A bunch of cool stuff

Now before I start my review of the last chapter, I'd just like to say that I applaud Searle for his humbleness. Like he will admit that even though he thinks he's barking up the right tree, he may not be. And in many ways he is trying to represent consciousness as something more understandable, which is a noble task. One thing I really like about this chapter, is it really encourages scientific research into learning about consciousness. If you read some of your average dualist literature, it's attitude that consciousness can't be discovered or comprehensively described physically or with science as we know it may seem very discouraging for scientists. I feel the way Searle puts it he's very encouraging of scientists trying to follow this path, even though it may be difficult or a dead end. But I'm certainly with Searle in the sense that I think Neurobiological research into consciousness will help us learn a lot about the brain. Sometimes the journey is much more fruitful than the end result.

So, Searle begins by making a controversial statement, he says he believes that just because something is ontologically subjective does not mean it can't be studied objectively. This treads the water of contradiction, but on some levels he may be right. However, as far as studying subjectivity all we really have to go on is reportability and relatedness to our own experiences. Initially I want to accuse Searle of being soft, and he is, but I can see why he does it. He's trying to make consciousness less contradictory with the physical world as we know it. Basically more available for the scientific minded I guess. Sometimes he seems very loose with meaning. Mostly about this statement I'll say that on one hand he's right, but on the other I don't think you can get a deep understanding of subjectivity objectively, there's a wall there that can't be crossed.
He talks about intentionality briefly, kind of defining it, but the next chapter is all about it, so I'm gonna wait till then to really discuss it. I'm still kind of confused, I thought it was like decision making, but it's more about things implying other things in the brain. Like I said, next blog entry I'll give a better description.

After this he goes into several different ways people have attacked the problem of consciousness.
He begins with mysterians who he calls pessimists. Essentially the mysterian angle is that with our current system of science there will be no way to truly understand consciousness. They either believe that it is absolutely impossible to explain as human animals or that we will need to completely revolutionize the way we look at the world to be able to explain it. I think I may be in this camp a bit, I have a strong feeling that the physical world is not the be all end all, that it is just it's own closed system. I know I need to explain that more, but I do feel a complete revolution of how we look at the world would probably shed more light on consciousness than physical science. Not that physical science doesn't have a lot to offer, but like I said earlier, it has boundaries.

Second he talks about supervenience, which actually an idea that stems out of ethics. In ethics it is the idea that two identical actions cannot have different moral values. If an action is good or bad it must be supervenient on other features, and therefore isn't the same action. In the mind, consciousness would be supervenient on the physical processes of the brain. The difference Searle says, is that in morality the action constitutes the morality, but in the brain the supervenience is causal, not constituted. And in other words, supervenience says nothing new, and can pretty much be broken down as the exact same as searle's argument just with different words.

After that he talks about Pan-psychism which is another theory that kind of appeals to me. It is the idea that everything is conscious to some degree. So for example, physics can only talk about extrinsic properties of things. It can only talk about what is objectively observable from the outside, how something interacts with something else, it cannot explain anything that could possibly happening intrinsically in whatever it is discussing, or inside or the exact thing in itself. So maybe the intrinsic things that are moved around by physics are consciousness. And groups of them create consciousness fully. Consciousness is everywhere.

I like it, but Searle does have some good points that I don't think are totally debilitating to the argument, but are certainly worthwhile questions that make you think twice about the theory. First, consciousness appears to be unified and centralized. If it was everywhere part of everything then how is it centralized? His next point is, if it is everywhere why should it feel located. Why don't we have consciousness from the perspective of the room we are in, where do the distinctions happen? Why don't I have the conscious experience of the computer when I touch it? Why does it stop at my hands? Why do I feel it in my brain more than anywhere else? It's a damn good question to be honest. If everything is conscious, why do I feel it here and not there?

So for Searle he thinks that the best way to go about cracking consciousness is via neurobiology. This is how most scientists would like it to be and I'm sure we can learn a whole lot by this method, but you know my views, I don't think this is the right method, but his explanations why he likes it are pretty good.

He explains that there are two ways to go about explaining consciousness through neurobiology, "building block" and "unified field" approaches. In building block the idea is that if you break the problem up into smaller problems you will make the problem easier. A lot of scientific questions are answered this way. Essentially they feel if they say, isolate red, and try to find the point where red becomes a conscious experience, it will open the flood gates to finding out about all the rest of the conscious experiences. My immediate thought is, conscious experiences are so different that I don't know how you could really keep aligning this model up with say, having an emotion of grief. But it is an interesting way to go about it.

Searle has problems with it to. When we are conscious of something it occurs when we are already conscious. So different conscious experiences aren't consciousness itself, but ripples and patterns in the field of consciousness. This is actually the "unified field" approach, which I do like. What consciousness is like, I'll agree is probably much more like that than it is like "YOU SEE RED NOW" black "YOU SEE BLUE NOW" et cetera. Of course this would be a much more difficult way to try and interpret the mind and would require some seriously intense technology. Maybe a problem for the future, the scope of it is just insane.

His last paragraph in this chapter is brilliant and really speaks to me. I'll just quote it here:
"One of the weird features of recent intellectual life was the idea that consciousness--in the literal sense of qualitative , subjective states and processes--was not important, that somehow it didn't matter. One reason this is so preposterous is that consciousness is itself the condition of anything having importance. Only to a conscious being can there be any such thing as importance"

I'll end with that but next chapters all on that intentionality stuff, so I'm interested in what he has to say there.