The Rediscovery of the Mind (Representation and Mind) by John R. Searle (PDF)

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In this major new work, John Searle launches a formidable attack on current orthodoxies in the philosophy of mind. More than anything else, he argues, it is the neglect of consciousness that results in so much barrenness and sterility in psychology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science: there can be no study of mind that leaves out consciousness. What is going on in the brain is neurophysiological processes and consciousness and nothing more—no rule following, no mental information processing or mental models, no language of thought, and no universal grammar. Mental events are themselves features of the brain, “like liquidity is a feature of water.”Beginning with a spirited discussion of what’s wrong with the philosophy of mind, Searle characterizes and refutes the philosophical tradition of materialism. But he does not embrace dualism. All these “isms” are mistaken, he insists. Once you start counting types of substance you are on the wrong track, whether you stop at one or two. In four chapters that constitute the heart of his argument, Searle elaborates a theory of consciousness and its relation to our overall scientific world view and to unconscious mental phenomena. He concludes with a criticism of cognitive science and a proposal for an approach to studying the mind that emphasizes the centrality of consciousness to any account of mental functioning.In his characteristically direct style, punctuated with persuasive examples, Searle identifies the very terminology of the field as the main source of truth. He observes that it is a mistake to suppose that the ontology of the mental is objective and to suppose that the methodology of a science of the mind must concern itself only with objectively observable behavior; that it is also a mistake to suppose that we know of the existence of mental phenomena in others only by observing their behavior; that behavior or causal relations to behavior are not essential to the existence of mental phenomena; and that it is inconsistent with what we know about the universe and our place in it to suppose that everything is knowable by us.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review The computationalists have probably never had such a powerful challenge as this book.―Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review About the Author John R. Searle is Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Elimativist materialism (the view that consciousness can be reduced to brain states) is untenable because we all know that consciousness is quite real. Property dualism is also untenable because it treats the brain and consciousness as seperate things. So, what is a poor philosophic bloke to do?John Searle, making arguments similar to Colin McGinn and Thomas Nagel, argues for a “biological naturalism” that sees consciousness as part of the brain – but a part of the brain that is quite baffling because of several irreducible properties. Consciousness studies and the philosophy of mind have been quite unsuccessful, Searle says, because in their view that real things must be objective (in a third-person sense), these fields are quite at a loss for what to do about the irreducibly first-person thing called consciousness. So, even though we all know that consciousness is very real (otherwise, what is doing the knowing?) our third-person model of objective science has a lot of trouble dealing with the idea of consciousness.The best chapters of this book, to me, are the early ones. Particularly, I enjoyed Searle’s astute diagnosis of the problems the study of consciousness has encountered, and how it seems to make the same mistakes over and over again. Particularly useful to me and my purposes was the appendix to the second chapter: Is There a Problem About Folk Psychology? It is a mock dialogue between Searle and a believer in the idea that all “mind talk” would be better replaced by “brain talk.” Searle uses straight talk and wit to show this position to be absolutely ludicrous.The later chapters tend to focus on Searle’s objections to seeing consciousness as a computer, arguing basically that the mind must be more than this becuase to compute, one must need to recognize the valid inputs and know how to use them. (Speech is more than sybols. It requires an individual to decide what syntax, semantics, etc, to use. That is more than a regular computer can do.)This view has become, I think, less controversial than when Searle advanced it. Jerry Fodor has espoused similar objections in his

⭐and recently, Jonathan Hawkins has argued for a very different view of intelligence (as predictor rather than computer) in his

⭐.Throughout, Searle’s arguments are sharp, his writing is crisp, and he is quite creative in his use of (sometimes humorous) thought experiments. This is an excellent place to start when getting into Searle’s view on the philosophy of mind. Also, though, I would still recommend Colin McGinn’s very similar case in

⭐.

⭐This man is extremely interesting to watch, listen to and read. Very in depth study of the nature of consciousness without diving and tangling one into the weeds and mire most “classical” scholars on the subject seem to leave us all alone in. If you are looking at a refreshing and unique point of view of how the faculties of mind work, have a go at Searle.

⭐I’ve found this book excellent as a start point for rethinking the way to study the brain and the mind. Searle states very clear the different aspects of his sketicism against the currently installed ideas and opens the path to a much more interesting way of thinking about the our brains and our mind.I recommend reading this book in order to start studying the amazing and interesting world of the mind and it also allowed me to research other books related to areas covered by Searle and shed more light in a yet young science and philosophy of the brain and mind.

⭐It is probably worth the price of admission just to read Searle make the (one would think) obvious point that we really are conscious, and that the attempts by materialists of one type or another to define away the irksome problem of subjective experience (“qualia”) are absurd. Indeed, much of what Searle lays down in the way of premises is quite promising, in that you might think, after reading the introduction, that you are going to be treated to a really fresh and exciting attempt at solving the mind-body problem.Unfortunately, the book pretty much goes off the rails as soon as Chapter 2 starts, and one quickly begins to wonder whether there were any rails there to begin with. Searle starts chapter 2 with the classic “silicon brain” thought experiment, in which doctors replace your neurons, one by one, with silicon chips that perform, by premise, the exact same functions. Searle now enumerates the possible outcomes of this experiment. 1) Nothing happens. 2) Your behavior remains the same, but your “awareness” slowly shrinks, that is, you gradually turn into a metaphysical zombie. 3) You remain fully conscious, but gradually lose control of your body, until you are trapped, fully conscious, in a paralyzed body.So what’s wrong? Everything! Case 1 (nothing happens), is clearly the most plausible outcome of the experiment, yet it represents one position Searle wishes to destroy in this book. This bodes poorly for him. The outcome in case 2 is incoherent upon a little reflection. How can one be consciously aware of the loss of conscious awareness? Searle illustrates this outcome as follows (page 66): ‘You find, for example, that when the doctors test your vision, you hear them say, “We are holding up a red object in front of you; please tell us what you see.” You want to cry out, “I can’t see anything. I’m going totally blind.” But you hear your voice saying in a way that is completely out your control, “I see a red object in front of me.”‘ Somehow, Searle has envisioned a scenario in which you lose the ability to experience visual qualia, but you apparently are still able to enjoy the subjective experience of your own inner monologue. How can this be? Further, Searle has described a subjective experience (that of going blind) that might supposedly accompany the loss of the ability to have subjective experiences. Where before you saw and experienced redness, now you presumably see and experience blackness or nothingness. This is dualism plain and simple; Searle has place the patient firmly in the cartesian theatre, his earlier denunciation of dualism notwithstanding.So far, these are all forgivable faults. But now we come to case 3 (you retain your subjective experience but become physically paralyzed), where Searle takes seriously an outcome that is plainly in direct contradiction of his stated premises! Searle clearly states that the neuron replacement procedure preserves the physical behavior of each neuron completely – how then is there any room left for the physical behavior of the person as a whole to change?From there Searle goes on to another thought experiment, wherein he talks about the task of redesigning a conscious robot that happens to be miserable with one that exhibits precisely the same behavior, but without the pesky consciousness that causes it to be unhappy. He seems to be trying to establish the clear possibility of metaphysical zombies, but he doesn’t stop to inquire how the designer of the unconscious robot would know that his efforts had succeeded if, after all, both models of the robot must exhibit precisely the same behavior.This failure to take seriously the implications of imagining conscious and unconscious individuals who behave identically is a common thread throughout the book. It would be disappointing in a undergraduate paper on the topic, but it is nearly inexplicable in a book by a man of Searle’s stature. What was he thinking? Was he thinking?The rest of the book is a shambles as well. Searle’s thesis is apparently the statement “brains cause consciousness”. However, this is never really supported except insofar as it is repeatedly asserted. Nor is it ever explained what view this uncontroversial statement is in opposition to. Does anyone claim that brains don’t cause consciousness? He repeatedly turns to analogies to other biological processes such as digestion to drive home his contention that consciousness is an ordinary biological phenomenon, without addressing the obvious objection that while there are universally accepted tests by which 3rd persons can agree on whether digestion is taking place, no such test exists for the phenomenon of consciousness. Clearly there is something very different about consciousness (after all, no one studies the philosophy of digestion), but Searle insults his readers’ intelligence by blithely pretending that there isn’t. The dusty old Chinese Room argument is trotted out a few times – this is perhaps the greatest example of Searle’s failure to really consider the implications of his thought experiments deeply. He doesn’t, for instance, ask what his Chinese Room would have to look like if it were capable of taking, as input, a chinese language version of “The Rediscovery of the Mind” and returning, as output, any of the reviews on this page.Harrumph! Harrumph I say! For a far better book I recommend “Consciousness Explained”, by Daniel Dannett. Despite the book’s failure to deliver what its title promises, it is far more rewarding than Searle’s work.

⭐Clear and well argued. In the introduction he writes (concerning the functionalist approach to consciousness): “If you believe in functionalism you don’t need refutation, you need therapy.” That a joke folks. This work is both a refutation of functionalism and a strong affirmation of the first person reality of consciousness. Essential.

⭐Easy to read, and he does a great job conveying his thoughts clearly and with humor.Amateurs can probably make sense of it without terrible difficulty. His emphasis on the difficulties our language has brought to the problem is especially valuable.

⭐John Searle are the closest to the problems of mind, he understands the most deeply among other philosophers why we never will be fully understand it. But he still is in hope. He writes from many aspects of mind but fails to declare that the subjective-objective opposition in the case of mind makes it impossible to understand it. A third person science never will be capable to treat the first person mind properly.

⭐I enjoyed this book, but I struggled to find anything in it that wasn’t already being said by philosophers from the continental position.

⭐I wish I has read this 20 years ago. Searle writes with assurance and clarity. He makes more sense than any philosophy I’ve read before.

⭐の論考。別のSearleの本でも同じですが、Searleの意見はおおむね常識的で何かの党派的な説に偏ってもいないように思われ、最後まで面白く読めます。「心的機能は消化機能と同じく人体の機能の一つである」という指摘は、言われればあたりまえの事ですが、心的機能をなにか特別で特殊な（悪く？すると神的神秘的な）機能のように考えがちなヒトにとっては覚えておくべきことの一つのように思いました。

⭐

⭐The great Roman author, jurist and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE, once sarcastically observed ‘I know of nothing in any way too absurd to say that isn’t said by some philosopher’ – nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum (De Divinatione 1I. 119). This was over 1,600 years before Rene Descartes, in propounding the notion ‘I think therefore I am’ (a plagiarised sentiment going back to the ancient Greek thinker Parmenides) and that of a material brain working in concert with an immaterial mind, unleashed that notably errant brand of speculation called the ‘philosophy of mind’. It’s a safe bet that Cicero, a man with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Greek philosophy and no mean philosopher himself, would have reacted with even greater stupefaction and derision were he alive today and exposed to this type of thinking. For the philosophy of mind exemplifies to the full the worst characteristics of philosophy in general – an abiding addiction to the counterintuitive, to arcane distinctions of hair-splitting triviality, to the burying of the blindingly obvious in preposterous pseudo profundity, to pervasive hyperbole and dogmatic, unsubstantiated assertions, to pompous, pretentious pedantry, and finally, but not least, to a bewildering terminology typified by an endlessly proliferating array of mostly superfluous -isms. In a pathetic effort to mask the intellectual poverty of their discipline and aspire to quasi-scientific respectability, philosophers of mind have taken in recent years to brazenly call themselves ‘cognitive scientists’, a term normally reserved for those engaged in the purely scientific study of the brain and modelled simulations of mental activity, i.e. neuroscientists, AI specialists and psychologists. There is nothing remotely scientific, however, about any aspect of philosophy, least of all the philosophy of mind. For the latter, whose distinguishing features are strict logical analysis and clear-cut conceptual definition, eschews the results of practical observation and experiment – thereby precluding any serious investigation of a nebulous entity like the mind and, in particular, of that most mysterious and elusive of its properties, namely consciousness. Indeed, by its very terms of reference, practitioners of the philosophy of mind have little choice but to label mental concepts as ‘incoherent’ and ‘irrelevant’, and them dismissing them from further serious consideration.Among philosophers of mind, UC Berkeley-based John Searle is often viewed as a moderate, a sensible and level-headed compromise between the flamboyant metaphysical abandon of Daniel Dennett (see Consciousness Explained) on the one hand and the icily tendentious elitism of Peter Hacker (see The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience) on the other. Yet it is perhaps illustrative of the fundamental shortcomings of this discipline that even Searle’s work exemplifies many of the negative features mentioned above. For starters, the very title, The Rediscovery of the Mind, is a hyperbolic misnomer since the author fails therein to rediscover, let alone discover, anything of any consequence about the ‘mind’, the book turning out instead to be a summation of various theories and his own highly debatable speculations on this contentious topic. He offers at the outset what appears to be a spirited defence of the primacy of first person subjectivity and qualia (i.e. our individual responses to sensory input) in learning about the world, an approach which he rightfully claims is unduly downplayed by philosophers of mind in favour of the objective 3rd person perspective typically employed in science. He therefore roundly condemns materialist views of the mind in all their various guises (i.e. physicalism, monism, reductionism, the identity theory and above all eliminative materialism) – in particular on the ground that the submersion of mental faculties within the physical brain which they imply denies any element of first person subjectivity. Logical behaviourism (i.e. divining the inner thought processes of others from their outward behavior) and functionalism (i.e. plotting the causal relations between various mental functions, their inputs and outputs) are likewise rejected for the same reason; in the first case somewhat unfairly (because what else do we usually have to go on except the outward behavior of others in trying to judge what’s happening inside their heads?), and in the second, much more reasonably, because the omission of personal subjectivity in functionalism’s remit virtually eliminates any constructive value it might have as a cognitive tool.But Searle’s endorsement of first person subjectivity turns out to be a limited one. For it soon becomes clear that he conceives it exclusively in terms of external personal subjectivity, i.e. referring only to what’s outside us, and not to what’s internal within us. He therefore dismisses the concept of a privileged access we all might have to our own mental states (e.g. hopes, beliefs, desires, fears etc.), doing so with the curious argument that where they are would have to be ‘different from the space’ we would go looking for them. This assertion is echoed in his equally counterintuitive rejection of introspection on the ground that ‘any introspective observation that I might care to perform is itself that which was supposed to be observed’. Why does he think this? Because to him, the idea of us having feelings about other feelings we have represents a logical contradiction, a violation of clear-cut, unambiguous conceptualisation of the self. First person subjectivity he clearly views as bound up with the issue of intentionality, an arguably superfluous notion (but one of Searle’s pet obsessions – see his magnum opus Intentionality) which denotes a category of mental states which are always about something else (those which are either about ourselves or about nothing in particular, e.g. an aimless, inexplicable sense of euphoria or depression, are excluded from this category). Unsurprisingly, intentionality’s scope is circumscribed in a very similar fashion to that of first person subjectivity – a feeling of pain, he says, cannot be considered to exemplify intentionality because our mentally reacting to another mental thought or experience like a pain purely references something internal to ourselves and not something outside us.It transpires that although the book purports to treat consciousness as one of its principal themes, the deeper aspects of consciousness are something the author is clearly uncomfortable with: almost needless to say, they represent ‘incoherent’, illogical and hence indefinable concepts. Don’t therefore expect to find here any serious attempt to investigate such standard mental processes as reflection, recognition or recollection, let alone any reference to the subconscious or related phenomena like telepathy, premonitions, hypnosis etc. The nearest Searle gets to this sort of stuff is his bland motion of ‘unconscious’ mental states – typically memory and epistemic content like the fact I still ‘know’ when I’m comatose or asleep that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris – which have the potential to surface as conscious states. This feature he grandly denominates the ‘principle of connection’ – just one instance of idiosyncratic terminology sporadically injected into his narrative. Other examples of such Searlian nomenclature include a) the ‘Background’, meaning the myriad capabilities we derive from daily life experiences which enable us to correctly interpret and control our environment, b) the ‘Network’, a term he bestows on the web of hopes, fears, desires, beliefs etc. that serve as operational backup to the ‘Background’, and finally c) ‘strong AI’, an especially misleading term (it’s used in a totally different context in computer science circles) and by which Searle means the notion – apparently widespread among philosophers of mind – that the mind can be viewed as little more than a piece of computational software working in harness with a physical brain. This concept he had first belittled in 1980 in his ‘Chinese Room’ analogy, and here he offers a revised version of the argument to convey how computers, unlike minds, have no accompanying conscious awareness, in particular of what they’re doing when they execute programs; like trains forced to stick to and follow rail tracks, they mindlessly obey given syntactical rules and are oblivious to the semantic significance of the data processing and number crunching operations they have to carry out. This example of the blindingly obvious (every 2nd grader who encounters computers gets to understand this most basic of principles from the get-go) was treated – incredibly – as a ground-breaking revelation by many in the philosopher of mind community when Searle first proposed it, a striking testament to pervasive computer illiteracy among its membership.A prominent theme in the book is the irreducibility of the mind and the associated issue of dualism, a highly controversial topic which, according to Searle, philosophers of mind tend to recoil from in horror since it evokes the generally discredited Cartesian thesis of an immaterial/physical mind-body set-up. Here, as part of his firm stance against materialism, he rejects the notion of the mind’s reducibility to a physical brain, proposing in place of a wholly material brain the concept of one invested with both physical and mental properties, the former representing the brain’s neuronal basis and the latter the supervenient role of the mind on the former. Despite the fact that this interpretation is manifestly a type of property dualism, it doesn’t stop Searle from trying to make out (from eagerness to shore up his possibly shaky anti-dualist credentials?) that it isn’t. To back up this line of thinking, he makes much of the supposedly analogous case of how H2O’s properties, for instance, can vary from liquidity (i.e. plain water) to solidity (i.e. ice). But the comparison fails miserably because the distinction between the mental and the physical – a huge conceptual gulf to be sure – is of a vastly greater order of magnitude and significance than that between purely natural, observable phenomena like liquidity and solidity; we are on firm scientifically testable and definable ground when we talk of these, but can the same be said of a priori concepts like the mental and the physical? In his treatment of dualism, we see an attempt to have it both ways, of wanting (as others have pointed out) to have his cake and eat it. Yet another example of this can be detected in his ambivalent attitude to the concept of ‘homunculi’ (i.e. little men) who many philosophers of mind believe are supposedly needed to account for many integral neurological processes, e.g. the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ of mental imagery derived from memory or the external world which we all witness when we close our eyes, or, at a more basic level, the transformation of the two dimensional visual array our retina receives into the three dimensional representation of outside reality we consciously experience. Oh really? Without invoking the principle of ‘recursive decomposition’ (apparently one of Dennett’s brainwaves) to explain homunculi away we might well take on board the no brainer consideration that countless vital physiological processes like breathing, cardio-vascular activity, digestion etc. occur automatically, not only without any conscious intervention on our own part but also without any suggestion by eccentric philosophers of mind that busy bands of homunculi are working overtime behind the scenes to take care of all these functions. Why then assume our visual system is any different?There is an elegance, precision and stimulating quality to Searle’s writing which give it a superficially persuasive air – presumably that’s why The Rediscovery of the Mind has attracted many favourable reviews. His fecund imagination enables him to repeatedly come up with an endless supply of vivid analogies which do much to illustrate the points he is making. But the text is marred not only by the various defects already noted but also by persistent unsubstantiated assertion, a particularly imprudent and irritating habit when dealing with a topic as nebulous as the mind. We learn for instance, that witches don’t exist (how does Searle know this?) and that quantum physics is something animals don’t understand but humans do (pity he never tried convincing the famous physicist Richard Feynman of this obvious truism!). Ad nauseam we are lectured that the physical brain houses all our mental processes, thoughts and feelings, that the most critical mental function of all – consciousness – is just a property, an emergent feature which emanates seamlessly from our cerebral circuitry. But what justifies such certitude? On the evidence of this book, a little less dogmatism, a bit more intellectual humility on Searle’s part would have been much appreciated.

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