John Searle - Can Brain Explain Mind?

John looking at the brain you would hardly think that that three pounds of wet meat can cause the all of the rapturous things that we can think about and therefore it's caused all sorts of philosophical debates over millennia well we have duelists who believe there's different kinds of stuff materialists would say no you've refuted it all and have come up with something called biological naturalism yes well let me first of all share your sense of awe and wonder that's where philosophy starts philosophy begins with the sense of amazement that things are the way they are and it is astounding that this as you say a kilogram and a half about three pounds of this icky stuff it's about the texture of English oatmeal that's where all of our conscious life goes on and process there cause everything in our conscious life however you ask about my own view and let me state it briefly that philosophers feel more comfortable with labels and I call my view biological naturalism I'm not passionately went to the label because it says the mind is a biological phenomenon that's the right level to explain it and it's part of nature it's a part of the natural world that goes on at the level of biology so you reject the dualist view of two different kinds of stuff a mental stuff or a spiritual stuff and you reject the materialist view who generally say consciousness is either an illusion or something that's not really involved with the world or some way to get rid of it both dualism and materialism I think are trying to say something true but they end up saying something false and I'm trying to tear the true part apart from the false part the materialist says physical reality is all reality there is it's all I physical particles and fields of force the doula says there is a part of reality that's irreducibly mental and I want to preserve both of those now how do you do that right well step number one is you take the brain seriously after you've first established what I want to do that consciousness really exists maybe I should I emphasize that that there are some people try to deny the existence of consciousness but that won't work because the way that we typically get rid of things in science is by showing that there's an illusion of color and illusion of solidity and illusion of liquidity but it reduced to something else but that won't work for consciousness because where consciousness is concerned the illusion is the reality if it consciously seems to me that I'm conscious then I am conscious so that's different than the materialist that's different from the materials the materialist that the eliminating materialist thinks you can eliminate consciousness by showing that it's an illusion and I say you can't all right number one we accept consciousness as a theory as real and irreducible now step two is you start to ask well like anything else in biology what causes it what's causally responsible and when I first got interested this I went out and bought a whole bunch of textbooks on the brain and just sit down and read them by the way that's way to learn a field if you if you want to know somethin bout the field go by the undergraduate textbooks and and in the end you can get a feel for the subject now unfortunately we don't know an awful lot about the brain i we don't know exactly why the processes that result that the processes that result in a simulation of my nerve endings cause a pain to occur in the brain and we don't know all the details even about vision but let's take a case where we do know something about it if you track the visual stimulus through the optical system over the optic chiasma and back through the lateral geniculate nucleus and and then through the visual cortex and then forward into the cortex then it's it's pretty obvious this process is causing visual experiences we don't know all the details but this is why red looks red because there are a series of neuronal processes in the brain that cause the visual experience so that's step two that's step two step two all conscious states are caused by neuronal processing step two all right but now then you ask have to ask is yes and what's their mode of existence how do they exist and there the answer I think follows more or less immediately namely all of these conscious states everything is realized in the brain it's all going on in the brain in a certain piece of neuronal architecture and and this runs counter to a whole tradition we have of discussing these things that say consciousness can't have a spatial location but we know in fact that it does and with current imaging techniques were actually able to discover where certain conscious processes goes I mean like step three then says that consciousness is a function of the higher brain systems that these brain systems that you can see light up and these exactly exactly that is you see if you go through these steps it's real it's caused by brain processes then what you're gonna find is that the brain processes that cause specific conscious states are likely to be architectural II specific to certain parts of the brain if you could I ascend the stimulus from your ear or into the optic centers then you would have a visual experience a corresponding Tillie or the auditory stimulus in fact we do get something like that when you have what's called phosphenes one of us seeing stars yeah if somebody for sure on the eye somebody punches you in the eye you see stars you see a flash that's because the the stimulus is going to the visual cortex and through the visual system so the neuronal architecture is it is not just random or accidental it's quite specific to specific conscious then then then to go from there though you still come back and say that consciousness does have causal impact yeah it's not something that's that's irrelevant or so-called epiphenomenon is kind of writing on the surface with no no no no real impact you say that in your system in your systems natural that consciousness really does have causation right okay so now we got we got up to this far conscience is real and irreducible caused by brain processes in the brain what's it do well it's obvious that it plays an enormous role in our lives it functions causally I like to give an example of this to raise my arm and then there aren't my arm going up but that's just one example among many I have a thought in my brain and guess what it produces words coming out of my mouth I have these intentions to answer Roberts questions and this actually causes behavior so there there isn't any question if we just look at the facts now and forget about the philosophical tradition that consciousness functions causally in producing behavior taking it all together you then would draw an analogy between the brain doing consciousness and the gut doing digest exactly that's a that's an example I like to use because what I want to do is D mythologize consciousness think of it as an ordinary biological process that happens to go on in the brain in the way that digestion happens to go on and in in the stomach and the rest of the digestive tract let's try to get rid of this deep mystery now you might say but assist isn't like that well I have another analogy I like to use and that is the history of the debates about life there was a time not all that long ago a century ago when probably near this very spot people debated passionately about the question can you ever give a scientific account of life can you ever give an account of how matter could come become alive now we can't feel those passions anymore that problem has been for the in large parts solved we with with the understanding the replication of a DNA and Ra RNA we have a pretty good understanding of the biochemical basis of life we no longer feel that is an issue and what I'm suggesting is that as our understanding of the brain improves and we are making progress I mean I don't want to give the idea that we don't know anything we know quite a lot as understanding the brain improves I believe that the problem of consciousness as somehow deep metaphysical problem will be treated as a scientific problem like any other and will be solved in the same way that the problem of life was solved here's the problem I have with the consciousness digestion analogy consciousness is not like digestion maybe maybe the perception of vision is like the digestion maybe the the hormonal systems are like digestion a lot of things like digestion not consciousness yeah well all analogies break down somewhere and there is a dis analogy between consciousness and digestion and that is in an ordinary sense once we get a complete knowledge of the causal structure of digestion we do an ontological reduction we say a digestion is nothing but all of these processes but we can't holiday meaning the what's the real exists yes ontology just means that which exists in the nature of its existence so we do an ontological reduction based on the cause of reduction the causal analysis enables us to say that's really all there is to digestion but you can't do that with consciousness because consciousness has this subjective or first-person ontology its mode of existence is to exist only when it's consciously experienced by a human or animal subject and you can't get rid of it so typically a causal reduction leads to an ontological reduction in the case of consciousness you get a causal reduction but no ontological I think this is enormous ly significant you say typically but can you name anything else besides consciousness in which you have causal reduction without ontological reduction I think that that consciousness is special because it's the only thing we know in the universe that has this subjective or first-person ontology but that's just how nature turned out but there may be all kinds of things that are weird quantum mechanics seems pretty weird to me but the way that nature turned out on the little corner of the universe that we inhabit there is a piece of the universe that's very important to us but maybe not a very big deal in the larger scheme of things and that is our conscious states they are on their causal irreducible they there isn't anything going on Causley except consciousness but their consciousness there isn't anything going on cause I accept that neuronal basis of conscious which causes consciousness but the consciousness itself is not ontological irreducible this articulation that you do is to me so important because it is a materialist view but it is different than every other materialist view because you recognize the uniqueness of consciousness and I think that's essential member my slogan is always don't say anything that's obviously false its obviously false to say that consciousness doesn't exist it's obviously false to say there's nothing there but third-person objective properties Edie is essentially qualitative and subjective but it's false to say therefore it's not part of the physical world of course it's part of the physical biological universe but it is special it has this unique feature of ontological subjectivity and that's how nature turned out we can't pretend that didn't happen that's just the way the world works

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 31,707

Rating: 4.8113823 out of 5

Keywords: John Searle, Closer To Truth, Brain, Psychology, Neuroscience, Mind, Consciousness

Id: ehdZAY0Zr6A

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2016