On Searle: Irreducibility Without Dualism?

As I said earlier, John R. Searle is a great philosophical critic. Armed with muscular prose, common sense, and a surly (Searle-ly?) attitude, he shreds the sophistry of Dennett and Co. But I have never quite understood his own solution to the mind-body problem. Herewith, some notes on one aspect of my difficulties and his.

The Mystery of Consciousness (1997) ends on this note: "We can, in short, accept irreducibility without accepting dualism." (214) Consciousness is irreducible, but still "a part of the ordinary physical world." How exactly?

Searle sees with crystal clarity that it makes  no  sense at all to think that conscious phenomena are reducible to an underlying physical reality in the way that perceived lightning, say, is reducible to an atmospheric electrical discharge. With respect to objective phenomena such as lightning it makes sense to distinguish appearance and reality and to attempt a description of the underlying reality in observer-independent terms. But "where consciousness is concerned, the reality is the appearance." (213) Just so.

The esse of a pain, for example,  is its percipi: no sort of logical wedge can be driven between the two. Searle likes to say that mental data have a "first-person ontology." That amounts to saying that pains and the like have a mode of existence radically different from the mode of existence of nonconscious items. Digestion and photosynthesis occur whether or not they are experienced; "but consciousness only exists when it is experienced as such." (213)

But this smacks of dualism, does it not? You have two radically different modes of existence just as in Descartes there is the radical difference between thought and extension. If you know your Descartes, you know that for him 'thought' covers all manner of conscious data, not just thinking in contrast to sensing, imagining, wishing, willing, etc. A res cogitans, a thinking thing, is a conscious (and indeed self-conscious) thing. So we could just as well name the Cartesian modes of being consciousness and extension. This seems to be close (though of course not identical) to what Searle is getting at: there is first-person (subjective) being and third-person (objective) being: "consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything that has a third-person or objective ontology" (212) Searle (mis)uses the inflated term 'ontology' where it would be better to use 'being' or 'existence.'

The last quotation explains why Searle is not a materialist: he is not trying to reductively identify something essentially first-personal with something essentially third-personal. So far so good. But then why does he fight shy of being called a dualist? Even if he is not a substance dualist like Descartes, why does he not own up to being a property dualist?

The answer, I am afraid, is that he is in the grip of the ideology of scientific naturalism. In contemporary philosophy of mind, nothing is worse than to get yourself called a dualist. For then you are an unscientific superstitious fellow who believes in spook stuff, ghosts in machines, and worse. Next stop: the Twilight Zone.

Searle is in a tough bind. He appreciates the irreducibility of mind and sees clearly the hopelessness of behaviorism, identity-materialism, and functionalism. But at all costs he must contain his insight into irreducibility and not allow it any spiritual or dualistic significance. Consider this sentence: "Consciousness is a real part of the real world and it cannot be eliminated in favor of, or reduced to, something else." (210)

But what is the real world? Why, the natural world. So what Searle is saying is that consciousness is in the natural world as a "real and intrinsic feature of certain biological systems" but it has a first-person ontology that makes it radically different from everything else in the natural world.

This appears to be a contradiction since the natural world is just the world of the (objective, third-personal) natural sciences. Natural entities have a third-person ontology. So if consciousness is natural, then it too must have a third-person ontology. It is a contradiction to say that consciousness is both natural and has a first-personal ontology.

To avoid contradiction, Searle ought to admit that there is more to reality than nature. But he cannot do this, of course, without abandoning his ideological and scientistic commitment to scientific naturalism.

This comes out very clearly on pp. 118-124 of The Rediscovery of the Mind(1992). There he is concerned to deny that the irreducibility of consciousness has any "deep consequences." Searle writes:

. . . the irreducibility of consciousness is a trivial consequence of the pragmatics of our definitional practices. A trivial result such as this has only trivial consequences. It has no deep metaphysical consequences for the unity of our overall scientific world view. It does not show that consciousness is not part of the ultimate furniture of reality or cannot be a subject of scientific investigation or cannot be brought into our overall physical conception of the universe . . . .

One can see from this that for Searle, the unity of the scientific world view must be preserved at all costs. One can also see that Searle identifies ultimate reality with the physical world which is the subject of scientific investigation. But how can consciousness be irreducible and not threaten the unity of the scientific world view?

Searle's answer is that the irreducibility of consciousness is merely an artifact of a pragmatic decision to carry out reductions in a certain way. "Consciousness fails to be reducible, not because of some mysterious feature, but simply because by definition it falls outside the pattern of reduction that we have chosen to use for pragmatic reasons." (122-123)

This suggests that we might have chosen a different "pattern of reduction," and that, had we done so, consciousness would not have been irreducible. But what could that mean?

It doesn't mean anything! Obviously, consciousness provides the epistemic access to every objective phenomenon which we can then attempt to reduce to a more fundamental reality. Because I am conscious I feel heat which I can then explain in terms of mean molecular kinetic energy. Because I am conscious, I see the lightning before I hear the thunder and can go on to explain why in terms of light waves whose propagation needs no medium unlike sound waves that move throught the air, etc. Because I am conscious, I am aware of a certain freshness in the air after a thunderstorm, a freshness that I then reduce to the presence of ozone, etc.

Searle is right that consciousness is irreducible, but this irreducibility is grounded in the nature of consciousness, in its "first person ontology." This nature is not a trivial consequence of a mere decision on our part as to how we shall conduct reductions.

Once one sees that the fancy footwork on pp. 122-123 of RM is a sham motivated by an ideological commitment to scientific naturalism, one sees that Searle has not avoided dualism. He has failed to provide a satisfying naturalistic solution to the mind-body problem.

There are other problems as well, which I will leave for later.

Comments

[Joseph A.]

While I agree that Searle is a fantastic critic, I admit that (as an admitted, express amateur on this and most philosophical topics) I always can't help but think his argument boils down to, 'If I just call the mental physical, everything is solved.'

And now, to expose my amateur-ness. Searle is not a materialist? What would he be called then? He's not a dualist or a panpsychist (is he), so what would be left? Or is he off in his own category?

[bobkoepp]

I've never understood how Searle's appeal to pragmatic considerations is supposed to explain why consciousness won't be reduced. But I don't think that can be turned into an argument against monism. Consciousness, after all, is hardly the only "thing" that resists reduction -- most tellingly, the most fundamental "things" posited by physical theories. Taking an historical view, forces of the sort posited in Newtonian mechanics aren't reducible to Cartesian extension (nor, for that matter, is the "resistance to deformation" that Descartes attributed to matter). We don't know what sorts of "occult properties" sceintific investigations will urge on us.

[Ilíon]

Can there even be a recognition of, much less any discussion of, any sort of "third-person (objective) being" is there is not first some "first-person (subjective) being" to do the recognizing and discussing?

It's similar to the "consciousness is an illusion" mind-set ... one points out that 'illusion' presupposes the very thing it is being alleged to explain and eliminate.

[J. Istre]

Thanks for this post. I have been reading Searle, and I was wondering how to interpret his claim that he is neither a materialist nor a dualist.

He wielded his critique of the various forms of materialism effectively, but then with a redefinition of terms, claims to reject materialism and dualism. As I read his "solution" it did not ring true; it sounded to me like he was simply redefining the words used in the debate rather than expressing a new solution.

Then I read some of his comments on science, and I somewhat understood where he was coming from. He sees science as something to be revered in its certainty. As he mentions the history of science, with the standard litany of science shattering superstition time and again, only to show the entire truth in some unforeseen time in the near future, I got the impression that perhaps he does not have a solid grounding in history.

Perhaps if he would revere science less than philosophy, maybe he would take his arguments against materialism a little further, which I am imagining could be a brilliant critique of materialism in general and the limits of scientific inquiry. His fear (as I see it) of a critique of scientific inquiry is perhaps holding him back from some brilliant insights into the issues.

[HTB]

I'm wondering if there is not a Reppertesque argument for dualism to be found in the fourth paragraph from the bottom. If it is really because we are conscious of things like heat, lightning, etc. that we can pursue investigation of how they work or reduce them to more fundamental descriptions, then it follows that conscious experience is causal to other human behaviors and even to other mental excercises. But, if one holds to physical causal closure without reductionism, then the experience of heat is not itself causal to anything. One's consciously perceiving lightning and thunder would not really benefit one's ability to explain why the appearance of light precedes the sound of thunder.

I do know that one could show that it is the conscious perception rather than the physiological counterpart which enables us to perform such actions as reduction and explanation, but it certainly does seem that the subjective quality plays some role in the formulation of the question (why we see the lightning before we hear the thunder, for example), as well as our understanding of the components (such as light waves as contrasted to sound waves). It would seem that we were seeking to discover something, not merely about the things subjectively perceived, but about how they are subjectively perceived. This seems problematic for physical causal closure. I do not know what Searle would make of it, as I seem to recall an argument in Mind that mental properties are causal, but I think it would still be problematic for epiphenomenalist and supervenientist philosophies of mind.

In any case, a very good post. This whole series on philosophy of mind has been excellent. Thank you, Bill.

[Spencer]

Hi Bill,

Let me see if I've got this right--consciousness is the space in which reducible events occur because the subjective experience can be cashed out into signs of objective reality (for instance, your example of lightning). But consciousness itself isn't subject to that means of explanation because it is subjectivity itself! If you try to step away from it, it vanishes. That is why the Dennett explanations will always fall short.

[Steve T]

Great post, Bill. I haven't read as much Searle as you have, but from what I have read, plus a nifty tape series he did from The Teaching Company, I came to the same conclusion. He cuts down the physicalist arguments and then just *posits* that the mind fits within his naturalistic world view.

Take care,

Steve

[Vlastimil Vohánka]

Two papers similar to this thread:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/f315455273744p08 (by my friend D. D. Novotný)
http://dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=48 (by D. Willard)