© michael lacewing consciousness and biological naturalism michael lacewing...
TRANSCRIPT
Searle on consciousness
• Creature consciousness: some organisms are conscious, some aren’t
• State consciousness: conscious creatures have conscious mental states, in which the creature is conscious of something
• Consciousness as a ‘field’, states as ‘flux’ in the field
A functional account
• Searle must say what creature consciousness is.
• An alternative is this: – A creature is conscious if it has conscious
mental states.– A mental state is conscious just in case it
has certain other (causal-functional) relations to other states and behaviour.
• But functionalism faces the objection from qualia.
The ‘first-personal’ nature of
consciousness• Searle: the phenomena and reality of
consciousness is irreducibly ‘first-personal’, known from the ‘inside’
• Conscious states are only available (as conscious) to the person whose states they are
• Functional analysis is ‘third-personal’, from the ‘outside’, which is why it misses the subjective perspective
Biological naturalism
• Consciousness is a biological property, a ‘systemic’ property of the (working) brain
• Systemic properties are properties of a whole system not possessed by its parts, e.g. liquidity, transparency– In these two cases, we can
explain the systemic property in terms of molecular arrangements
Biological naturalism
• Neurones aren’t conscious, but some brain processes, as a whole, are conscious– Consciousness is
caused by neuronal processes
• So consciousness is a natural, biological property
Objection
• We can give scientific questions of why liquids are liquid, why glass is transparent
• But the first-personal nature of consciousness prevents us giving a scientific (third-personal) explanation; so consciousness is not a physical property (an argument for property dualism)
Searle on reduction
• With the molecular explanation of liquidity, we redefine liquidity as a particular arrangement of molecules (ontological reduction)
• We could do the same with consciousness, but we don’t, because it would miss out the first-personal aspect of consciousness
• But this doesn’t show consciousness isn’t physical - we have already explained that it is a systemic property of the brain
• The unwillingness to reduce is pragmatic, not metaphysical
When are two things really one thing?
• With liquidity, the explanation also shows why, given how molecules interact, the substance must be liquid; so we can’t think of the two as separate
• Nagel: we can’t imagine an explanation that would show why neuronal activity has to produce consciousness; so it is natural to suppose that consciousness is something more than just neuronal activity
Searle’s response
• Neuroscience might yet produce such an explanation– But how can any third-personal
explanation account for first-personal phenomena?
• Scientific theories don’t always show why something must be the case, e.g. e=mc2
Naturalism?
• Is Searle a property dualist? He says ‘no’
• But if consciousness is irreducibly first-personal, then if it is a biological property, it is unique, not like any other biological property