Searle: Philosophy of Mind, lecture 12

the point is the papers out of that paper topics thought to be intellectually challenging it all you ought to feel both that they enable you to show your mastery of the material in the course and do some intellectual work on your own do some independent thinking okay what is there anything else I need to announce well then let's just go to work I struggle with the so called mind-body problem and with basically what I call mainstream philosophy of mind and there are a bunch of questions in mainstream philosophy of mind that some of which we haven't approached yet much at all one of them is the problem of free will and we will talk about that but I have to give you a theory of intentionality first now I'd like in the and maybe today but in the next couple of lectures to finish mainstream philosophy of mind so that I could start talking about what I think is really the important part of the course namely how does the mind work and the essential notion there is the notion of intentionality the capacity that we have to represent objects and states of affairs in the world through perception memory belief desire intention the emotions the emotions are something we haven't talked about yet and I'd like to at least give well one lecture our chunk of like of a lecture about the emotions because I think you won't really understand the nature of the mind if you don't understand the emotions okay so I last time I started talking about the structure of intentionality but in my eagerness to get to what I think is a more fun part of the course I left out various things that I should have discussed and I'm gonna fill in and that with those and then we're gonna go back and pick up the discussion of consciousness one thing that I I did not talk about were some current theories of mind that seemed to me so implausible that I'm astounded that anybody can take them seriously but anyway there are well-known philosophers who hold these views so let me tell you some of what they are one view that is going around now I think if you came back in ten years you wouldn't hear any more about it because it'll die of its own preposterous nizam aim it's called the theory of the extended mind and the idea is this suppose functionalism or right suppose a mental state just consists in sets of causal relations between input stimuli and output behavior well if you're interesting if you're interested in the causal mechanisms that mediate input behavior input stimuli and output behavior then why stop with the brain why stop with the skin there are all sorts of mechanisms in the world that enable you to facilitate the relationship between the input stimuli and the output behavior why aren't there part a part of your mind I actually made sort of lecture notes today more than I ever I'm more than I normally make because it's kind of a long list of stuff I want to talk about why aren't the lecture notes part of my mind and these these guys say well if you take functionalism seriously they are part of your mind this is actually a piece of my mind on the extended mind theory so the extended mind theory says the mind is extended all sorts of things are parts of the mind provided they are part of the causal relations between I the input stimuli and the external behavior so your computer is part of your mind this piece of chalk I guess is part of my mind now I think that view is preposterous it would have the consequence for example I that when I tear up this piece of paper I'm tearing up a piece of my mind or if my computer is stolen a piece of my mind is stolen and I think that's not how not how it works I think to put it in very crude terms the brain is rather special the brain plays a special role in in that all of our mental states go on in the brain and in a theory of the mind has to explain the nature of what is going on in the brain that enables us to call certain of those processes mental and others of those processes not mental so I don't take the extended mind seriously but if you google extended mind or looking the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy which incidentally is largely supported by the berkeley library but incidentally if you look in those places you'll find accounts of the extended mind if there's anybody who wants the defend extended mind now's your chance I mean if you think there's anything in it so any questions about the extent I'm not gonna say more about it except to say I think it's not it's not a serious project on the other hand many views about the mind are equally repositories and they get one is pan psychism that everything is conscious another is well as you know behaviorism it says well really there isn't any mental life going on in there there's just the output behavior so I don't know that the extended mind leads the league that it's the the champion of a preposterous theories of mind but it's certainly one of the challengers yes yeah yeah no I think that's a good point I just put the people at the back of the room he says but it's certainly the case that you can't have certain sorts of thoughts without certain kinds of tools and I would want to say the essential tool is language there are all sorts of thoughts that my poor dog Gilbert has simply cannot have because he hasn't got language it isn't just they can't worry about whether or not he'll get his income tax in on time this year but he can't even worry about what he's gonna do next Wednesday because he hasn't got the apparatus to represent next Wednesday he hasn't got the linguistic apparatus so I don't want to give you the impression that what I'm arguing for when I say mental states go on inside your brain that I'm arguing for a kind of solid system that the whole of reality is inside your brain or that the that all of the contents of what's inside your brain can be entirely fixed without reference to any external objects that's not the case no much of your mental life depends on your abilities to cope with the world and those go beyond what is actually encoded in your brain at any given moment so for example I want to go skiing this weekend but a look at the weather prediction says no chance I dare they're absolutely brutal I just looked before class and it said if you're planning any trips over the Sierra don't do it until after Saturday afternoon so there they're putting me now in the old days they used to say well it's a winter storm warning God knows you know it's your responsibility now they actually actively discourage you so this is a case where my mental life is severely affected by information that I get from my computer and you I mean you can give thousands of examples in daily life any other questions about the extended mind as Gil Harmon says somewhere one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens remember modus ponens goes if PETA and Q be there for Q and modus tollens go if P then Q not P therefore not Q so modus ponens says well if I if functionalism is true and it is true they think then extended mind is true functionalism is true so the extended mind is true the other guy's off which I'm one says the extended mind is fall if functionalism is true then the extended mind is true but the extended mind is false therefore functionalism is false one one side gives modus ponens the other guy's gives modus tollens and that's much of the history of philosophy is like that one man's result is a one philosophers result is another philosophers refutation I and I yes there's a guy at the back would hand up yeah no idea the point is not about the nature of cooperation or universal minds I don't think there are universal minds all mental life is in the heads of individuals humans and animals maybe someday we'll be able to invent a conscious machine but we nowhere near doing that so far nobody's been able not to invent anything like a conscious machine the question is is there some reason to say that the body and especially the brain have a privileged role in mental life that the actual all of my mental life goes on inside my brain and maybe other parts of my nervous system but certainly inside my skin I think that's right all right that it does go on inside my brain but there is a single most influential view in the philosophy of mind is probably some kind of functionalism I and according to functionalism somebody and some people have recently discovered well on the functionalist account it seems arbitrary to set the boundary of the mind at the at the skin at the boundary of your body because if the mind is essentially a matter of causal relations those causal relation to extend beyond your body and as I say they don't at the mental phenomena don't extend beyond your body I and that's a refutation of functionalism but if you're convinced of functionalism then you might think that what I'm calling a refutation is in fact a discovery okay now there's another crazy view I'm sorry to use these technical terms and that's pan psychism that everything is mental that the piece of paper is mental and a piece of chalk is conscious and so on and it's very hard to get people to come out and endorse pan psychism but I think Dave Chalmers is committed to it and at least in a hesitant fashion and he does in his book describe what it would feel like to be a thermostat he thinks the thermostat is conscious or if it it could be conscious and I named once it what's it feel like to be a thermostat now I think if you can take that seriously you have real problems but in any case that the problem with one of the many problems with pan psychism is you can't give a coherent statement of it why because consciousness by definition comes in units and remember I told you on Tuesday that it's a feature of conscious consciousness that it always comes in unified conscious so if you're gonna say the thermostat is conscious what about the parts of the thermostat why the thermostat and not each screw in the thermostat or the bimetallic strip in the thermostat or I if you're gonna say the thermostat why not the whole heating system of which the thermostat is apart or if you're gonna say the heating system why not the whole building so yeah I I don't think there is a coherent statement of a pan psychism i I think it's it kind of to put it crudely a kind of intellectual laziness that people say well maybe consciousness everywhere it's sort of spread over the universe like so much jam and I don't the problem with that is not just that it's false but that you cannot give a coherent statement of it because you can't give a coherent statement that's consistent with what we know about the about consciousness coming in unified fields ok so that's one problem that I should have mentioned earlier and I didn't but anyway no I've done that now another one is that there are class of philosophers not very many but there are some philosophers who say we can't solve the mind-body problem we can never understand how brains relate to consciousness we even if it's right that brains cause consciousness we can never understand how it works well I mean I and I guess the the leading spokesman for this view is calling him again who says that we cannot have a theory of the relation of mind and body for us he says it's newman 'l using cons expression for that the unknowable things in themselves yes there is a causal relation between the brain and the mind but it's unknowable to us the problem with that is even if it were true we couldn't now say that it's true because in order to set the bounds to knowledge you'd have to be able to think both sides of the boundary and it's Auto interest people that know neuroscientists working on this problem would just say well it's a mystery we'll never understand it I mean that if we know the brain processes cause consciousness we know that this happens and we know that the brain is investigating is something you can investigate like any other organ then it looks like we ought to get busy and investigate it maybe we're not going to succeed it's like discovering a cure for cancer we don't have a cure for cancer but that doesn't mean and maybe we never will but that doesn't mean we should continue the investigation that there's some theoretical reasons for not continuing the investigation a weaker form of mysterion ISM is the view and Tom Nagel when Thomas nagels article it was I think a very good article the would not refer to it many times that what it's like to be a bad article and there he says with our present conceptual apparatus we can't understand how brain processes could cause mental states well once again I think if you say that you're too much in the grip of cartesianism you think there's some unbridgeable gulf but suppose we actually had a perfect science of the brain suppose we could actually we actually know how not just how brain processes brain processes cause us to be conscious but and we know in detail how the experience of read the conscious experience is seeing something read is caused by processes in the brain we had a theory of that we have a theory of why certain processes cause certain types of mental states and other processes don't we had a theory let's say comparable to the germ theory of disease where we have a theory of how microorganisms cause disease symptoms then it would seem to me that would answer the mysterion's and I don't think anybody except a Cartesian could say well you don't really understand it because you don't see how to get over the metaphysical gulf from the brain to the from the brain to consciousness and I think again the history of life the history of the study of life is revealing here people used to think that the existence of life was a deep mystery I and that you could never explain it by mechanical causes by by standard chemical causes and there was a huge dispute it may have gone on in this very building I don't know when it was built but it's built quite a long time ago I between people called mechanist s' who thought there's a mechanical explanation of life and others called vitalists and the vitalists vitalism the vitalists thought you have to postulate a vital spirit and a certain kind of nonsense sound a lot better in French you have to have an L on Vitale and the LOV tile is that distinguishes living organisms living matter from nonliving matter today it's interesting it's very hard for us to feel what drove these people we don't feel the passion that they felt this was a passionate debate people felt very strongly about mechanism versus vitalism now I don't have to tell you the mechanist won the argument because we now understand the mechanisms that produce life I and we understand a whole lot of things that were simply not understood at the beginning a hundred years ago at the beginning of the 20th century much less 150 years ago in the 19th century so I had the kind of explanation of consciousness that we have of life of what it is for an organism to be alive then I think the sense that there's some deep mystery about mind body relations would simply disappear and the point is not just that the mechanist one and the vitalists lost but we got a much richer conception of the nature of biochemistry we stand things about about carbon-based molecules about organic chemistry which would have stunned people in the middle of the 19th century we just know a whole lot more so we have a much richer conception of the mechanisms involved we no longer talk mysteriously about what how heredity works we actually have we can actually identify the mechanisms in DNA and RNA molecules indeed according to Francis Crick we don't really have much use for the notion of a gene anymore because we mostly deal with it with molecular biochemistry and their courses in this University where you can learn the details of that if we had that kind of knowledge about consciousness I think the philosophical problem would simply disappear and I don't see any reason in principle why we can't have it it took a long time much longer than then the mechanist expected it to take to get an understanding of life but we know have it by the way one of the things that really drove me crazy when I was in undergraduate when I was your age is by and large the professor's didn't tell us what they didn't know they were so anxious to say what they did know that they didn't tell you what they didn't know and when I took a course in biology nobody told us that they didn't know how heredity worked well they didn't it wasn't until Francis Crick and Jim Watson discovered that DNA was the mechanism that we began really to understand it okay now I want to tell you flatly we don't understand how the brain works we understand a fair amount about the about the anatomy and physiology in fact we're getting a whole lot better understanding of the the basic chemical structure of the neurotransmitters and about the nature of synaptic transmission and about what is happening in the synaptic cleft we know a lot of that stuff now but we don't know the crucial answers to the crucial questions such as how exactly does the brain produce consciousness now we don't even know how exactly does the brain store memories we're learning a lot about that and one of the things that's interesting is we now have a much richer conception of memory so all kinds of distinctions are made between iconic memory and working memory and event memory and declarative memory which previous theorists wouldn't have been able to make they didn't know they enough of the neural biology to make those and when we talk about intentionality I'll have more to say about brain research but I don't see any obstacle in principle to having an understanding of how brains cause consciousness so I'm not a mysterion I mention that because I frequently self see myself referred to as a mysterion because I reject the computational theory of the mind oh and now they have to tell you that article came out yesterday in the Wall Street Journal and yeah I I actually had to go to a dinner party last night and actually saw the damned article for about 30 seconds but I didn't get a chance to read it so but have a look at it you can probably find it on the web and the email has started to come in and one of the things that I liked best was some outraged doctor wrote me and said why do you waste your time writing this article we all know that of course the computer can't think I mean he thought that everybody agreed with my conclusion he hasn't been in this debate for the past 30 years but in any case I was delighted that some people think the point is so obvious why are you making it and I wrote back and told him I only did it at the insistence of the Wall Street Journal okay shall we go on I'm I'm honest I an extended mind and mysterion's and mentioned another thing I left out yeah I can't hear you yeah mechanism was opposed to vitalism and what they meant by mechanism was not that they knew the nature of the mechanism but they thought an explanation of life would have to be given in I make mechanistic terms that is to say in chemical and physical terms and that's what happened you wouldn't need to postulate something outside of the physical chemical world some spirit some I vital spirit which was this what's called the a long Vidal that came from outside the physical world to explain life and I'm saying you don't mean some spiritual explanation to explain consciousness we're gonna have an explanation in neurobiological terms where that goes on now I told you on my theory on what I call biological naturalism the view of consciousness that I gave you there are certain depressing results and one is when you die your consciousness is going to cease I'm sorry about that but as far as I can tell that is how it in fact works another thing I that I should tell you a lot of people think is a counterintuitive result and maybe it is on my account if you have a pain in your toe strictly speaking the location of the actual event of you're feeling the pain is not in your toe it's in your brain and the phantom limb I phenomena are good examples of this there I'm sorry to give you these horrible stories but anyway they're the ones that illustrate the case a guy has his leg cut off because he gets in an accident he run over by a train or something like that but after his leg has been amputated he still reports feelings of pain in his toe this is known as the phantom limb - ah mannan and I still to this day still get letters from people saying my uncle has phantom limb pains what can you do about it as if you know I'm going to be able to help him out I'm not but I the and the point on my account is there's a severy buddy understands why what happens is the nerve that the nerve endings that stimulate the pain in the toe are still being stimulated even after the toe is gone i and consequently the guy does can sincerely feel a pain and he sincerely reports that the pain is in his toe but he hasn't got a toe now on my count that's perfectly possible the way it works is the brain creates a body image if you look in standard neurobiology textbooks they usually show you this huge homunculus in your brain where the body where you experience different parts of your body in the body image which is in the brain so it's a real event that occurs when you have a pain in the toe but the actual physical location of that physical event is in your brain and not in your toe and that seems right to me there's a sense in which all of us are well I would say all of us but a lot of us have phantom limb pains a very common ailment which if you don't have it you probably will someday it's called sciatica and in the case of sciatica the patient feels a shooting pain that goes down his leg but there's nothing wrong with his leg his leg is fine the sciatic nerve in his spine is stimulated and that gives him the experience of a pain in his leg but there's nothing going on in the leg it's all in the brain so on my account to put it paradoxically really all bodily sensations are phantom limb sensations they're all going on in the brain now that doesn't mean that when I go to my doctor and he said well where exactly do you feel the pain I don't say I hear no I'd point to my toe where I actually feel the pain because that's where he's got to carry out the treatment and that is the phenomenology of it that's how it actually feels but but if we take the experience of pain as an event occurring in space-time which it is then the actual spatial location of that event is not in the toe but it's in the brain this is why aspirin another handle Jesus work they work on the pain centers in the to make the pain make the pain go away okay so I want to point that out to you because that I a lot of people think that's a counterintuitive result and it is it is counterintuitive to say well the actual strictly speaking the location of the pain in the toe if you take that experience as if as an event a real event occurring in the real world it occurs in my brain yes the mysterion's well mysterion's think consciousness exists but they think we'll never be able to understand it I mean they're not materialists I mean I'm talking about Colin McGann more than anybody else because he's the sort of the leading mysterion and he doesn't deny that consciousness exists and he really doesn't deny that it's caused by brain process he thinks it is he just thinks we can never understand it for us it will forever be a mystery yeah well you see you can understand what we need to understand from a third-person perspective you can understand how these experiences cause how these neurobiological event caused these experiences now there may be a forms of the experience that we will never be able to I have empathy with because it's so different from our own so I mean to take a negligibly may never have a full understanding of what it's like to be a bat because we don't know what it would feel like to live the bats life or I give an example of the bird that navigates by detecting the Earth's magnetic field what's it like to feel a surge of magnetism coming up in your chest I don't know but we may still be able to figure out what are the neurobiological mechanisms that produce those experiences and for science that's enough I mean that's pretty good if we could do that okay shall we go on then so we dealt with the extended mind the mysterion's now there's one other thing that I should mention before I go back and talk about consciousness which is what I really want talk about and that is the accusation made against me by Jai Guan Kim prominently but other people have made it as well and it's useful to have these slogans it's called causal / determination now what kim says is on my account i if there's a neurobiological cause of my arm going up and a mental cause of my arm going up and there's no ontological reduction of the mental to the neurobiological then you have too many causes so what caused my arm to go up ah well my intention in action I had this I decided to raise my arm and my decision led to the trying as another name for the intention in action to raise my arm and it went up oh that's a mental story about how the mental cause the physical but at the same time there's a neurobiological story and I won't tell you the whole damn story about that what happens in the motor cortex and how it goes down to the motor neurons and how eventually it reaches the axon endplates of the motor neurons where they latch onto the muscle fiber and then you get all of these marvelous things happening in the muscle fiber and eventually it ratchets up with the myosin filaments and the actin filaments you find it in any in any physiology textbook I there's a story about how muscles move when you read for example raise your arms okay now says Kim on Searles account you got too many causes and indeed if you look at these the diagram that I continued the draw where you have an intention in action causing the bodily movement and you have a whole lot of neurophysiology which also causes the physiological changes then it looks like you got a cause down here this is a cause and this is a cause but there this is a single event here of my arm going up but it looks like you have causal overdetermination you have a neuro physiological cause and intention and action cause okay well you know my answer to that but I want to repeat it because it's crucial to the whole argument the course namely this these are not two events they're one event with two levels of description there's a level of description where this my conscious decision going on and another level of description where that is grounded in I it is caused by and realized in my bottom-up causation a whole lot of neuro physiological processes going on in the same way that the bodily movement is grounded in a whole lot of physiological processes going on it's just that this one has this remarkable feature at the top level it's got subjectivity which you do not have as an ontological feature down here but remember and this is a key to this whole discussion a consciousness is entirely causally reducible the brain processes there's no separate causal force to consciousness any more than there is the solidity or any other higher level feature but the causal reducibility does not lead to ontological reducibility for a really kind of trivial reason namely the first-person ontology of the subjective cannot be entirely eliminated in favor of the third-person ontology of the objective now I'm talking in slogans but I've taught you what these slogans mean about object about ontological objectivity and ontological subjectivity so it's because consciousness is ontologically subjective that you can't do the reduction to the neurobiology but there's no causal power to consciousness which is not I realized in the neurobiology yeah any feature of your conscious state is entirely caused by neurobiological processes so I don't take a Kim's account seriously but like all of these accounts it rests on taking the cartesian categories as being adequate and they're not the mental and the physical are simply inadequate as traditionally conceived inadequate to describe the phenomena and I gave you an odd kind of proof of the reverse where I said look there's no question my intention caused my arm to go up but anything that caused my arm to go up that way has to cause the secretion of a very specific neurotransmitter acetylcholine one of my favorite neurotransmitters I have others I like better but that's a good one dopamine well I won't tell you about dopamine it's another lecture but the intention and action causes the arm to go up and the intention and anything that causes the arm to go up has to cause the secretion of acetylcholine and only a neurobiological feature could cause the secretion of acetylcholine so what's the answer to that not that we have too many causes no but the intention in action is a neurobiological phenomenon with neurobiological properties it's got neurobiological properties describable down here and mental properties describable up here one event with both sets of properties and they are not observer-relative either one of them have both intrinsic they're both observer-independent okay so I'm not dismayed by the objection that Kim makes I couldn't find my copy of his book but I'm sure we can track it down yeah Jim yes one of and this is true of car engines as a my favorite example because I understand how it works I the car engine has one event that's describable either as the passage of electrons across the electrodes or the spark plug firing it's those are one event with two different levels of description it has another event which is caused by the sparkplug firing which is an explosion in the cylinder and that event is describable either as the oxidization of hydrocarbon molecules or the explosion in the cylinder as the engine fires it's exactly like the mind body problem except of course with the fact that in the case of the of consciousness you get ontological subjectivity yes yes okay now on my account you get bottom-up causation pretty much throughout everything and the objection that people make to that is well you can't have a causal relation if you have an identity relation and there I think that's wrong you can have a causal relation within a system so for example the the solidity of this desk will it causally account for its well except the damn thing rolls around too much well cause we account for the fact that it supports my keys or anything else I put on it now what's the whole causal story the causal story is the vibratory movement of the molecules in lattice structures causally accounts for him penetrability if I hold these things out here and let go of them they'll fall to the ground molecules in both places this one pile of molecules this and other pile of molecules the molecules here have a causal property that these molecules don't have and that causal property is explained by the behavior of the molecule movements now I want to say it's exactly like that with this example except with this exceptional feature which is what makes life fun namely we have this ontological subjectivity say some more the yes God there that it's a bit tricky because I mean I'll state this point precisely once you get a causal reduction our standard practice has been to make an ontological reduction by way of redefinition so before we know any chemistry physics elyda T is defined as resistance to touch and pressure maintain maintenance of the same bodily shape stability of a certain kind those are part of the definition of solidity now then once you get an explanation of those surface phenomena you redefine solidity in terms of the micro explanation the micro features cause the macro of surface features instead of defining solidity in terms of the macro surface features you define it in terms of micro features but the causal relations remain exactly the same so instead of saying I well the I this thing supports objects because it's solid we now say the causal relations between the molecule movements and the molecular structure the object placed on it make it the case that you've got an explanation of why it supports objects placed on it these impenetrability now has a causal explanation now it might look well as if well that's trivial okay so you redefine the notion but it has amazing results and the single most amazing result is you can now discover things that you couldn't discover otherwise namely you can discover that glass is our liquid why because the molecules aren't moving the way they move in the case of other solids it's just a liquid that flows very very slowly like you'd have to wait around for millions of years for the glass and these glass panels to move so that redefinition is not trivial now let me want make one last thought here and then I'll take you the reduct ontological reduction on the basis of a causal reduction why can't we do that with consciousness and the answer is we might we might get so good at brain science that we would say things like look well this guy really has a pain but he can't feel it yet we can see on the brain o-scope that he's got a pain but he can't feel it yet it eventually he'll feel it but he doesn't feel it yet we might redefine the pain in terms of the micro causes in the way we redefine solidity in terms of the micro causes but if we did that you'd still need a concept to describe the ontological subjectivity so our I'm convinced that our part of our problem in AI appreciating this is we know too much about the history of philosophy we're still wrapped in the cartesian terminology we still think well if it's mental it can't be physical and then the worst mistake then is to go the next step and say well if the world contains not only the mental and the physical but it's got a third realm frege's said that popper says it Jurgen Habermas said it in lectures in Berkeley so and worse than dualism you got trial ISM that there are three realms that we live in that's all a mistake there's one world we all live in one world and it's got all kinds of oddball features and part of the fun of philosophy is you get to explore those features but anyway you had a question yes yes you can reduce the firing of the spark plugs to the electrons passing between the electrodes you can reduce the explosion in the cylinder to the oxidization of the hydrocarbon molecules but and I want to say you can also reduce their consciousness to the neural physiology but the reduction area is causal not ontological you can't make the ontological reduction on the basis of the cause of reduction in a way that you can with the others because if you did that you'd lose the point of having the concept of consciousness you'd still need something to name ontological subject now if somebody says well how can that be you know I mean why you're giving up the whole materialist worldview why did Galileo suffer if you're gonna just chuck it out the window this way well I think no I'm not chucking anything out the window I'm just recognizing this is how the world works and people say yeah but you know it's easy to imagine the world without consciousness yeah it is but that's not the world we live in the world we live in contains consciousness I've got it so do you yes yeah people accused me of property dualism and they think look it's obviously proper to dualism because you say a consciousness is not reducible to brain processes but it's a feature of the brain at a higher level that's the definition of property dualism but then comes the crucial difference and they say but once you say that you've said that consciousness is not a part of the physical world and consequently at the can't function causally or if it does function causally you get property now you get a causal overdetermination either you get epiphenomenalism or you get causal overdetermination epiphenomenalism says this level here makes no difference at all all of the work is done in this level or or overdetermination says you have too many causes it can't be right because you got two independent causes I want to say where both of those answers show that we're still in the grip of the Cartesian categories and we ought to be suspicious of these little parallelograms that I've been drawing and maybe a much better I mean I put those in print so we're stuck with it I'm stuck with those for a while but maybe a much better picture is this instead of the metaphor and the higher and the lower think of this big system moving forward and it's got these neurons in it and sometimes the neurons are in a certain state in the same way that the water molecules are in a certain state and then we're not struck by the the lower and the higher which gives us the idea well maybe consciousness sort of like the varnish on the top of the table it's higher up but lower down there's a real molecular structure now what I'm trying to say now is maybe we should think that there's a whole system that moves in time and it's got a micro structure and there's a micro explanation of the macro phenomena as there is in everything as there is in tables and car engines and all the rest of it and the micro explanation of the macro phenomena in this case is that neuron firings caused consciousness and consciousness Quay consciousness continues to function causally in the same way that solidity Quast solidity functions causally okay I don't know if that helps but in any case this is I mean this is gonna this an argument I'm sure I'm gonna win this one III won the Chinese room but it took me 30 goddamn years you wouldn't think take that long but anyway I won't live to see this one but I'm pretty confident this has to be the way it works because we know this independent let me know independently all this stuff is caused by I knew on firings in the brain presumably you gotta have you gotta have a certain number of neurons you can't do it with just oddball neurons or even probably a hundred thousand neurons though who knows that's a factual question we can't settle it philosophically okay other questions Candida yes yes yes well okay first of all let's establish that it does say if you do philosophy long enough you'll get a sore arm but my urges and whenever I have doubts yep sure enough the damn thing goes up so there isn't any question about that but that's like saying either spark plug firing causes the the engine to turn over there or the explosion the cylinder causes the piston to move but now I can do a causal reduction of that because there aren't any causes of my consciousness that don't have a neurobiological base if they didn't if they were not grounded in the plumbing they couldn't move the arm the arm after all is an object in the physical world like any other and it's got to have a certain sorts of mechanisms operating in order for it to move those mechanisms happen to be both describable at a mental level and at a neurobiological level and maybe we should just get rid of this whole vocabulary of the mental and the physical the trouble is the other vocabularies that I know kicking around aren't any better sound it's kind of stuck with a traditional vocabulary I mean I don't find it helpful to say well it's really the buffoon League kite and gabor fan height of design I and its struggle with a laban spell that's a high degree and jargon and that doesn't help me much I mean I don't get any clarity out of that I saw I'm stuck with a traditional vocabulary and and by and large what I'm telling you I have no problem explaining this to neuroscientists yeah they feel okay what's the big deal about that they agree with all of that though it took a long time to agree to it yes yes but well actually many levels yeah go ahead yeah there's a single cause moving the whole system forward right yeah that's right yeah well okay there are cases where my arm moves without me having an intention in action let's suppose that somebody simply stimulates the neurons in such a way that the arm goes up you can I either the standard experiments here are Penfield's Penfield was a neuro surgeon in montreal and he was the best brain stabber like for a thousand miles around you had something wrong with your brain you went to him and I never met him but I met his sidekick Rasmussen and I had some conversations with him these phenomena it's very interesting now Penfield did an interesting series of operations on people that involved opening up their brains and if you look at the photographs they're horrible because they shave all the guy's hair off and then they cut a sort of window in the skull and they take out a piece of the skull this was brought home to me because my brother had a brain operation and the I called the doctor and the doctor I turned out was kind of fan of mine he'd read things by me and he thought well he mistakenly thought I hope know a whole lot about the neurophysiology which I don't know my level of knowledge is that of an undergraduate neurobiology textbook and he told me what he did billy-boy in horrendous detail the operation was success my brother's okay now but he began by saying well first we cut his skull off huh well okay you know I didn't want to go I didn't stop listening at that point but anyway yeah they did cut his skull off then oh yeah then they glued it back on okay well that's good I'm glad but I mean what Banfield did was he cut windows in the skull and then he goes in with a micro electrode and what he does is he says I have caused a patient's arm to move I've caused a limb to move by stimulating portions of the motor cortex with a micro electrode so he's got his little gimmick and he touches the portion of the motor car take the patients are fully awake and the guy's arm goes up now says and feel when I have done this to a patient I invariably ask the patient about it and you think you better ask him about your messing around inside the guy's brain and invariably the patient says I didn't do that you did it I so it's easy to imagine what it's like you're just sitting there the guy or liner the guy is messing around inside your brain and suddenly your arm just goes ah you don't move it you don't do it he does it and another creepy case is said he says I have caused a patient to vote kyes he stimulates the auditory portions of the motor cortex and invariably the patient says I didn't say that I didn't make that sound you pulled it out of me notice the metaphors here now he doesn't say what noises these people make I imagine they don't sing the Canadian national anthem when he's stimulating their brain but they probably go her or something like that and the interesting thing is it's without the intention in action so what you have you is you have the bodily movement part without the intention in action the way it actually goes and when we talk about intentionality I'll go through this typically you form a prior intention that leads to the intention in action it's another word for this is trying and the intention and action causes the bodily movement and this whole thing is the action now what happens in Penfield's case is he's have found a way that he can come in at this point and stem and create the bodily movement without the intention in action now nobody's been able to do this experiment where the guy says I don't know why but for some damn cool reason I'm raising my arm I don't know why I'm raising mine I'm just raising it that would be the case where you stimulate the brain at the point where the guy has the intention and action as far as I know nobody's been able to do that or the prior intention the intention you have prior to the action in that case the guy would say you know for some reason I made up my mind to move my arm I don't know why I just made up my mind to move my arm that would be where you created the prior intention nobody's been able to do that either and I think the reason is because these aren't local see this part is pretty well localized in the brain it has to be to get very specific bodily movements but you can have intentions in all kinds of ways in the brain it's not you don't get a nice type type correlation with intentions that you do with the proximate causes of the bodily movement okay there's a guy at the very back did you have your hand up yeah no okay I didn't all right you've already had anybody else who didn't have a chance to speak do you want to speak again yes yeah well that's not a bigger problem I mean no question now we're talking now about conscious agents who are busy acting intentionally and we want to know how does it work how do their how is it possible that in a unified reality which is consistent tirely and physical particles conscious agents can move their bodies by making conscious decisions and then trying to carry out those decisions and I think there is that the formal structure that answer is rather simple that's the one I've given you now the details of how it works in the neurobiology that's much tougher we don't know that we don't know we don't know the answer to how the brain creates consciousness and we don't know the answer to the question how it creates this specific form of consciousness the second question may be easier to answer than the first actually because of we now have imaging techniques which enable us to localize in the brain certain kinds of things that are going on do you have your hand up now yeah it isn't that's the point I'm making I you see the what I'm suggesting is you shouldn't think of this as two different sets two different events there's a single event of you're trying to raise your arm and that single event has a level of description where it is a matter of physiological changes taking place in your brain have neurobiological processes in the brain going all the way out to the muscle fibers okay I'm gonna go on now and I didn't I was going to spend a couple minutes at the beginning of this lecture but this is not kind of worth going over this material because it's crucial for the whole course but we were at the very end last time I was telling you about the features of consciousness and I think the way to do this is if you can try to forget about the history of the subject and just describe your own experiences and what you will find is your conscious states have the following characteristics they are first of all qualitative they have this qualitative character that there's always some particular quality to having any qualitative and if you like abstract nouns you can make that qualitative Ness but it's got too many syllables for me but in any case that conscious states are qualitative now some philosophers like to use the word Kweli up and that's another term you will see in in the literature for conscious states I am me that's the plural the singular is quality one quality to qualia it's from the Greek I don't have any use for the notion of qualia because all conscious states are qualitative the idea that a lot of people have is well drinking beer that's a qualia feeling a pain listening to music those are qualia but just thinking there's no qualitative field to think I think there is I think I thinking two plus two equals four has a certain qualitative field and you can see that if you as I mentioned before if you're thinking in different languages its Lightman spies in feel sounds to me it feels to me different from thinking two plus two equals four and I won't bore you by going through French and Spanish and Portuguese but try it out with languages you know so every conscious state has a qualitative structure and for that very reason it's subjective ontologically that is to say it only exists in so far as it is experienced it has ontological subjectivity and it comes to us in a unified form I don't just have a taste of beer and the sound of the music but I have both the taste of the beer and the sound of music as part of a single unified conscious experience I and I argued very briefly I just said it I didn't really argue for it and that is if you think about these are really just one qualitative subjective unity or unified qualitative subjectivity that's a single feature of consciousness with these aspects why do I say that because each of these implies the next it couldn't be qualitative if in that sense if it wasn't subjective and it couldn't be I couldn't have qualitative subjectivity if it wasn't unified if it didn't come to you in these unified chunks and that's why the split brain cases are so interesting to us and I mentioned them briefly as well where the patient apparently has two centers of consciousness going on simultaneously okay the fourth feature was was intentionality and I'm going to talk about that in detail so I won't talk about it now it's just to say from an evolutionary point of view the single most important feature of our consciousness is its capacity to relate us to the environment to find food to reproduce to enable enable ourselves to survive under adverse conditions to do those you've got to have a way of representing how things are in the world how you're gonna make them be how you want them to be etc so that's intentionality now it's also the case that all of our conscious states come to us in some mood or other it needn't be a mood that has a name like being depressed or being elated but clearly there is a mood moods are not the same as emotions though the moods may predispose you to emotion if you're in an irritable mood that may have you more tendency to become angry anger is a form of intentionality irritability is not because you can be irritable without being irritated about anything specific there's in the case of anger what are you angry about must always make sense there has to be an answer to that question but if the guy's just grumpy he needn't be grumpy about anything or if he's just irritable he needn't be irritated about anything okay another crucial distinction in the case of consciousness is the distinction between the center and the periphery of consciousness there are all sorts of things that are part of my conscious field that I'm not paying any attention to so for example as I walk around on this floor there are various lines in the linoleum but I'm not paying any attention to those lines or I the specific distance between the fluorescent lights those are all part of my conscious experience I could focus my attention on him but I am NOT i focusing my attention on them and the whole point about the center is at the center is where we're focusing our attention the metaphor the searchlight I think is almost inevitable how you sort of shine the searchlight of your intention by focusing on certain aspects of your consciousness and not others but you can be conscious of lots of things that you're not paying attention to the feeling of the shirt on my back or the other the particular texture of the chalk in my hands those are all part of my conscious feel but they're not at the center now related to this but I think not really the same is the sense in in our conscious states that there are a certain boundary conditions on the conscious states that I that they are situated and I'll just have an ugly word call that situate Ted Ness that in the case of my consciousness though it's not really part of the conscious field I have the conscious field as situated in space and time in a certain way so for example I know what month were in I know if it's after breakfast or before breakfast I and one of the audit forms of disorientation you will experience as you get older is it something you can have this kind of disorientation where you wonder what the hell month are we in you know are we in the spring semester of the fall semester and you do have this sense of a discombobulation when you lose the situatedness this is really not either the center or the periphery but if this is your conscious state and this is what you're focusing your attention on all the same you know what's going on out here yeah you know I know now know that I'm in the United States that I'm in Berkeley California that it's after breakfast that were in the lat part of the month of February all of those have to do with a situatedness of my conscious states and I think that's separate from the center periphery distinction okay now a crucial feature of consciousness is I think every conscious state comes to us with the pleasure on pleasure dimension it's a bit unfortunate that we oppose pleasure and pain because there are all sorts of unpleasant painful and what I'm getting at is this for every conscious state it always makes sense that as such questions as was it fun did you enjoy it did you have a good time was it boring amusing exasperatingly ecstatic or just plain blah any expansion experience you know somebody went to the party I or they spent a weekend in Sausalito and it always makes sense to ask well did you have a good time was it fun were you happy during that period and I think this is true of consciousness in general and it's presumably again plays a crucial role in the in the evolutionary function of consciousness is that we are attracted by pleasure and we resist pain and other forms of on pleasure so any conscious state will be situated on the pleasure on pleasure dimension all right let me top for questions about that because I want to mention some other features of consciousness and I've talked I've given you a whole lot of features any questions about this list of eight I'm going to get about it doesn't lease out before we stop if I have time yes No there are lots of conscious states that have no intention ality I so for example a mood typically does not have intentionality if you ask people well you seem to be anxious what are you anxious about there may be no answer that I don't know I'm just jumpy I'm not anxious about anything in particular similarly with them even certain forms of depression you can be depressed you just down in the dumps or elation people get in an elated mood oh I feel great today what do you feel great about nothing special I just feel great in fact there was a time in this university I'm sure that's not true of you when some of my students would inject chemical substances in their bodies for the purposes of producing what they called feelings of well-being I think these were by and large not intentional it wasn't that they suddenly decided they felt good about the revolution in Egypt they just liked to feel good and so they took various feel-good substances but there was no intentionality involved they all these were sometimes described as mood altering these were I they were down here they were not at the level of the intentionality now I gave a lecture about this stuff to a bunch of psychoanalysts once and they said well that's our job actually is to take the undirected anxiety and find the actual intentional object that when you when when you have a an intentional state without when you have a I meant a conscious state without any intention ality there's really some unconscious intentionality and the psychiatrist's psychoanalyst has to find that very intentionality I was reminded of Freud saying that the aim of psychoanalysis is to remove is to replace neurotic misery with ordinary human unhappiness and I guess maybe that's not a bad description neurotic misery usually lacks well-defined intentionality but with ordinary human happiness you normally know what you're unhappy about so not all consciousness is intentional I and again well there are all sorts of conscious states that lack there's no answer the question what's it about whereas others there has to be something that it's about I mean if you have fear or pride or shame or belief or desire or intention there has to be a Content it has to be an answer the question well what is it exactly that you believe a guy can't say I woke up believing today and I say well what did you believe and believe anything what's a free country I just wanted to believe so I just believed well but you got to believe something no not in California okay that won't do yeah there has to be a Content it has to be an answer the question what exactly do you believe and we're gonna you're going to hear more about the nature of intentionality yes yeah okay let me say a little more about that a lot of the features of consciousness are not immediately present I and what I mean in the sense that it's what you're thinking about when you're conscious nonetheless it is a feature of my conscious state that it occurs to me as occurring in a certain spatial temporal and social context I didn't say anything about the social now the spatial temporal is easy I'm not thinking right now I'm in Berkeley Berkeley's in California California is on I don't have to think any of that crap but all the same that's sort of my background knowledge I sent I have this consciously I'm lecturing on philosophy of mind in Northgate in the University of California but I and all of that goes on with a sense of its situatedness I and I this is occurring in the latter days of February in the second decade of the 21st century all of that is part of the background situatedness of my consciousness but it's not part of the content of the consciousness now another feature that we're going to get to of the situated like situatedness where it's not actually what you're paying attention to it's not actually part of the conscious field but it's a condition on the conscious field and I might as well mention it now and that is the sense of the self it isn't just that I'm having these conscious states but I have them as my conscious states now what the hell does that mean you see Hume Dorris that you have no experience of the self and I think he's right about that we know if I if I ask myself what am I really and I grab my forehead and ask what do I experience really what I experience is some fist is grabbing the top of my forehead and I'm pulling at my skin and it happens to be my fist but there is no separate experience of the self all the same I want to say these conscious experiences do have a characteristic namely they come to me as part of my life history they are my conscious experiences what does that mean well I'm going to talk about that when we get to the self I think itself is kind of a sordid subject in philosophy but I don't think we can really do without it I think we do need a notion of the self okay let me mention just a couple of other features a remarkable feature of our consciousness is its capacity to organize our diverse stimuli into meaningful units and I gave you this example where it doesn't really look like a face but your brain will organize it into a face it'll get a meaningful unit out of what is in fact just a bunch of lines on a blackboard that the brain has a capacity to organize the your consciousness into meaningful holes a gestalt is the German word for form and your experiences come to your conscious experiences - in meaningful forms and there's a whole lot of research honest about how perception is a function of expectations but their historical events that that bear this out when Captain Cook sailed into Sydney Harbor the natives paid no attention you know okay so these dumb clouds are on the water they literally couldn't see his boats because they they're they're a previous experience didn't allow for that kind of thing but when men got over the side of the boats and appeared in little boats which they they could identify as fellow human beings then they panicked then then the consciousness organized the experience in a way that was meaningful to them so perception is a function of expectation and your expectations will be a function of all what I'm going to later call your your that your set of beliefs as well as your background knowledge or background ways of coping one last we could keep going with these all day but I want to mention one last one before we stop and that is they say to me there's clearly a distinction between passive versus active consciousness in the case of active consciousness you have a sense of you are doing something you're acting in the case of passive consciousness you have a sense of this is happening to me the the classic a distinction of course is between voluntary actions where you have an active consciousness and perception where it's just a perceptual these of course locked together I mean you don't have any actions without perceptions and most for humans most perceptions are related to actions either actions you can perform or actions you are performing this is why we have a problem of the freedom of the will but we do not have a problem of the freedom of digestion or the freedom of perception somebody can say I believe in the freedom of digestion I can digest any damn thing one eye or the freedom of perception we don't have those problems we do have a problem of freedom of the will and we're going to talk about that okay let's stop here be sure to give me your

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Keywords: John, Searle, Philosophy, of, Mind, University, California, Berkeley

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Published: Mon Oct 10 2011