable of understand it, for he thinks that nature can be, at times, inherently contingent (he sites Hume as an example of how he thinks about this).

This is a subtle, but major, point of confusion for me–I’d go so far as to say it is the crux of the problem–for it seems odd to say that consciousness is not separate from the brain even though we can’t do an ontological reduction from consciousness to the brain, especially if he thinks there need not be any necessary connection between consciousness and the brain. After all, one could understand Searle’s prohibition against ontological reduction as a kind of conceptual difficulty. That is, he might mean that we cannot conceptualize a first-person entity as being ontologically identical as a third-person entity, but if the reality is that they are ontologically the same thing, then one would think there must be a necessary connection between them (Isn’t that just Aristotle’s first law: all things are identical with themselves?). But if he’s saying that nature is intrinsically contingent at times, then there is no necessary connection between consciousness and brain processes even in nature (not just in our minds). Doesn’t that mean they have to be separate things?

I have no doubt that this all makes sense to Searle, but to me it’s kind of a mess. I’m hoping we can sort it out in this thread.

Hello gib

I haven’t listened to the lectures, but you seemed to have explained the confusion quite a bit, so I’m commenting on that- your reaction.
I have seen this argument before- against reductionism, or the understanding that we are nothing besides mental processes, chemical signatures, a brain event, a brain state, etc. The issue was taken by Karl Jaspers for example. He said that to avoid ambiguity and obscurity he would always use the expression “comprehend” for the intuitive vision of the spirit, from inside. He would never call comprehending, but “explaining” the knowing of the objective causal nexus that are always seen from outside. It is therefore possible to explain something without comprehending it. That’s a paraphrase from the General Psychopatology book he wrote.
Searle, I think, is trying to establish the same difference- not dualism. The reductionist approach, they argue, would explain a human action, but it will not comprehend such action. At the level of material causation you lose reference to the meaning such action may have had for the person. You lose the very object you wished to understand. What is explain is a corpse, not a person. A person, it’s argued, is more than the sum of biological states. It seems romantic at first, but you’ve to think about it a bit to see where they come from.
Sartre said that we’re “condemned to be free”. Put that differently, you could say that our brain is such that it determines our indeterminancy. How? Because it creates the flow of consciousness, because there is a manner of filtration by the senses of what is arrested, apprehended of the world, and then, what is sensed is given, because of our brains, some sort of meaning. That is as far the brain state gets. What X sensation will mean is undetermined. We can determine that such and such types of brains are predisposed for creativity, however we cannot determine in just what way they will be creative, what will be the expression of their general disposition.

Now perhaps Jaspers and Searle will make a bit more sense.
Taking measurements of the activity of a brain will help you in explaining what is happening to bring about a certain subjective experience. But only emphaty, if anything, can help you comprehend, that is, see from withing, imagine what is like for that person at that moment. Another way of putting it, you can know perfectly the operation of a bat’s brain; you can explain it. But you will have no comprehension as to what it is like to be a bat.
So, if one has to ask why we do the things we do, it is not sufficient to explain the brain states leading up to the phenomenon, the action you wish to understand. One has to wonder about the subjective experience, what it was like for the person, not just the brain that makes the person possible. We have to analyse sympathetically what that person was thinking because ultimately a human action, or what Searl might have meant by “first-person mode of existence”, is as dependent, if not more dependent, on that as it is dependent on the state of the brain. Our brains are not the entire story. They explain the necessity of our interpretative selves- not the necessity of a given interpretation attached to any given brain state. This is where he gets to talk about a diversity of causes for a given effect and a diversity of effects to a cause. Causality thus, in the realm of human subjectivity, loses some of it’s explanatory power.

It is hard to explain, yes, but what Searle was aiming for, as well as Jaspers, or Galimberti, was to bring to the table all phenomena and not just those measurable by science. Reductionism, scientism, are not necessary, nor sufficient, to explain a person’s biography.

[Moreno]

@gib

Nonsense! When I go for a jog, I acquire the property of “being very sweaty”–and my body caused that.

Even if this were the case, I was not arguing that no properties of objects are caused by the objects. But I am not sure even this one works. Part of the body was put on the outside of the body. Is that a property now of the body? Is it the same body? Is the body sweaty or are there in fact many small objects - water molecules - which are a liquid and have the properties of liquids, now on the Surface of the body? But then I Think other properties have more problems. It seems to me IS is getting confused by effects. Or to put this Another way, this would mean, in the end, that objects are a Collection of effects with no cause. Since once we label all of their properties effects, there is nothing left to have caused these effects.

@Moreno

After meditating for a number of years, I found I could stay awake not just in REM sleep - lucid dreaming - but also be awake in non-rem sleep, hear myself snoring and all that.

I’m jealous of people like you.

I am much prouder of now being able to juggle.

I believe something similar. If you were to ask me, the reason why cognition and memory require a complex neurochemical infrustructure is because it requires something complex in order to have the kind of experience (read: the quality of experience) necessary for survival in our environment. IOW, it is in virtue of how thoughts and memories feel to us that they can be used to analyze the world and predict outcomes.

We are on the same page here. Of course even the simplest visible object is incredibly complex - once you get down to microsopic levels - so I don’t want to rule out types of likely very slow cognition in even things we consider inorganic, but I remain agnostic on that. Something like the sun which has a very complicated kind of evolving homeostasis, however, I am a bit more optimistic about.

Incidentally, you should know that Searle is steadfast against idealism. This is where I get my angst about “inner”. My views are a mix of idealism and, like you, panpsychism. But Searle hates both of these (and “hate” is not much of an overstatement). The alternative, then, is some form of naive realism (although such views don’t have to be literally naive, they do bank on a separation between perception and reality). So he would feel comfortable talking about “inner” mental content.

In a sense an empiricist is an idealist, since all the Words used to describe objects, for example, are actually describing repeatable experiencings. IOW even if one is a naive realist and an empiricist, one is restricted to being a functional idealist. (with a faith based, and useful, belief in things-in-themselves ‘out there’)

[gib]

@Moreno

Even if this were the case, I was not arguing that no properties of objects are caused by the objects. But I am not sure even this one works. Part of the body was put on the outside of the body. Is that a property now of the body? Is it the same body? Is the body sweaty or are there in fact many small objects - water molecules - which are a liquid and have the properties of liquids, now on the Surface of the body?

These are just different descriptions of the same thing–they’re not mutually exclusive. When you jog and become sweaty, that’s a fact. It’s a fact that you are now sweaty. To say that you have sweat on you is also a fact, but it’s a description of the sweat as an object(s), not a property.

It’s also a fact that your body causes you to sweat. It causes your sweat molecules to travel from inside your body to outside (as you would put it), or we could just say that your body causes you to become sweaty (as I, and most people, would say), and this too is a fact. One describes sweat as an object, the other as a property. It’s a language thing.

And it’s obviously an emergent property. You weren’t sweaty before, you became sweaty. Your body was the cause of its own transition, of its own acquisition of a new property (yes, from something inside itself which it always had).

@Moreno

But then I Think other properties have more problems. It seems to me IS is getting confused by effects. Or to put this Another way, this would mean, in the end, that objects are a Collection of effects with no cause. Since once we label all of their properties effects, there is nothing left to have caused these effects.

You only get rid of the cause if you think of it as one and the same as the effect or the property, but we have to make some distinctions here.

@Moreno

We are on the same page here. Of course even the simplest visible object is incredibly complex - once you get down to microsopic levels - so I don’t want to rule out types of likely very slow cognition in even things we consider inorganic, but I remain agnostic on that. Something like the sun which has a very complicated kind of evolving homeostasis, however, I am a bit more optimistic about.

Yes, indeed, and when it comes to inorganic materials, I imagine them to have a different quality of experience to us (probably not cognition), but it would be a sort of calm, balanced, or neutral quality of experience, something to keep it in equilibrium. This is what keeps most inanimate objects at rest.

[Moreno]

@gib

These are just different descriptions of the same thing–they’re not mutually exclusive. When you jog and become sweaty, that’s a fact. It’s a fact that you are now sweaty.

yah, sort of. I mean just because it is the right adjective and grammar doesn’t mean the object ‘body’ has a property. I mean, say I lean on a wall, have I become wally? I vomit, have I gained a property? If not, it is because what has emerged from me is not touching my skin (unless I threw up on myself). We certainly say that when we get dirt on our skin we are Dirty, but is this a property of the body or something contingent?

It seems like our use of adjective can be misleading since they are of the same category, but some properties they describe seem essential to the objects and others do not.

Is my body creating it’s colors?
To me it makes more sense to say it has or is certain things that when light strikes it…etc.
Likewise with mass or shape. It is this. You cannot separate out the identity of the object from these properties.

To say that you have sweat on you is also a fact, but it’s a description of the sweat as an object(s), not a property.

That’s the issue I am raising. Now my body has caused an object. This sounds magical.

It’s also a fact that your body causes you to sweat. It causes your sweat molecules to travel from inside your body to outside (as you would put it), or we could just say that your body causes you to become sweaty (as I, and most people, would say), and this too is a fact. One describes sweat as an object, the other as a property. It’s a language thing.

Good we are on the same page with that, but when is an adjective an indication of a property caused by an object?

And it’s obviously an emergent property. You weren’t sweaty before, you became sweaty. Your body was the cause of its own transition, of its own acquisition of a new property (yes, from something inside itself which it always had).

I don’t Think that’s an emergent property- except literally, since the sweat emerges. It’s not something beyond the chemical and physiological properties of the body. It doesn’t need new laws to describe.

You only get rid of the cause if you think of it as one and the same as the effect or the property, but we have to make some distinctions here.

But still, there is nothing but the effects of the object. It seems like we have a set of causeless effects. I mean that is not so different from some partical physicals. Nothings with qualities, so maybe it is OK, but if we are going to check by looking at every day language it seems odd to me.

Does the body cause its shape?

@Moreno

We are on the same page here. Of course even the simplest visible object is incredibly complex - once you get down to microsopic levels - so I don’t

Yes, indeed, and when it comes to inorganic materials, I imagine them to have a different quality of experience to us (probably not cognition), but it would be a sort of calm, balanced, or neutral quality of experience, something to keep it in equilibrium. This is what keeps most inanimate objects at rest.]

Though perhaps they are like Ents, only more so, and decision making and reactions take Place over huge periods of time. Perhaps the metals are absolutely freaked out with all our alloy-making and forming.

[gib]

@Moreno

yah, sort of. I mean just because it is the right adjective and grammar doesn’t mean the object ‘body’ has a property. I mean, say I lean on a wall, have I become wally? I vomit, have I gained a property? If not, it is because what has emerged from me is not touching my skin (unless I threw up on myself). We certainly say that when we get dirt on our skin we are Dirty, but is this a property of the body or something contingent?

You’re still thinking of these things as objects. Properties aren’t objects; they’re closer to states an object is in. We don’t have a word ‘wally’ in our language, but if people really needed a way of describing people who lean against walls, why couldn’t they say such people are wally?

@Moreno

It seems like our use of adjective can be misleading since they are of the same category, but some properties they describe seem essential to the objects and others do not.

That I will agree with. The essential properties of an object are just what make the object the thing it is–take those away and it just isn’t the same object anymore.

@Moreno

Is my body creating it’s colors?

If you were a chameleon, it would.

@Moreno

To me it makes more sense to say it has or is certain things that when light strikes it…etc.

Yes, we can always say this. But I don’t see why that makes the use of “causal” terminology mistaken. If my body doesn’t cause my color, that fine; something else does (although you could say my body participates, or has a say, in which wavelengths get reflected and which don’t). With things like mass and shape, again, it depends on whether we’re talking about an emerging property or not. Shape can change, but it will still be the same object (and the object itself might bring about its own change in shape). Same with solidity–imagine it was ice that melted. I don’t think mass can be said to be an emergent property. Searle talks about things like mass and velocity as being the sum of the parts (velocity would probably have to be talked about as an average of its parts) whereas emergent properties are typically more than the sum of their parts.

@Moreno

Now my body has caused an object. This sounds magical.

So don’t say it like that–stick to properties. If you want to translate “being sweaty” into object terms, you have to also translate how you describe the cause/effect relationship properly. Obviously, the object that your body had an effect on was the sweat, but it didn’t “bring it about”; rather, it pushed it from inside to outside–it caused an action.

@Moreno

Good we are on the same page with that, but when is an adjective an indication of a property caused by an object?

I don’t know, you’d have to look at the science behind it. If there’s a certain property that an object can lose or gain, you have to ask, does it lose or gain this property by some action or process that it does to itself or happens within itself. If so, you can say the object caused its own property.

@Moreno

It’s not something beyond the chemical and physiological properties of the body. It doesn’t need new laws to describe.

Why should it need new laws? As I said above, don’t think of emergent properties as new objects that come into existence; they’re more like states the object enters into.

@Moreno

But still, there is nothing but the effects of the object.

You mean because all properties can be thought of as effects? And there’s nothing left of an object once you take away all its properties? Remember that every effect can be a cause of something else, and visa-versa. Put it this way: all actions or state of affairs are effects brought about by some cause. Since the entire universe is composed of nothing but actions and states of affairs, the universe is made of nothing but effects. Where did all the causes go?

@Moreno

Does the body cause its shape?

Sure, if I were a gymnast.

@Moreno

Though perhaps they are like Ents, only more so, and decision making and reactions take Place over huge periods of time. Perhaps the metals are absolutely freaked out with all our alloy-making and forming.

Ha! Maybe. But I try to steer as far away from anthropomorphism as possible. I doubt metals ever get “freaked out” or care what happens to alloys. I think they feel something, but it’s probably incomprehensible to us.

[gib]

double post