In the Light of Evolution Volume VII: The Human Mental Machinery (2014) / Chapter Skim
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1 Theory of Mind and Darwin's Legacy--John Searle
1 Theory of Mind and Darwin's Legacy--John Searle
Pages 3-18
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Efforts to get a detailed scientific account of how brain processes cause consciousness are disappointing. The Darwinian revolution gave us a new form of explanation; two levels were substituted: a causal level, where we specify the mechanism by which the phenotype functions, and a functional level, where we specify the selectional advantage that the phenotype provides.
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. The Readiness Potential Consciousness does exist, but it has very little importance because research on the readiness potential in the supplementary motor cortex
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Materialism If consciousness is real, it must really be something else because the final inventory of the basic ontology of the world -- an inventory that includes subatomic particles, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and other fundamental features of reality -- is entirely material and so will not include consciousness (Dennett, 1991)
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You can have a completely adequate science of consciousness or mental life in general that is epistemically objective even though the entire domain is ontologically subjective. Related to the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is the distinction between those features of the world whose existence depends on human attitudes and those features that exist independently of anyone's attitudes.
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From page 7... ...
So the existence of money and language, for example, is observer relative and consequently contains an element of ontological subjectivity. However, and this is a crucial point, as we have already seen, the ontological subjectivity of a domain does not preclude an epistemically objective science of that domain.
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This feature makes consciousness seem intractable; it makes it seem a difficult subject for scientific study. Unity A third feature of consciousness is that there is a remarkable unity to our conscious states.
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The neurobiological solution turns out to be very difficult and complicated, but, at the level of describing the general relationships between consciousness and neurobiology, the solution is not complex. Here it is: all of our conscious states without exception are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain and they are all realized in the brain as higher level or system features.
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I distinguish between what I call the building-block approach, where we think of the total conscious field as made up of a set of separate conscious building blocks such as the specific types of perception, and what I call the unified field approach, where we think of specific stimuli such as perception as modifying a preexisting conscious field. There was a period when it seemed the crucial research task was to discover the neuronal correlate of consciousness.
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From page 11... ...
It is an epistemically objective fact that I am writing this using the Word program and that the program is implemented electronically, but "Word program" does not name an electrical phenomenon. Epiphenomenalism We have literally thousands of years of experiences of human and animal consciousness causing behavior.
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The dualistic tradition has given the mental level of description a bad name because it makes it appear that our mental life is not part of our ordinary biological existence. Readiness Potential In these experiments, subjects were asked to perform a trivial act such as pushing a button and to observe on a clock exactly when they undertook to do it.
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Of course, ultimate reality is as described by the natural sciences and thus is "material." There is nothing in this concept of the material that prevents subjective, qualitative consciousness from being as much a biological phenomenon as digestion, mitosis, or photosynthesis. THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION A remarkable thing about the development of knowledge is that we get not just new explanations but new forms of explanation.
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It may sound question-begging to assume it failed, so I want to explain a little bit what its limitations were. The crudest limitation that sociobiological methods had was that they were trying to explain specific features of human culture and society, thus the name sociobiology, but the mode of explanation had to be consistent with the fact that there has been no major change in the human gene pool over the past 30,000 years.
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In general, they tend to have greater sexual desires for people brought up in a different kibbutz on the other side of the hill. And Wilson said that what happens is that close proximity during the period of development leads to a type of aversion; this sexual aversion gives the mechanical or causal explanation of the incest taboo.
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There are two classes of people I have argued with about this. One class says: consciousness must be epiphenomenal because the physical world is causally closed, and on your own account consciousness is irreducibly subjective, and therefore it is not reducible to the objective world.
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It is irrelevant to giving an evolutionary explanation. The way that nature works for beings like us is that we have enormous power added by the existence of consciousness, by the existence of qualitative subjective conscious states.
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It is essential to distinguish unconscious mental phenomena from nonconscious neurobiological processes that make consciousness possible. For example, even when I am sound asleep I have an unconscious belief that George Washington was the first president.
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