Debate on Mind-Brain Relation: Searle vs Eccles (1984)

there is one intellectual and cultural Battlefield that hasn't been quiet for centuries and on which in this last 5th the 20th century the battle does indeed Rage with much waving of new Flags or rather the battle's rage there are more than two armies and a good many roving bands Better or Worse armed and a good many individual free Spirits seeking to take on all comers the subject matter is the nature of the human mind and more particularly the relation between the mind and the Brain how is some thought you have of me right now or maybe that urge you feel to turn up the sound on the Telly how does that relate to the 1500 grams of stuff in your head does the brain have thoughts and feelings as a product maybe as a byproduct could it be the truth rather that the Mind runs the brain is neither of those ideas right it's not puzzling that the battlefield has for a long time been crowded what's to be won is not just the prize for Truth for solving the puzzle philosophies sciences and models of the Mind are more than just that they have profound implications they carry with them a lot of other things that matter some carry with them determinism the proposition that the mind is machine like wholly a matter of causal and law-like connections perhaps that all mental events are just the effects of physical events in the brain such of you has always seemed to threaten not only freedom and responsibility but our very uniqueness as individuals other philosophies and Sciences of the mind which give it more Independence of the brain offered to save not only Freedom responsibility and individuality but more than that ancient hopes of a religious or a spiritual or a metaphysical kind are to be salvaged from where many say they are that is in the Dustbin of History again and differently some accounts of the Mind promise US an escape at last from what you might call the boredom of mystery the mind is brought into Accord with relatively clear principles and methods of science finally there's the matter of moral and political implications it's said that some of the curses of our time say pornography or terrorism or dehumanization these are somehow owed to or they go with materialist or naturalist views of the Mind those that give some dominance to the brain well there's no puzzle then about the battlefields never having gone quiet there's no puzzle either about the renewed Vigor on it that is owed I think in one large part to what might be called a first maturing of the neurosciences neurophysiology neuroanatomy neurobiology neurochemistry and so on they bring new weapons to hand these new weapons perhaps against expectation are not seized only by the materialist and the naturalist armies and parties Professor Sir John Echols has been one of neurophysiology's leaders for decades it was the winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1963. to his many works on the neuron the brain the central nervous system he's added a philosophy of Mind a joint Endeavor with the distinguished philosopher of science Professor sir Carl popper in this Theory the mind is certainly not prisoner of the brain nor very certainly is the Mind identical with the brain our beliefs and our judgments our hopes and despairs these aren't just the very same things as physical processes in the brain say the firing of neurons or the traffic of transmitter substances there is something called the self-conscious mind which is above all that enforcer John as a religious believer as I mean to say without any implication the idea of the self-conscious mind is a pretty satisfying one dualist interactionism as he names his view is certainly not the only dualist view of mind and brain but perhaps it's the one which satisfies most aspirations professor John Searle is also a man of large distinctions having escaped from Oxford a decade or two back and taken up residence in the University of California at Berkeley he's come to be what you might call a philosopher's philosopher it signal work on the philosophy of language above all on speech acts has now had added to it comparable achievements in the philosophy of mind and he is this year's BBC wreath lecturer well Professor Searle does indeed have a different view of the mind and brain one that is closer than that of Sir John to the inclination of most neuroscientists it said that the mind and the brain are one thing not two thus Professor searle's view comes with the label monist interactionism it's not I think such of you as to satisfy Sir John's deep hopes Sir John we shall come to your arguments and perhaps your hopes but might we begin with your conclusion what would you or how would you state what you take to be the central proposition of your view of mind and brain yes I've had this more or less developing all through my life from adolescent years when I have struggled to understand the brain more and more and to see how it could be related to all my mental life I wanted to see this interaction and I found out that the brain Sciences of the time were quite inadequate to bear it so I became a brain scientist with sharington I was at Oxford for 12 years working on this but working more remotely just to understand the working of mental of neural happenings and from that gradually has come more or less a Bahrain performance which I feel now is adequate at last to be the servant I might say them over the master the mind that I have a brain at my disposal my brain which I've never seen Sir John there is one question which I'm sure you can clear up which is roughly this one there are a lot of dualistic views of mind and brain and there's one very common one which says that with respect to each of a lot of brain events there is a corresponding mental event and that view of the Mind stops there now one might think in in your view that there are actually three things not two that is there are brain events and there are mental events and there is something a third thing which is overseeing the lot is that a distortion of your views yes uh I think correctly there are a tremendous amount of neural events which have no relation to Consciousness at all then there are another special class of neural events which are somehow related to the mind and received from the mind but then on top of that I believe there is the whole mental World which I live in and which is related to my brain interacts with it but is quite independent from it right it does begin to sound as if in your view each of us is not just a pair but a Triad that each of us is perhaps not just a duet but a trio yes but then I would put if you like to think of it it used to be called The Mind Body problem occur incorrectly because the body doesn't do anything directly with the mind it must only receive through the brain and special parts of the brain that could be your tree head could be mind the lame body you describe yourself as a finalist in some of your recent writings yes and I think you refer to the fact that you think that the entire history of the universe that is the evolution of the universe and then the evolution of us all of that sequence of events is directed to some Final End yes is that traditional religious belief no it's an attempt to try to explain how I come to be let us be clear about that I am primarily trying to understand myself that's my whole lifelong ambition is to know what I am who I am how I am what I am this you might say is a very uh uh restrained position but I immediately then say but then if I know what I am then I can tell you know much more about you only sort of studying myself because I understand about other people say this is the way I look at it I'm sure every man has to put up with his critics and I'm sure you're able to deal with yours some of them would I suppose suspect that your religious belief has directed your Neuroscience what would you say to such aggressive persons I don't mind if they say it really I I I I want to think them to think of me more as an inquiring philosopher who is trying to understand himself and of course I do believe if you try to understand yourself you are quickly in the uh ballpark of religion because as I see it now there are just two big explanatory uh fields in the world there's the scientific materialist explanations and there is the religious ones and these two EXP try to explain ourselves and I think that the scientists have gone beyond their purview to try to take over the religious explanations and I think they've been guilty of many superstitions in that respect which is called scientistic beliefs but we shall certainly come back to that but I would like now to perhaps have an initial statement of his view from Professor Searle who says above all that the mind and the brain are one thing I suppose if someone said to me that the brain was the same one thing as the mind and then I thought that the brain was physical I might suppose that you were suggesting that the only stuff that exists in the universe is physical is that what you mean by saying that the brain and the mind are one thing actually I I think that the word thing here is going to be a source of confusion the way I think of it is like this take this glass of water the glass of water is entirely made up of the the water itself is entirely made up of H2O molecules but it's got a lot of properties that are not properties of individual molecules for example it's not a liquid state now the liquidity of the water is caused entirely by the behavior of the molecules but the liquidity isn't a separate thing it's just a feature of the system of H2O molecules you can't say of any molecule you can't say this one's wet now I take that as an absolute banal example of a familiar set of relationships in nature where if higher level feature of a phenomenon is caused by the behavior of the micro elements it's caused by the behavior at the smaller level but at the same time it's just a feature of the system made up of those elements and it seems to me that's exactly the relation between what we call the mind and the Brain it isn't that there is a thing called the mind which happens to be identical with another thing called the brain no there's just one thing in my skull and that's my brain but the brain has certain processes that cause the things that make life interesting such as Consciousness mental States intentions desires all the rest of it and those although caused by processes at the neurophysiological level are themselves features of the whole system so just as I can't say of any molecule this one's wet so I can't say of any neuron or any synapse this one's conscious but Consciousness is an emergent property in the utterly banal and and non-exciting sense in which liquidity is an emergent property of the H2O molecules I do understand your reluctance to suppose that there are two things that you'll do because that would bring you somewhere on the way to the position of Sir John Echols you do however say that there are levels or perhaps features or characteristics indeed presumably you have to because you talk about the relationship right between mental and physical properties or parts and indeed you talk about one of them causing the other the physical causes the mental well I understand your reluctance to say there are two things but presumably we have in some sense two entities or two characters or two parts and it might be suggested by an aggressive person which I'm not but you are um Sir John Echo is under a slight disguise that is you two are a dualist no I'm not it well there is a sense in which you could say my position is duelist because I think that naive mentalism The View that we really do have conscious mental States and and that they make a difference to our life they're not just epiphenomenal uh that is a view that I adhere to but my if I had to summarize the reason why I'm not a duelist it's this if you take naive mentalism The View that we really do have conscious mental States and that and that aren't most naive views about the mind that I'm now conscious and awakens so are you that that and you take that and contrast it with naive physicalism The View that the world consists entirely of physical particles entirely of microparticles and the various relations between micro particles those views seem to me to be perfectly consistent in other words I want to reject the military metaphor that you begin the program with saying that these armies struggling over this great issue I think in fact the issue has a rather easy solution that there the Mind Body problem is a bit like the stomach digestion problem and I want to I want to see it in his banala term terms as those because I want to say that just as we don't think there's any we don't feel there must be a stomach digestion dualism though I mean they use perfectly possibly have a stomach where digestion isn't going on similarly I don't see any need for a mind-brain dualism though of course it's perfectly possible to have brains that aren't alive where no mental processes are going on it is so it isn't a question of there being two different things in my skull but rather there are different levels of description of a set of biological processes at one level we can describe it in purely physiological terms in terms of neuron firings and synapses and action potentials and all the rest of it and at another level we can describe the very same system as a conscious system engaging in certain kinds of voluntary Behavior having certain sorts of thoughts and feelings and that's those descriptions I want to emphasize are not in any way in conflict with each other could I just ask you for perhaps a very brief answer one final question in this initial moment of our discussion Sir John Echols allows that there is some connection between his neurophysiology and his religious belief I suppose it might be asked of you whether you are that kind of person who is deadly against mystery that is you are totally opposed to finding mystery in the universe and are very keen rightly on being another kind of person not a mystery Monger but some might say a plain Californian man now I think the fact that the world exists and that the way that it exists that the way in which it works is a source of astonishment and mystery to me all the time that is to say all right it seems to me a source of immense mystery that a series of neuron firings in my hypothalamus can produce my present feeling of thirst or that an impact of a lot of photons on my retina together with a bombardment of bilateral geniculate nucleus in the visual cortex can produce all these Myriad visual experiences that I have on the contrary I stand before nature with awe and mystery excuse me that's the original this is the original Socratic origin of philosophy is this sense of mystery excellent well Sir John I wonder what you think of that position well I am trying to think of myself and my brain that's been my lifelong problem and uh when I consider that and what I know about the brain I'm not prepared to give it all of these mental properties I don't see any reason for that there's no physical basis for this nothing in physics giving mental properties to complexities of neurons or complexities of any matter in any form whatsoever and in fact a large part of the brain is as complex as you can think of without any mental properties so this has to be explained how can this come about uh then I I wanted to finally say that the evidence from the Neuroscience sharpens all of these problems now so that we can say certain areas of the brain very precisely to find ones give us special mental happenings and others are responsible for uh controlled movements with Free Will and so on coming in this is what we now know so it does seem to me to require some development of your hypothesis well I I think in a part I agree with what you said namely that we don't know an awful lot about the details of the way the brain works but we do know enough now so that certain sorts of mental features can be localized but your first point seems to me one that is really quite irrelevant and that was that the notion of the mental isn't a notion that's part of physics but there are lots of things in the world that are not part of physics at least physics narrowly construed of all sorts of biological processes I mean the notion of life itself is not a notion of classical physics it's a biological notion but we see life as an emergent property if you like or property of certain sorts of physical systems not exactly that sense I want to say that the brain is capable and indeed does produce certain sorts of mental States and the I like your point about localization I mean we know that for example in case of pains that certain sorts of neuron firings a big picking up a stimuli at free nerve endings passing through the spinal cord and through the with the with the Delta a fibers and the C fibers and into the thalamus and the sensory the somatic sensory cortex you actually have the feeling of pain and this is produced by certain events in the brain now we don't know how that works except for a very few uh a simple mental phenomena but there doesn't seem to be any obstacle in principle to getting a complete account of how brain events produce our mental life and I think there is and what would that be I would say first of all that biology you gave us an example of not being in physics that was the idea of vitalism that it was beyond physics and that has been eliminated by science for quite a long time biology is completely within the physical world and in that sense I want to say the mind is part of the physical world that there was a time when there was a big issue between vitalism and mechanism and now it's just not an issue anymore because we understand the biological processes that are part of life but we don't describe them in Newtonian terms I mean it isn't as if we describe life strictly in terms of Newtonian mechanics no we have a biological explanation of what our physical systems and it's in exactly that sense I want to say we can have a biological explanation of our mental life where we pers where we perceive mental features of the world as just higher level physical features of reality I want to say the opposition between the physical and the mental is just a relic of dualism and I want to say it's in the Forefront of our thinking I want to say furthermore that uh what I did where I don't follow you is the idea that more and more complicated material happenings can give you mental events this is another world I think I'm I think the dualist position is quite strong that we'll go along with neural happenings and I go to the end and trying to explain what the brain does in neural happenings and the Wonder and mystery of all of that Which is far from being understood but it doesn't bring in mental events to go right through the holes say visual system doesn't explain how light and color comes out at the end of the perception it's it's nowhere near that it's a different world you enter and that's the world of dualism yeah I want to say that seems to me a profound philosophical mistake and let me see if I can't say succinctly why I think that is with any system where you explain the behavior of higher level phenomena in terms of lower level of course as long as you stay at the lower level you'll never get to the higher level if we just describe the movement of each H2O molecule we'll never get to the world of liquidity liquidity doesn't exist at the level of the individual molecule now in exactly the same way as long as you're you're quite right in your various writings and here and saying as long as you stay at the level of the neuron then you don't get the marvelous visual experiences that we have but it simply doesn't follow from that that somehow or other the visual experiences live in a different world no we only live in one world it's the world we're all in and it's a world of physical objects and physical processes and among the most marvelous of those are those brain processes that produce our conscious life and what you're telling me now is a lot of materialistic explanations but using your mental thinking and Imagination to do so and this is a contradiction no it's not a contradiction at all that you have moved out of the world of matter energy into the world of trying to understand and where does understanding come in the world of matter energy in exactly the same way that I use language to analyze language and I use Vision to analyze Vision so it seems to me I use the brain or the mind and God whichever you like to understand the operation of the brain and the mind but consider the alternative excuse me your alternative is I I think Ted's quite right in saying there is a kind of homunculus for you except it's a purely spiritual homunculus that is the way the way on on your account we have all these neuron modules and then in addition to that there is this non-spatial entity inside our brain that is that is the self-conscious mind and that the self-conscious mind and is integrating all of this stuff and that seems to me really A A desperate move to make given the fact that we're on the verge and continuing to make various neurophysiological discoveries that show how it actually works in ordinary biochemical terms and you think that you can explain your whole mental life not only vision but love hope fears anxieties all of the beauty the whole of your memory of beautiful Beauty and pattern and in music and all the rest of you think all of that is just neuro and firings I think that the that it's important to try to understand how the world works at any stage we are terribly ignorant and the the area of the unknown vastly exceeds what little we know but insofar as we have any idea about how the world works as far as our own mental life is concerned it seems to me that the brain is the most marvelous instrument in the universe a hundred billion neurons organized with fantastic complexity and the idea that somehow or other all of the deep complexities of my life my best and my worst philosophical thoughts my loves and hates and fears my aesthetic feelings that all of that might be the product of brain processes doesn't seem to me at all unplausible or repulsive on the a country I want to say anything else seems to me irrational and mystification given what we know about how the world Works given what we know about the world this stuff in here is what's causing my mental state Sir John your fundamental view is that mind and brain are two things let's forget about three for a while mind and brain are two things the mind being the self-conscious mind and the Brain being the machine about which you know so much what principal argument would you depend on in neurophysiology to defend your dualism there are many but I will give you a special and a very simple one I think that is more appropriate I will talk about voluntary movement we're all familiar with Walter Milton who we all believe that we can carry out actions at will and that's what I try to at will is a mental event the actions are neural events something has to cross between the mentally conceived action and the Brain performance now this has now been worked up quite a lot in recent years and we can be quite precise about some of the factors involved in this and the places it's no more of a wishy-washy stuff we're getting into precise science now with most advanced techniques on the human brain and the area that I particularly want to refer to is this area here the supplementary motor area at the top of the brain here is the front of the brain under your forehead and here's the back here and this is the top here the vertex and this is just the medial side of that hemisphere you have two hemispheres as you know and this is the left hemisphere and so we look at this area here with a lot of perhaps 100 uh million nerve cells in it and can then proceed to do something uh looking at the happenings in this part of the brain that on human subjects with radio Tracer techniques and the subject has to do the following actions just simply touch and you can see me doing it on my fingers one two one one two three one two one two one two three one one two backwards and forwards is complicated thing if you try this for yourself you'll see that you can't even talk while you're doing it you I had to talk about it but I couldn't go on with my talk while I was doing this I it takes my brain right over or my mind right over to be doing that and when you do that you find out and here is the same brain just look at this here this is the same left hemisphere the front here the occipital here the top here and when you take the actions in the brain which can now be very well worked out with this radio tracer technique week you find out that certain areas of the brain hear the motor area from the muscles that run the motors down pass down to the muscles that is active but also a part here the supplementary motor area which is this area that I showed you here uh here in the top of the brain now when the the real point at issue now the important thing is that's the movements going on and that's what you'd expect this was unexpected a bit but now what was more unexpected and quite a idea of a genius was this not to do the actors not to be going through all this but the subject sits there and I said at rest and just thinks of it and when he's thinking of it carrying out no movements whatsoever this area here now comes up here with circulation going right up like the same here but nothing at all elsewhere and so this is the mind really working upon the brain in a very specific way to carry out the actions and yet no actions occurring it's the mind is able to block the actions but at the same time uh beginners that were on the way can I can I just respond to that I agree with everything John said up to that very last couple of sentences where he says this is the Mind where he thinks of them line is some separate entity working on the brain it seems to me the most natural interpretation of this data and I think it's beautiful data is precisely in support of the view that I have been advocating namely we have two levels of description of one and the same phenomena at one level we can describe my thinking about moving my thumb against my fingers as a series of thought processes at the level of Consciousness and intentionality and not at another level the very same thought processes are caused by and realized in a set of neuron firings in the supplementary motor area so there seems to be nothing whatever in this that would enforce us or even incline us to to do something which I think is really extravagant and that is to postulate some non-physical forces some purely mental forces that live in a different world altogether that some or other are latched on to the neurons that are busy shaking the neuron on modules by mysterious non-physical methods it seems to me all of this is perfectly consistent with the idea that we live in one world and in this one world we have both mental and physical properties so Professor do you use them do you then believe that thought processes have not in themselves the power to cause anything in the brain I do believe that thought processes have the power to operate causally but they do that in exactly the same way that higher level phenomena cause other lower level phenomena so for example the hate that is generated in my cylinder the cylinders of my car that's generated by the firing of the spark plug the heat can cause an explosion and that runs the car now the heat is a higher level property of a series of movements of electrons between the electrodes now let's apply that's again a banal example let me apply that to bodily movement I now intentionally and freely raise my arm that has a level of description at the at the mental level where I decided to raise my arm and that actually had a physical effect my arm went up but the the way that it worked at the lower level of description is that those thoughts were themselves caused by and realized in a set of neurons firings and that eventually a set up other neuron firings in the motor cortex there were motor neurons that reached the end plates of the muscle fibers there was a receipt release of acetylcholine there was a calcium ions attacked the cytoplasm of the muscle fiber what we find is one end the same sequence of events has both a level of description in terms of the mental it's perfectly real nothing epiphenomenal or parallel about it it's actually working in the world just watch anytime I want to see the Mind work on the body I just move an arm but at the same time all of that is just part of the physical world that we live in it has a lower level of description that is a Dogma for which there is no evidence whatsoever because your analogies are within the material physical world and not in a world of two entities the mental entity unknown in the physical world and the physical world the difficulty with with just saying that it's a Dogma is that it looks like there's been an appeal made to another dogma and that is that there must somehow be a mental entity that lies outside the world we all live in and and that I believe is a Dogma with a rather long and unfortunate history call it what you will but it has immense explanatory power and it's the explanatory power I want to present my dearest interaction on the explanatory power of telling each person we now know you to be two things a mental with your mental life and your physical life we know a lot about that but it is a dualistic world and this explains so many of the things that you know without having to get mixed up on false analogies or in the material world can I say a little bit about the explanatory I wonder I wonder if we just might push on a little bit I would like to ask Sir John about another and very striking piece of evidence which he makes use of we can't talk about it in any detailed way but what it comes to is roughly this that he feels that for example if my hand is touched that sometime later my brain is in such a state as to produce a mental event for example the thought that my hand is touched and it is the case I think you wish to suggest that the self-conscious mind Alters the time of that mental experience that is the time when I think that my hand is touched so it's not the case that one has the machine which is the brain to which there are actually tied mental events it's rather the case that the self-conscious mind can intervene and put a mental event at a different time from the time the brain suggests it should be at could you tell us just a little bit about that argument uh the special aspect of it I wanted to deal with namely you can have a subject that is expecting a touch a very faint touch on his finger and it comes at no time he doesn't know about but he's got to count them and while he's just attending to that and not in fact there are no touches but while he's attending to that certain parts of the brain come into action it's the mental intention working on his brain that causes an area here and another area here to come into action and that is an extraordinary thing that just waiting for something and still nothing happening you are able because of that to get your brain to work professional views on that that doesn't seem to me at all surprising I mean exactly uh inconsistent with what I said in response to the supplementary supplementary motor area argument namely of course we would expect and indeed it would be amazing if it weren't the case that all of our thoughts and feelings are correlated with processes in the brain that merely by thinking now by thinking about a certain thing that is going to happen to me or by thinking about certain things that I expect we've known this since the time of Pavlov that one can produce certain neurophysiological phenomena but there's nothing in that that forces us to say for this reason we must abandon abandon the past 300 years of science the basic idea of which is that we live in one unified world with a unified set of physical forces operating in that world I mean it nothing it seems to me an extravagant response to say we need to postulate mysterious none physical forces that were perhaps are in violation of the first law of thermodynamics that lie outside everything we know of how the physical world Works in order to account for these experiments because we have all sorts of quite familiar ways of accounting for them I don't know what ways they are and the point is the 300 years is a mistake it was all the way through until the last this this Century shall we say people did believe in all their mental events they didn't believe in the in dualism in one way or another was of course Descartes who got wrong in a way but there were many others of that kind around believing in a mental life and a religious life and freedom of action and moral responsibility for their actions and so on so they lived with them with themself the a self which could make decisions for which it was responsible and you didn't blame the brain they blamed themselves then I want to go to that the self is the key thing of my beliefs and it's the book that Papa and I wrote the self and its brain the selfish primary and I don't I think that is how we get out of this extraordinary mistake of trying to give physical events a mental counterpart which is something new that's coming that was not thought about until recently no I quite agree with you that it wasn't thought about it indeed that's why I'm very anxious to distance myself and what is traditionally called materialism because materialism is often rested on a denial of what seemed to be and what I believe are quite obvious facts and they're just the fact you're applying to we are morally responsible agents we do have a sense of our own self and it seems to be quite a valid sense of our own self as unique human beings uh uh we are we know that our own thoughts and feelings produce effects that we're capable of acting on the world and we accept responsibility for those actions what I want to say is all of that seems to me perfectly consistent with a thorough going scientific account of the world now you're quite right in saying that until recently people thought those two views must be inconsistent that it that the idea that we live in only one world and that world is for one of a better word one we could call a physical world but somehow or other we if we admitted that we'd be taking something away we'd be taking away our sense of ourselves or moral responsibility or free action I want to say none of that follows none of that follows what we're talking about is not two separate worlds that mysteriously connect at uh at some uh as yet unknown point in the brain but what we're talking about is one world that has a whole lots of different features aesthetic features moral features uh scientific properties and and within that one world the most marvelous instrument of all is the human brain but then I feel you set a lot of dualistic truths in that statement can I just respond to that I think that I think that is really the the basis of the disagreement between us because I think what we really want to say about the brain which is true and what we want to say about the mind which is true are both consistent with each other and do not force us to any kind of dualism if I have if I want to say there's anything new in my view that's it John Searle we've we've been addressing ourselves to some extent to the question of of Professor John's Arguments for his position do you have quite specific arguments I mean he does indeed point to certain neurophysiological facts do you have someone specific argument which leads you to the conclusion that mind and brain are one thing and everything is simple and happy in that way it isn't that I can point to an area of the hypothalamus and say right here on this diagram I can show you that the mind and the brain are really two different ways of describing the same system no it's not like that as a philosopher I want to know how the world works and I I I have to I I find myself at a given phase in the history of knowledge and I have to construct the most coherent testable consistent account that I can given the material available to me now anything we say here I'm sure John would agree with me about this anything is tentative and we're we're we're we're largely in the dark but given what we know about how the world works there are two propositions that seem to me to be both true and my task as a philosopher is to show how they're consistent one is everything in the world consists of physical particles and relations between them and the other one is we do obviously have mental States in all their glory and the most naive kind of mentalism where we have conscious feelings and moral responsibility and all the rest of it and I want to know how can that be how can both of those propositions be true and it seems to me once you get out of that old duelist tradition that says they can't be true the physical world threatens the mental World it somehow is a threatens moral responsibility once you get out of those categories then it seems to me it's obvious we don't live in Two Worlds or three we live in one world and the marvelous feature about that world is it contains conscious human beings do you depend a lot on Neuroscience for your conclusion well I've learned a lot about uh Neuroscience by just because I'm fascinated by it and of course I'm I'm just an amateur I mean certainly in the presence of John who's devoted his life to this but it seems to me that a philosopher ought to know whatever is the latest stuff in neuroscience and of course you know that it's tentative that uh in 20 years time the Neuroscience that we're talking now will no doubt seem terribly amateurish so I don't depend on it in the sense that uh I have to rush to the latest issue of brain to see whether or not the Mind Body problem has got a new wrinkle but I think philosophers ought to know what the current views are about the brain well my position is this about all that but I I think that Don is really a dualist but it disguises himself as a monus because that is the thing you must do to get on in the academic world uh to be everybody likes to be a monist and a duelist I'm a duelist and I I get of course much discredit for that never mind but I live with the brain work with the brain intensely I I what should we say I've got more respect you know if you like to say it for the brain because of the detailed knowledge I have and the Wonder and mystery of the brain performance I think it came in The evolutionary process there's some quite incredible thing but each and each of us has a brain but it is our computer I like to think that the brain is a wonderful computer that we have through life uh working through the body receiving and giving and we are the programmers of the computer and this makes the dualistic sense for me as I see it and then the more and more we study the brain the more we see the Wonder beauty of the computer operation the more it begins to make sense of how we as programmers can manage to do all the things we can do all the subtleties and skills of movement all of the imagination and creativity all of the feelings and loves and beauty and all the rest all of this can be produced in a sense by happenings in the brain which we interpret in our minds yes I want to say I'm in no sense a duelist if duelist means there are two different worlds that we live in or two different kind two irreducibly different kinds of things in the world on the contrary in one sense I'm more than a duelist I'm a polyester I think there are all kinds of higher level features of the world not just features like Consciousness but features like the liquidity of the water or the solidity of the table part of hard difficulty I'm convinced is thinking in these tired categories of monism or dualism when I call myself an interaction as monus that's meant to be ironical because in traditional categories that would be self-contradictory since there isn't anything to interact with anything on a traditional moment so that's a joke when I say it's an interactions monus what I'm trying to do is take what we know about how the brain works take what we know about how the mind works get out of the traditional categories it says you've either got to be a monaster a duelist I want to reject those those categories all together and just say as far as we know anything about how the world works this is the way the Mind fits into the world the mind is a part of the physical world it's caused by neurophysiological processes and it's realized in neural systems right but if you've got relations or causal connections you need two of something don't you what I think is one of the greatest sources of confusion in this area is a naive human view of causation and the the thing you're about to say next is you've got to have two events you've got to have this event the physical event causing the mental event two of something will do two of something will agree with you you do have to have something namely levels you have different levels within a system so going back to these same banal examples in my car there's a level of description where I can talk about the oxidization of hydrocarbon molecules and another level of description of the very same system where I can talk about explosions in the cylinder that make the car work now the oxidization of the hydrocarbons causes the explosion but that doesn't mean the explosion lives in a different realm or different world no it is just the explosion is realized in that system of oxidizing hydrocarbon molecules and exactly the same way I want to say my mental states are perfectly real nothing epiphenomenal no parallelism involved here but they are themselves realized in a neurophysiological system but what I want to object is sleight of hand where you gave these binaural examples and then you said in exactly the same way now you cannot justify a statement as precise and strong as that can well let me say let me try what we're interested in is not the details of how the brain does it for the very simple reason none of us knows we don't know the details but we do you know we we are making progress and we do know certain sorts of things so let's take an actual case where we know a little bit about it take thirst or at least certain kinds of thirst now we know that renal secretions synthesize a substance called Angiotensin and the Angiotensin gets into the hypothalamus and it causes a series of neuron firings and that series of neuron firings cause certain kinds of thirst now you might ask well where's The Thirst doesn't The Thirst have to exist in some soul that's separate or in some self-conscious mind that's separate and stand ends outside of all that I want to say as far as we know how the world works the Thirsty is going on right there it is a higher level feature of this system of neurophysiological processes now of course you might say well there's still lots of differences between that and water and and H2O molecules and I quite agree I mean the old the point of the analogies and I deliberately picked finale examples is not that we we can get a one-to-one mapping a one-to-one isomorphism between the physiological processes and the behavior of the H2O molecules but what we can get is a sense that our difficulties in understanding the relation of the mind to the brain are empirical difficulties about the enormous difficulty of describing a system as complex as the brain there isn't in addition some deep metaphysical difficulty of overcoming a mind-body dualism we don't have to worry about it the first thing I know is about my mind I've known it always all my viewers analysis will know about their minds they know probably nothing about the brain and we know very little by the way we're at the beginning of understanding this let's be very humble about this we know a great deal about the mind it's great creativity the whole of culture the whole of our life story each of us lives in that world long before brains were known about it all Aristotle thought that this whole thing went on in my heart and not in the brain for example and so there was this great culture this great civilizations were built without knowing about the brain it was the world of the Mind the mental creativity that gave us everything that matters and even in science today science is not about things happening but if science is laws regularities principles ideas sizes entirely in the world three of Papa in the world of ideas not in the world of test tubes and molecules and all that these are just Machinery behind the real understanding of science so let us think that all of the life that's worthwhile is mental and in the entity of Mind events and their coherence uh their explanatory power and the way in which they are coded from generation to generation this is our culture coded in writing coded in pictures and so on this is the world that each of us lives in and finds ourself in it's a mental world as a philosopher I certainly want to agree with you about the Primacy of the mental and the Primacy of the cultural what I what I disagree with you is the idea that somehow or other that leads us to think that we must live in three different or two different ontological Realms no we just live in one world the world we all live but I wonder if I could ask just a question of both of you at that point um one thing we all experience as part of ordinary life is that we are not just a place where mental events take place we're not just some Locale in which things flow through but we have what I'm sure Sir John would call a sense of self or indeed what philosophers call rather ponderously the unity of Consciousness now he I think offers a rather good explanation if you accept the rest of the theory of the unity of Consciousness he does after all have the self-conscious mind what do you say in connection with that well I say first of all that the price of the explanation is inordinately high as I said a few minutes ago we have to abandon the conception of reality that has grown up of the past 300 years of science we have to postulate non-physical forces acting on physical entities and it's interesting to note there's never been any account now I mean any really hard neurophysiological account of how the self-conscious mind operates on neurons does it does we're totally gets into the modules but does it shake the axons or does it wiggle the dendrites I mean what what are they I know what it does short physical process but just let me finish this other point the the question is what is the origin of the unity of Consciousness that seems to me I mean the split brain experiments bear this out seems to me to depend on the fact that our brains and the two hemispheres have a certain type of relationship to each other and indeed a certain set of vehicles of communication between them notably they corpus callosum right just wait a while I I want to come back on the price you say the price is too high I will say the price of Truth is never too high if we have some independent reason for supposing and I'm not going to be put off in my Quest For Truth by pricing no I can't let that go on I I can't let go under mark one of the things we have discovered in our Quest For Truth is that you don't postulate entities you don't need Occam's razor and if we had to summarize the basic dispute between us one way we might say it is I think that all of the marvelous data that you've got and all this brilliant research that's been done about by you and other people about the brain can be accommodated by a general scientific account of the world that's perfectly consistent with our ordinary sense knowledge about ordinary Common Sense knowledge about our own minds now when I say the price is too high I mean we're running against one of the basic principles in the search for truth namely Occam's razor if we have to postulate things that stand outside all that we know about the world I wonder if I could just come in there since we're getting near the end there was one question we looked at briefly at the beginning which is raised for example Sir John by your Gifford lectures and you speak in your Gifford lectures of a decline in individual freedom and the rise of a bureaucratic State and things like that and in a book which you're about to publish you speak of the trough of pornographic sex that we're now all in and you connect these things a loss of Freedom the rise of the state of the trough of pornographic sex with materialist and naturalist views of the mind um here we have a very materialistic as it seems a naturalist philosopher do you think very seriously that his view of the mind is contributing to those frightful things I think the decline in religious belief is having a very big effect because so many of the young people have no meaning in life no hope they don't have anything else to live by except their material uh enjoyments happenings of this kind they don't know what happiness is for example they don't know what uh the whole life of dedication is to ideals as I had when I was young this is not at all coming up because all they're given is material satisfactions and of the often the cheapest kinds with drugs and sex if you like but they're not against all that but it's triviality is what beats me John Searle does your view of the Mind Body problem have this connection with amongst other things the trough of pornographic sex it certainly has no logical implication if I had to summarize what I would have been saying I might say that on my view of the Mind Body problem a an adherence to the most strict spiritual values is perfectly consistent with the most thorough going scientific physicalism but not I think consistent with religion well if by religion you mean a belief in a supernatural God that stands outside uh the world that we live in and attacks Immortal Souls onto uh the fetus at a certain point in the development then certainly there's no reason at all to suppose that that's true we have no evidence that that's true let me just put it this way if God did exist one there's one thing I like about John's whole approach these issues if God did exist if religion were true that would have to be a fact of science like any other that couldn't be something that stood outside the possible can of human knowledge this is not to a fact of science it's not true the whole philosophy is an effective Society well if by science we just mean systematic truths about how the world works I mean it was a matter of definition of science but if we mean a systematic search for truth about how the world works then that's one of the things I like about your approach is you treat the mind-body problem not by saying as as a dogmatic Theologian might well we just know that there are Immortal Souls no you treated as a scientific problem if there is a soul and a mind that has to be a fact of science like any other if science is a systematic surgery no no it's a fact of philosophy well the philosophy I'm here let's be clear about science I'm a scientist and the money scientists talk out of Science and become scientistic that's the trouble let's be clear about science scientists dealing with a natural world of physical events and objects and energies and all the rest of it it isn't dealing with even the philosophy of science that is outside science and so is all other philosophy maybe the problem we're having here is over this particular word so let's drop the word and let me put the point I was trying to make using another word what we're interested in is systematic knowledge about the world whether we call that philosophical or mathematical or scientific or religious or religious now I want to say if if there is systematic knowledge about the world then and I was using science just as a general umbrella for all of that if they're a systematic knowledge about the world than if there are religious truths they have to be part of that systematic knowledge about the world so John the last sentence we've come to the end I I just say I am a human person and I've just been trying to understand myself in all humility the complexity of existence and I hope that what I discover will be of use to other people well that alas is all for tonight next week we shall have with us a distinguished spokesperson for artificial intelligence that movement and we shall examine the claims of artificial intelligence to make the mind as clear as glass through an understanding of computer programs John Searle will be on hand to put a little gentle pressure on those claims as well good night

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 47,829

Keywords: Philosophy, Philosophy Overdose, Analytic Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Metaphysics, Social Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, John Searle, Psychology, Chinese Room, Intentionality, Consciousness, Mind, Cognition, Other Minds, Mind-Body, Cognitive Science, Materialism, Dualism, Mental Representation, Perception, Thought, Physicalism, Mental Causation, Mind-Body Problem, Reductionism, Reductivism, Naturalism, Free Will, Subjectivism, Monism, Neuroscience, John Eccles, Cartesian

Id: 1KemhfmAsg8

Length: 55min 19sec (3319 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2022