Consciousness by John Searle

John Searle is one of the leading modern philosophers of consciousness. He posits his view on consciousness in between what could be regarded as two opposing extremes; namely, (Cartesian) dualism on the one side and materialism on the other. Searle's view goes under the name of biological naturalism and argues that consciousness is neither a capability of the immaterial soul, as Descartes declared, nor an illusion created solely by the material parts of the brain, as materialists would put it. Rather, it is a biological phenomenon, like any other (eg. Photosynthesis), that emerges from the brain, but is not merely the sum of various structures of the brain – i.e. it is a higher-order function of the brain. To be more precise, Searle claims that consciousness is caused by neurobiological processes and is realized in the structure of the brain. Furthermore, he emphasizes that it is wrong to regard consciousness as some sort of a “part” of the brain, but rather as the state that the brain is in, just like water is in the liquid state – the liquidity of the water isn’t exactly a part of the water itself, but how the water (its smaller parts – molecules) is while it is liquid. It can, of course, also turn into a solid-state, just like the brain can go into an unconscious state.

Seeing that it is fairly difficult to define consciousness, perhaps it would be best to quote Searle himself; “Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes of sentience or awareness. Consciousness, so defined, begins when we wake in the morning from a dreamless sleep - and continues until we fall asleep again, die, go into a coma or otherwise become "unconscious." It includes all of the enormous variety of the awareness that we think of as characteristic of our waking life. It includes everything from feeling a pain, to perceiving objects visually, to states of anxiety and depression, to working out cross word puzzles, playing chess, trying to remember your aunt's phone number, arguing about politics, or to just wishing you were somewhere else. Dreams on this definition are a form of consciousness, though of course they are in many respects quite different from waking consciousness.” (https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~paller/dialogue/csc1.pdf)

In other words, consciousness is seen as a first-person experience of the world - what it is like to go through the states of perception, awareness, feelings, etc. From such a viewpoint, consciousness is, by definition, subjective. This makes it more difficult to objectively (and accordingly, scientifically) assess it, but Searle argues that the ontological subjectivity of consciousness does not imply that epistemological objectivity is impossible. To put it in fewer words; despite the fact that consciousness is subjective, we can still gather objective knowledge on it.

Furthermore, Searle disagrees with the argument that consciousness is something like a sum of the current stimuli/perceptions. For this he provides an example; if someone were to wake up in a dark and completely silent room, he would still be conscious; i.e. despite not yet being externally stimulated by anything, his state is certainly different from the one he was in when he was asleep/unconscious. Consequently, senses are not what causes consciousness, they merely modify consciousness that already “exists”. This is similar to the previous statement that consciousness is more than a sum of different parts (what Searle calls building block theory); it is rather “a feature of the brain emerging from the activities of large masses of neurons, and which cannot be explained by the activities of individual neurons.” This view is called the unified field theory in which consciousness is an intrinsic state of the brain, not a response to external stimuli. Moreover, unified field theory is further developed into what is called the dynamic core hypothesis which posits that “we should not look for consciousness in a specific sort of neuronal type, but rather in the activities of large neuronal populations”.

To summarize, due to the complexity behind the concept of consciousness, it is necessary, in Searle’s view, not to fall prey to various erroneous arguments such as (1) the historically important but outdated dualism and materialism, (2) the mechanical view of consciousness as a software/computer program, or (3) the building block view in which consciousness is seen merely as the processing of information. The problem with (1) dualism is that it divides the immaterial world from the material and states that consciousness is the consequence of the former. This, however, along with its mystification of consciousness, fails to address the relation between the two alleged worlds. On the other hand, materialism with its insistence on exploring solely the material parts denies the existence of consciousness altogether. Furthemore, to bring down (2) the view of consciousness as something like a computer program, Searle developed the famous Chinese room argument which explains why highly developed AI’s (i.e. “computer programs”) cannot be defined as conscious in the human sense of the word. Finally, (3) Searle disagrees that consciousness is merely the reaction to what the brain processes from the world because a person could, in theory, be conscious even without having any outside stimuli. Consciousness is, therefore, neither of the aforementioned things, but rather a mental phenomenon that emerges from the neurobiological processes of the brain (it is also the state that the brain is in, rather than a “part” – immaterial or material – of it). How exactly it emerges, remains open.