On Searle: Irreducibility Without Dualism?

As I said earlier, John R. Searle is a great philosophical critic. Armed with muscular prose, common sense, and a surly (Searle-ly?) attitude, he shreds the sophistry of Dennett and Co. But I have never quite understood his own solution to the mind-body problem. Herewith, some notes on one aspect of my difficulties and his.

The Mystery of Consciousness (1997) ends on this note: "We can, in short, accept irreducibility without accepting dualism." (214) Consciousness is irreducible, but still "a part of the ordinary physical world." How exactly?

Searle sees with crystal clarity that it makes  no  sense at all to think that conscious phenomena are reducible to an underlying physical reality in the way that perceived lightning, say, is reducible to an atmospheric electrical discharge. With respect to objective phenomena such as lightning it makes sense to distinguish appearance and reality and to attempt a description of the underlying reality in observer-independent terms. But "where consciousness is concerned, the reality is the appearance." (213) Just so.

The esse of a pain, for example,  is its percipi: no sort of logical wedge can be driven between the two. Searle likes to say that mental data have a "first-person ontology." That amounts to saying that pains and the like have a mode of existence radically different from the mode of existence of nonconscious items. Digestion and photosynthesis occur whether or not they are experienced; "but consciousness only exists when it is experienced as such." (213)

But this smacks of dualism, does it not? You have two radically different modes of existence just as in Descartes there is the radical difference between thought and extension. If you know your Descartes, you know that for him 'thought' covers all manner of conscious data, not just thinking in contrast to sensing, imagining, wishing, willing, etc. A res cogitans, a thinking thing, is a conscious (and indeed self-conscious) thing. So we could just as well name the Cartesian modes of being consciousness and extension. This seems to be close (though of course not identical) to what Searle is getting at: there is first-person (subjective) being and third-person (objective) being: "consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything that has a third-person or objective ontology" (212) Searle (mis)uses the inflated term 'ontology' where it would be better to use 'being' or 'existence.'

The last quotation explains why Searle is not a materialist: he is not trying to reductively identify something essentially first-personal with something essentially third-personal. So far so good. But then why does he fight shy of being called a dualist? Even if he is not a substance dualist like Descartes, why does he not own up to being a property dualist?

The answer, I am afraid, is that he is in the grip of the ideology of scientific naturalism. In contemporary philosophy of mind, nothing is worse than to get yourself called a dualist. For then you are an unscientific superstitious fellow who believes in spook stuff, ghosts in machines, and worse. Next stop: the Twilight Zone.

Searle is in a tough bind. He appreciates the irreducibility of mind and sees clearly the hopelessness of behaviorism, identity-materialism, and functionalism. But at all costs he must contain his insight into irreducibility and not allow it any spiritual or dualistic significance. Consider this sentence: "Consciousness is a real part of the real world and it cannot be eliminated in favor of, or reduced to, something else." (210)

But what is the real world? Why, the natural world. So what Searle is saying is that consciousness is in the natural world as a "real and intrinsic feature of certain biological systems" but it has a first-person ontology that makes it radically different from everything else in the natural world.

This appears to be a contradiction since the natural world is just the world of the (objective, third-personal) natural sciences. Natural entities have a third-person ontology. So if consciousness is natural, then it too must have a third-person ontology. It is a contradiction to say that consciousness is both natural and has a first-personal ontology.

To avoid contradiction, Searle ought to admit that there is more to reality than nature. But he cannot do this, of course, without abandoning his ideological and scientistic commitment to scientific naturalism.

This comes out very clearly on pp. 118-124 of The Rediscovery of the Mind(1992). There he is concerned to deny that the irreducibility of consciousness has any "deep consequences." Searle writes:

. . . the irreducibility of consciousness is a trivial consequence of the pragmatics of our definitional practices. A trivial result such as this has only trivial consequences. It has no deep metaphysical consequences for the unity of our overall scientific world view. It does not show that consciousness is not part of the ultimate furniture of reality or cannot be a subject of scientific investigation or cannot be brought into our overall physical conception of the universe . . . .

One can see from this that for Searle, the unity of the scientific world view must be preserved at all costs. One can also see that Searle identifies ultimate reality with the physical world which is the subject of scientific investigation. But how can consciousness be irreducible and not threaten the unity of the scientific world view?

Searle's answer is that the irreducibility of consciousness is merely an artifact of a pragmatic decision to carry out reductions in a certain way. "Consciousness fails to be reducible, not because of some mysterious feature, but simply because by definition it falls outside the pattern of reduction that we have chosen to use for pragmatic reasons." (122-123)

This suggests that we might have chosen a different "pattern of reduction," and that, had we done so, consciousness would not have been irreducible. But what could that mean?

It doesn't mean anything! Obviously, consciousness provides the epistemic access to every objective phenomenon which we can then attempt to reduce to a more fundamental reality. Because I am conscious I feel heat which I can then explain in terms of mean molecular kinetic energy. Because I am conscious, I see the lightning before I hear the thunder and can go on to explain why in terms of light waves whose propagation needs no medium unlike sound waves that move throught the air, etc. Because I am conscious, I am aware of a certain freshness in the air after a thunderstorm, a freshness that I then reduce to the presence of ozone, etc.

Searle is right that consciousness is irreducible, but this irreducibility is grounded in the nature of consciousness, in its "first person ontology." This nature is not a trivial consequence of a mere decision on our part as to how we shall conduct reductions.

Once one sees that the fancy footwork on pp. 122-123 of RM is a sham motivated by an ideological commitment to scientific naturalism, one sees that Searle has not avoided dualism. He has failed to provide a satisfying naturalistic solution to the mind-body problem.

There are other problems as well, which I will leave for later.