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"The Traditional Mind-Body Problem and How to Avoid It."The confusion about objectivity and subjectivity ... is just the tip of the iceberg of the traditional mind-body problem. Though ideally I think scientists would be better off if they ignored this problem, the fact is that they are as much victims of the philosophical traditions as anyone else, and many scientists, like many philosophers, are still in the grip of the traditional categories of mind and body, mental and physical, dualism and materialism, etc. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the mind-body problem, but I need to say a few words about it so that, in the discussion that follows, we can avoid the confusions it has engendered.
"The simplest form of the mind-body problem is this: What exactly is the relation of consciousness to the brain? There are two parts to this problem, a philosophical part and a scientific part. The solution, I believe, is consistent with everything we know about biology and about how the world works. It is this: Consciousness and other sorts of mental phenomena are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the structure of the brain. In a word, the conscious mind is caused by brain processes and is itself a higher level feature of the brain.
"The philosophical part is relatively easy but the scientific part is much harder. How, exactly, do brain processes cause consciousness and how, exactly, is consciousness realized in the brain? I want to be very clear about the philosophical part because it is not possible to approach the scientific question intelligently if the philosophical issues are unclear. Notice two features of the philosophical solution. First, the relationship of brain mechanisms to consciousness is one of causation. Processes in the brain cause our conscious experiences. Second, this does not force us to any kind of dualism because the form of causation is bottom-up, and the resulting effect is simply a higher-level feature of the brain itself, not a separate substance. Consciousness is not like fluid squirted out by the brain. A conscious state is rather a state that the brain is in. Just as water can be in a liquid or solid state without liquidity and solidity being separate substances, so consciousness is a state that the brain is in without consciousness being a separate substance.
"Notice that I stated the philosophical solution without using any of the traditional categories of "dualism," "monism," "materialism," and all the rest of it. Frankly, I think those categories are obsolete. But if we accept those categories at face value, then we get the following picture: You have a choice between dualism and materialism. According to dualism, consciousness and other mental phenomena exist in a different ontological realm altogether from the ordinary physical world of physics, chemistry, and biology. According to materialism, consciousness as I have described it does not exist. Neither dualism nor materialism, as traditionally construed, allows us to get an answer to our question. Dualism says that there are two kinds of phenomena in the world, the mental and the physical; materialism says that there is only one, the material. Dualism ends up with an impossible bifurcation of reality into two separate categories and thus makes it impossible to explain the relation between the mental and the physical. But materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness. In short, dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomena to study, and hence of any problem.
"On the view that I am proposing, we should reject those categories altogether. We know enough about how the world works to know that consciousness is a biological phenomena caused by brain processes and realized in the structure of the brain. It is irreducible not because it is ineffable or mysterious, but because it has a first-person ontology and therefore cannot be reduced to phenomena with a third-person ontology. The traditional mistake that people have made in both science and philosophy has been to suppose that if we reject dualism, as I believe we must, then we have to embrace materialism. But on the view that I am putting forward, materialism is just as confused as dualism because it denies the existence of ontologically subjective consciousness in the first place. Just to give it a name, the resulting view that denies both dualism and materialism I call biological naturalism.
"How Did We Get into This Mess? A Historical Digression.
"For a long time I thought scientists would be better off if they ignored the history of the mind-body problem, but I now think that unless you understand something about the history, you will always be in the grip of historical categories. I discovered this when I was debating people in artificial intelligence and found that many of them were in the grip of Descartes, a philosopher many of them had not even read.
"What we now think of as the natural sciences did not really begin with ancient Greece. The Greeks had almost everything, and in particular they had the wonderful idea of a "theory." The invention of the idea of a theory - a systematic set of logically related propositions that attempt to explain the phenomena of some domain - was perhaps the greatest single achievement of Greek civilization. However, they did not have the institutionalized practice of systematic observation and experiment. That came only after the Renaissance, especially in the seventeenth century. When you combine systematic experiment and testability with the idea of a theory, you get the possibility of science as we think of it today. But there was a feature of the seventeenth century that was a local accident and is still blocking our path. It is that in the seventeenth century that there arose serious conflict between science and religion, and it seemed that science was a threat to religion. Part of the way that the apparent threat posed by science to Orthodox Christianity was deflected was due to Descartes and Galileo. Descartes, in particular, argued that reality divides into two kinds, the mental and the physical, res cogitans and res extensa. Descartes made a useful division of the territory: Religion had the territory of the soul, and science could have material reality. But this gave people the mistaken concept that science could deal only with objective third-person phenomena, it could not deal with the inner qualitative subjective experiences that make up our conscious life. This was a perfectly harmless move in the seventeenth century because it kept the church authorities off the backs of the scientists. (It was only partly successful. Descartes, after all, had to leave Paris and live in Holland where there was more tolerance, and Galileo had to make his famous recantation to the church authorities of his heliocentric theory of the planetary system.) However, this history has left us with a tradition and a tendency not to think of consciousness as an appropriate subject for the natural sciences, in the way that we think of disease, digestion, or tectonic plates as subjects of the natural sciences. I urge us to overcome this reluctance, and in order to overcome it, we need to overcome the historical tradition that made it seem perfectly natural to avoid the topic of consciousness altogether in scientific investigation.
"Summary of the Argument to this Point:
"I am assuming that we have established the following: Consciousness is a biological phenomenon like any other. It consists of inner qualitative subjective states of perceiving, feeling, and thinking. Its essential feature is unified, qualitative subjectivity. Conscious states are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the structure of the brain. To say this is analogous to saying that digestive processes are caused by chemical processes in the stomach and the rest of the digestive tract, and that these processes are realized in the stomach and the digestive tract. Consciousness differs from other biological phenomena in that it has a subjective or first-person ontology. But ontological subjectivity does not prevent us from having epistemic objectivity. We can still have an objective science of consciousness. We abandon the traditional categories of dualism and materialism, for the same reason we abandon the categories of phlogiston and vital spirits: They have no application to the real world."
[Searle JR. 2000. Consciousness. Annual Review of Neuroscience 23:566-568.]