Materialism And Science.

[DominO123]

What is consciousness? Is its existance explained by "scientific materialism" ?

 

I just finished to read an interesting book: "The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness." by B. Alan Wallace published in 2000.

 

Here about the author: http://www.id.ucsb.edu/Veritas/2000/wallace.html

 

The author on the last chapter before the conclusion of the book developpe regarding the confusion there is between what he calls "scientific materialism" and "science" centered of course on the matter of consciousness. I decided to post the chapter in question.

 

 

 

pp. 145-158

 

CONFUSING SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM WITH SCIENCE

 

After four centuries of advances in scientific knowledge, more than a century of psychological research, and roughly a half century of progress in the neurosciences, even most advocates of scientism acknowledge that science has yet to give any intelligible account of the nature of consciousness. Nevertheless, the extent of our ignorance concerning consciousness is often overlooked. This ignorance is like a retinal blind spot in the scientific vision of the world, of which modern society seems largely unaware. In most books and articles on cosmogony, evolution, embryology, and psychology, consciousness is hardly mentioned; and when it is addressed, it tends to be presented not in terms of experiential qualia but in terms of brain functions and computer systems.

 

Under the doctrinal influence of scientific materialism, the public has been led to believe that scientists know things about the mind of which they are in fact ignorant and to believe that ordinary human subjects do not know things that they do in fact know perfectly well. A major tendency of scientific materialism has been to describe machines and other unconscious phenomena in anthropomorphic, cognitive terms. The same terms, adjusted to their application to machines, are then reapplied to human minds, giving the impression that minds and machines are essentially alike. Thus, a kind of "neuromythology" is fabricated that simultaneously obscures the actual nature of both machines and minds. 1

 

The broader, ubiquitous problem is one of confusing the metaphysical assumptions of scientific materialism with the empirical knowledge of science. This tendency commonly appears in journalistic accounts of science, science textbooks, and learned philosophical writings. To illustrate this point, I offer three case studies: a recent cover article in Time magazine on the nature of the mind; a commonly used textbook on cognitive psychology; and a recent, influential philosophical work on the nature of the mind.

 

Journalistic Confusion

 

The cover story of Time magazine on July 17, 1995 is an article entitled "Glimpses of the Mind: What Is Consciousness? Memory? Emotion? Science unravels the Best-Kept Secrets of the Human Brain," by Michael D. Lemonick . This article in various ways unconsciously substitutes metaphysical assumptions of scientific materialism for genuine scientific discoveries, as follows.

 

The first page of the article shows a computer-generated image of the brain based on a positron-emission tomography (PET) scan, with a caption describing this as an image "of a sad thought." In reality, it shows an area of the brain in which there is increased metabolism in the most active cells while a sad thought is present. Apart from a human subject's report of experiencing a sad thought, no such association could have been made with this portion of the brain. Moreover, the equivalence of a sad thought with specific neuronal activity is a hypothesis that has in no way been established scientifically. The author simply assumes the validity of the metaphysical assumption of the identity of specific mental states and specific brain states, without informing the reader of his choice or the reasons for it.

 

In a similar vein, a heading over two consecutive pages reads: "[a] memory is nothing more than a few thousand brain cells firing in a particular, established pattern." This statement is merely an affirmation of the principles of reductionism and physicalism and like scientific materialism as a whole, completely ignores the qualia associated with memories. Continuing with his uncritical equation of brain and mind events, the author writes:

 

[p]owerful technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron-emission tomography (PET) have also provided a window on the human brain, letting scientists watch a thought taking place, see the red glow of fear erupting from the structure known as the amygdala, or note the telltale firing of neurons as a long-buried memory is reconstructed.

 

While Lemonick reports Francis Crick's speculation that the general principles of a physiological reduction of visual qualia might be within our grasp before the end of the twentieth century, he apparently fails to recognize this as a tacit admission that such scientific knowledge does not now exist. This fact is also obscured by psychiatrist Larry Squire's reductionist claim that the combination of all the patterns of neuronal connections "gives you a complete perception." The qualia of perception, as usual, are simply ignored. Lemonick then goes on to quote neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás's assertion that "light is nothing but electromagnetic radiation." If the term "light" refers here to physical light that travels through space at 186,000 miles per second, this statement conveys nothing new. On the other hand, if it is meant to refer to the qualia of light, this assertion is nothing more than an affirmation of reductionism, with no empirical validation. Llinás goes on to assert that sound is the relation between external vibrations and the brain, and again he ignores the qualia of sound altogether.

 

Turning to the topic of consciousness per se, Lemonick writes: "t turns out that the phenomenon of mind, of consciousness, is much more complex, though also more amenable to scientific investigation, than anyone expected." To illustrate his point, he cites one scientist's speculation after another, without presenting any concrete scientific evidence to support these conjectures. For example, neurologist Antonio Damasio is quoted as speculating that, contrary to common sense, "consciousness may be nothing more than an evanescent by-product of more mundane, wholly physical processes." Lemonick also reports the speculation of Francis Crick and Christof Koch that consciousness "is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high-frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain." While Crick himself acknowledges this is not a scientific discovery but a highly speculative concept, Lemonick assures the reader that it is to be taken seriously, for such theories of consciousness "are at least firmly rooted in biology." Thus, these claims are backed, not by empirical evidence or compelling reasoning, but by sheer authority.

 

In a similarly facile manner, Lemonick dispenses with the problem of human identity with the following declaration:

 

After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for such a self [i.e., some entity deep inside the brain that corresponds to the self] to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply doesn't exist.

 

If modern neuroscience does not understand the nature of sensory qualia, and if it is ignorant of the nature of consciousness, this assertion concerning the nature of the self can hardly be anything more than sheer speculation. Moreover, the grounds of this conclusion--that it cannot be located anywhere in the brain--is simply an affirmation of the principle of physicalism. Lemonick raises a weak challenge to this principle in his concluding comment: "t may be that scientists will eventually have to acknowledge the existence of something beyond their ken--something that might be described as the soul." This comment is similar to the God-of-the-gaps approach to affirming the existence of the Deity: attribute to God whatever cannot be explained by science. But this strategy offers no genuine understanding of God, the soul, or anything else; it is therefore equally unsatisfying to religious believers and scientists alike. In short, while scientists and journalists are free to speculate on the nature of the mind, this article misleads its readers by failing to distinguish between scientists' metaphysical speculations and genuine scientific knowledge.

 

Pedagogical Confusion

 

The conflation of metaphysical speculation with scientific knowledge is also very prevalent in textbooks on the cognitive sciences. The rise of cognitive psychology around the middle of the twentieth century has often been heralded as a return to the study of the mind, which was deliberately ignored by American psychologists during the fifty-year reign of behaviorism. However, as the following critique of John Anderson textbook Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications will demonstrate, that reputation is only partially deserved.

 

Anderson represents the dominant viewpoint in cognitive psychology by taking an "Information processing" approach to the study of the mind. In this context, information is thought to be represented in terms of continuously varying electrochemical activity of neurons. 2 This neuronal activity is discontinuous, episodic, and often quantal. Thus, information may be carried by bursts or by a variety of patterns, with more than one neurotransmitter being released from the same terminal.

 

To take a specific example of such information processing, Anderson asserts that visual perception begins with energy from the external environment; and receptors, such as those on the retina, transform this energy into neural information (83). In this process, light is converted into neural energy by a photochemical process, and low-level cells in the visual system "detect simple patterns of spots of light and darkness in the visual field" (19).

 

Physicists understand light as consisting of quantized electromagnetic energy of various frequencies, traveling through space at 186,000 miles per second. Such energy may indeed be converted into neural energy, but Anderson gives no account of any process by which such energy becomes transformed into the qualia of lightness and darkness in a visual field. Nonconscious, low-level cells may react to impulses of energy, but where is the evidence that they detect experiential patterns of lightness or darkness in a perceived visual field? Such an experiential visual field does not travel through space at the speed of light, but we are left with the questions: where do visual qualia exist, what is their nature, and what are the sufficient causes for their occurrence? While neuroscience sheds a great deal of light on the biological basis of vision, it is not clear that it addresses these issues or that it has the experimental means to investigate them. This omission is concealed by the objectivist use of the cognitive term detect with respect to an experiential visual field. The mind/body problem has not been solved but rather has been camouflaged by this use of terminology.

 

This point has direct bearing on the endeavor to design computer models to simulate the information processing that takes place in the visual system. According to Anderson, the goal of such research is "to get these computer programs to see in a visual scene what a human sees" (37). Humans experientially see visual qualia in dependence on unconscious interactions between the environment and the nervous system; and neuroscientists now generally acknowledge that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the frequencies and intensities of objective light and the qualia that make up our visual world. If Anderson is suggesting that the computer programs he has in mind are designed to consciously experience the visual world perceived by humans, he must identify which components of these programs produce consciousness and explain the mechanism for this occurrence. If, on the other hand, such computers are designed to react nonconsciously to objective light, then there must be a one-to-one correspondence between their reactions and the objective features of the incoming electromagnetic energy. But in this case, it would follow that those mechanical devices are guaranteed not to see in a visual scene what a human sees. Indeed, we have no compelling reason to believe that they experientially see anything, nor are there any generally accepted criteria for judging what would count as evidence that mechanical devices do actually see.

 

In Anderson's presentation of the neural basis of cognition, cognitive terms are uniformly objectified. He asserts, for example, that "[c]ognition is achieved by patterns of neural activation in large sets of neurons," and "resides in patterns of the primitive elements of computers" (18,24). While he declares that "the brain encodes cognition in neural patterns" (24), he acknowledges that no one knows how this occurs. And he offers no justification or explanation for asserting that brain cells experientially detect, rather than merely electrochemically react to, visually related physical stimuli.

 

Anderson's account postulates not only unconscious cognitive processes but ones of which we cannot be aware. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that there is no essential or necessary connection between computation and consciousness. Anderson extends this principle beyond cognition to emotions when he writes that "computer systems . . . have been shown to be capable of . . . displaying frustration" and this "feeling of frustration" occurs in "large patterns of bit changes" (24). He offers no evidence for the presence of this emotion, nor does he demonstrate the manner in which feelings can become embedded in patterns of bit changes. Thus, this is one of the most flagrant examples of neuromythology, based not on scientific evidence, but on the unquestioned assumptions of scientific materialism.

 

There is a good deal of mystery surrounding the questions of how the subjective experiences of cognition and even emotions are supposed to be achieved by the components of the brain and the computer. Anderson deals with this mystery by answering: "t does not appear that there is anything magical about human intelligence or anything that is incapable of being modeled on a computer" (3), but he offers no justification for divorcing cognitive and affective terms from conscious experience and imputing them upon nonconscious, material objects and processes. Contrary to his claim, there is, in fact, a facet of human intelligence that does not appear to have been modeled on a computer--and that is consciousness. Without addressing this issue, we are poorly equipped to answer the question: are patterns of neural activation merely necessary for conscious cognition to be achieved, or are they sufficient? Anderson's account not only sheds no light on this question but obscures that there is any such problem at all.

 

Similar confusion occurs in this textbook's account of mental imagery. While cognitive psychology, unlike behaviorism, commonly acknowledges the existence of such mental qualia, Anderson explains it away with the comment that "when subjects are scanning a mental array, they are scanning a representation that is analogous to [a] physical array" (96). Thus, a mental image is "an abstract analog of a spatial structure" (98), and certain data might seem to indicate that subjects rotate mental objects in a threedimensional space "within their heads" (93). Anderson hastens to add that "subjects are not actually rotating an object in their heads" (93), but he does not explain where mental objects are rotated. If not in the head, it is even less likely that such objects exist outside of the head; and this raises the question: where, if anywhere, do they exist? As usual, this mechanistic account of the mind fails to illuminate the actual nature and origins of qualia of any kind. While scientific theories are characteristically based on and tested by means of empirical evidence, metaphysical dogmas are based on unquestioned assumptions and are immune to empirical evidence. Anderson's textbook account of cognition and consciousness evidently falls into the category of metaphysical speculation, while falsely posing as scientific knowledge.

 

Philosophical Confusion

An Empirical Challenge to the Taboo against Subjectivity

Many modern philosophical accounts of the mind are sophisticated expressions of scientific materialism. However, John Searle influential work The Rediscovery of the Mind is more complex, for it raises fundamental experiential objections to many of the contemporary rationalistic accounts of the mind/body problem. In a striking departure from the more orthodox views of the mind according to scientific materialism, Searle points out the disastrous effects resulting from the failure of modern philosophers and psychologists to come to terms with the subjectivity of consciousness. Indeed, he declares that much of the bankruptcy of most work in the philosophy of mind and a great deal of the sterility of academic psychology over the past fifty years have come from a persistent failure to recognize and come to terms with the fact that the mind is an irreducibly first-person phenomenon. 3 Searle goes further in pinpointing the rationale for the perpetuation of that approach.

 

Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives. That is, the choice we are tacitly presented with is between a "scientific" approach, as represented by one or another of the current versions of "materialism," and an "antiscientific" approach, as represented by Cartesianism or some other traditional religious conception of the mind. (3-4)

 

The disaster of this taboo of subjectivity stems from the strategy of describing the world as completely objective, leaving out subjectivity altogether, which has been a central premise of scientific materialism in general and modern cognitive science in particular. This strategy, he points out, makes it impossible to describe consciousness, because it becomes literally impossible to acknowledge the subjectivity of consciousness. Thus, for all its purported rejection of the Cartesian framework, cognitive science has maintained the absolute dichotomy of conscious, subjective mental processes--which are not regarded as a proper subject of scientific investigation--and objective neurological and behavioral processes that are regarded as the genuine subject matter of science.

 

In recent decades, Searle points out, because of their inability to explain consciousness, cognitive scientists have made systematic efforts to dissociate consciousness from intentionality. This "objective" treatment of intentionality implies that the subjective features of consciousness are irrelevant to intentionality. In short, "[m]ore than anything else, it is the neglect of consciousness that accounts for so much barrenness and sterility in psychology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science" (227).

 

In the second chapter of The Rediscovery of the Mind, Searle sums up and concisely demonstrates the philosophical inadequacies and violation of experience in the recent, prominent theories of the mind, including behaviorism, type-identity theories, token-token identity theories, black box functionalism, strong artificial intelligence, and eliminative materialism. After effectively refuting these materialistic theories, he sets forth his own views concerning the nature and origins of mental phenomena.

 

He begins by asserting that when examining the existence of mental states as mental states, the correlated behavior is neither necessary nor sufficient for their existence. That is, a mental state may arise and pass without the occurrence of any correlated, externally observable behavior; and the event of a specific type of behavior has no necessary, one-to-one relation with any specific type of mental state, or intentionality. Mental states are ontologically irreducible, they exist only as subjective, first-person phenomena, and they almost always have a content. While it is perfectly legitimate, he maintains, to ask how unconscious bits of matter in the brain produce consciousness, the individual neurons (or synapses or receptors) in the brain are not themselves conscious.

 

Central to Searle's conception of the mind is his "connection principle," which asserts that "[t]he notion of an unconscious mental state implies accessibility to consciousness. We have no notion of the qualia of the unconscious except as that which is potentially conscious." 4 The class of deep unconscious, mental, intentional phenomena that are not only unconscious but that are in principle inaccessible to consciousness simply does not exist. "Not only is there no evidence for their existence, but the postulation of their existence violates a logical constraint on the notion of intentionality" (173). While consciousness comes in a variety of modalities--including perception, emotion, thought, pains, and so on--talk of the unconscious mind is merely talk of the causal capacities of the brain to cause conscious states and conscious behavior. In short, Searle's basic position is that the study of the mind is the study of consciousness. Moreover, "the specifically mental aspects of the mind can be specified, studied, and understood without knowing how the brain works. Even if you are a materialist, you do not have to study the brain to study the mind" (44).

 

A Rationalist Retreat to Scientific Materialism

Despite Searle's revolutionary suggestions for a truly empirical study of the mind as a first-person phenomenon, his own theory of the nature and origins of the mind retreats to the creed of orthodox scientific materialism. In a familiar refrain, he echoes the prevailing view that mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain (1); this knowledge, he says, has been available to all educated people for at least a century, or since the beginning of the scientific study of the brain. Searle adopts the conventional view that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain in the sense that liquidity is a property of systems of water molecules; and he rejects the Cartesian mind/matter dualism by suggesting that consciousness is both physical and mental. The obvious failure of this idea, however, is that he provides no intelligible account of what it is about the brain that enables it to possess mental properties. Thus, his designation of mental phenomena as being both physical and mental appears to be nothing more than a shift in terminology, without elucidating anything new about consciousness.

 

As noted earlier, contemporary brain science has no objective means of detecting the presence of consciousness, whether in primitive organisms such as a hydra, in a developing human fetus, in an adult human, or in a computer; nor does it have any compelling explanation of the manner in which consciousness is produced. In light of this uncontested fact, what are the grounds of Searle's assertion that knowledge of the nature and origins of the mind has been widely available since the rise of modern neurosci-ence? Is this really anything more than an appeal to the authority of scientific materialism? Searle acknowledges that we are at present very far from having an adequate theory of the neurophysiology of consciousness, and that "[w]e would . . . need a much richer neurobiological theory of consciousness than anything we can now imagine to suppose that we could isolate necessary conditions of consciousness" ( 91,76-77). In short, neuroscientists simply do not know how consciousness is produced; but Searle rests in the firm conviction that its production occurs in human brains in virtue of specific, "though largely unknown," features of the brain ( 89, 57).

 

Having candidly acknowledged that contemporary neurophysiology does not know how consciousness is produced, Searle simply affirms his status as a scientific materialist by claiming that "[c]ausally we know that brain processes are sufficient for any mental state" and that "consciousness is entirely caused by the behavior of lower-level biological phenomena" ( 23,92). These two statements necessarily imply a thorough knowledge of all the specific causes necessary for the production of consciousness, but contemporary neurophysiology certainly does not possess such knowledge. Searle's justification for this violation of reason seems to lie in his faith in the future of the neurosciences: "f we had an adequate science of the brain, an account of the brain that would give causal explanations of consciousness in all its forms and varieties, and if we overcame our conceptual mistakes, no mind/body problem would remain" (100).

 

However, in the real world of the present, there is no such "adequate science of the brain"; there is no "account of the brain that would give causal explanations of consciousness in all its forms and varieties"; modern scientific and philosophical theories of the mind are riddled with "conceptual mistakes"; and the "mind/body problem" is still very much with us. Thus, Searle's assertion that "[t]he existence of consciousness can be explained by the causal interactions between elements of the brain at the micro level" (112) is an expression of faith in scientific knowledge that does not exist.

 

As noted earlier, Searle insightfully points out that the strategy of scientific materialism--to describe the world as completely objective, leaving out subjectivity altogether--makes it impossible to describe consciousness because of the impossibility of acknowledging its innate subjectivity. But most contemporary neuroscientists are absolutely committed to this strategy, a point that Searle apparently overlooks. Thus, when raising the question of whether fleas, grasshoppers, crabs, or snails are conscious, he suggests (74) that such questions can reasonably be left to neurophysiologists--who have no scientific criteria for identifying consciousness and who find it impossible to describe! Searle's dogmatic faith in scientific materialism does not stop there. Upon posing the question of the spatial location and dimensions of conscious experience, he removes this issue from the arena of first-person conscious experience and describes it as "an extremely tricky neurophysiological question" (105). This is all the more surprising in light of his previously mentioned assertions that the ontology of the mental is an irreducibly first-person ontology and that mental states exist only as subjective, first-person phenomena.

 

To take a specific case, Searle points out that common sense indicates that our physical pains are located in the physical space within our bodies-that a pain in the foot, for example, is literally inside the area within the foot. This is the subjective, first-person account of the phenomenon of an experienced pain in the foot. But Searle overrides this account by declaring that the brain forms a body image, which exists in the brain, and that all bodily sensations are parts of this body image. Thus, contrary to subjective, first-person experience, the pain in the foot is actually in the physical space of the brain (63). While first-person experience is certainly fallible, as in the case of pain felt in an amputated limb, this does not imply that all subjective experiences of pleasure and pain are misleading.

 

Searle's assertion that the location of the body image is literally inside the brain must be based solely on the fact that the brain produces that image-an assertion that ignores all the other internal and external influences that contribute to the occurrence of that experience of pain. If this is true, would it not be equally plausible to suggest that the other experienced attributes of the foot--including its color, smell, and texture--exist in the physical space of the brain and not in the foot? If it is justifiable to discard firstperson, subjective experience of a pain in the foot, why not discard it for these other factors that must be associated with our body image? If so, why should we stop with the foot? Why not lodge the rest of the body as it is subjectively experienced into the physical space of the brain?

 

Following this line of thought, the brain should produce not only a body image but images of the rest of the physical world as well. In this case, all the colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures that are perceived as (the Cartesian secondary) attributes of the physical world according to firstperson subjective experience actually exist only within the physical space of the brain. This can only mean that subjective experience is totally misleading when it comes to perception and that we must rely entirely on neurophysiology to determine the location of such experiences. But we are now left with the same problem as before: neurophysiology has no objective way of detecting or explaining subjective states of consciousness. No inspection of the brain has ever revealed a "body image" inside the skull, and it is questionable whether it will ever be found. Thus, Searle's assertion that the pain in the foot actually exists in the brain is reminiscent of Groucho Marx's challenge: "Who are you going to believe--me or your very own eyes?"

 

Self-consciousness and Introspection

 

Following Searle's assertion of the irreducibility of conscious mental states that exist solely as first-person, subjective phenomena, he poses the question: how are such phenomena to be studied scientifically? In response, Searle initially takes the empirical approach of suggesting that we let our research methods dictate the subject matter, rather than the converse: "ecause mental phenomena are essentially connected with consciousness, and because consciousness is essentially subjective, it follows that the ontology of the mental is essentially a first-person ontology . . . The consequence of this . . . is that the first-person point of view is primary" (20). Searle rightly cautions that it is immensely difficult to study mental phenomena and the only guide for methodology is the universal one, namely, to use anything that works.

 

To carry through with this pragmatic dictum, however, is difficult when it comes to studying subjective consciousness scientifically. Adhering to the principle of objectivity, science deals with "empirical facts" that are testable by "empirical methods," and this traditionally entails testability by thirdperson means. But this methodology, Searle insists, entails the false assumption

 

"that all empirical facts, in the ontological sense of being facts in the world, are equally accessible epistemically to all competent observers. We know independently that this is false. There are lots of empirical facts that are not equally accessible to all observers." (72)

 

This very assumption, of course, makes the scientific study of all uniquely first-person accounts of mental phenomena highly problematic. Following the dictates of scientific materialism, with one fell swoop it removes all subjective events from the realm of empirical facts.

 

The obvious implication of Searle's view of consciousness is that mental phenomena must be studied primarily from a first-person perspective. In this regard, he acknowledges the existence of "self-consciousness," which he describes as "an extremely sophisticated form of sensibility . . . [that] is probably possessed only by humans and perhaps a few other species" (143). Such consciousness is "directed at states of consciousness of the agent himself and not at his public persona" (142) and entails awareness of one's mental and physical behavior. Searle goes on to make the experiential claim that just as we can shift our attention from the objects at the center of consciousness to those at the periphery, we can also shift our attention from the object of conscious experience to the experience itself. "In any conscious state," he asserts, "we can shift our attention to the state itself. I can focus my attention, for example, not on the scene in front of me but on the experience of my seeing this very scene" (143).

 

Thus, Searle apparently opens the door to the possibility of scientific introspection of mental phenomena; but, in an abrupt withdrawal from experience back into the dogma of scientific materialism, he utterly rejects this possibility:

 

"if by "introspection" we mean a special capacity, just like vision only less colorful, that we have to spect intro, then it seems to me there is no such capacity. There could not be, because the model of specting intro requires a distinction between the object spected and the specting of it, and we cannot make this distinction for conscious states." (144)

 

The reason for this, he asserts, is that while the model of vision works on the presupposition that there is a distinction between the things seen and the seeing of them, for "introspection" there is simply no way to make this separation. "Any introspection I have of my own conscious state is itself that conscious state . . . the standard model of observation simply doesn't work for conscious subjectivity" (97). Moreover, just as the metaphor of introspection breaks down when the only thing observed is the observing itself, so does the metaphor of a private inner space break down because of the impossibility of making the necessary distinctions between the three elements of oneself, the act of oneself entering such an inner space, and the space into which one might enter. In the conclusion of his refutation of introspection Searle writes:

 

"[w]e might summarize these points by saying that our modern model of reality and of the relation between reality and observation cannot accommodate the phenomenon of subjectivity. The model is one of objective (in the epistemic sense) observers observing an objectively (in the ontological sense) existing reality. But there is no way on that model to observe the act of observing itself. For the act of observing is the subjective (ontological sense) access to objective reality" (99).

 

Searle's rejection of introspection is strikingly at variance with the rest of his presentation of consciousness and his endorsement of "selfconsciousness." While the model of vision endorsed in scientific materialism is indeed based on the presupposition of the absolute Cartesian distinction between subject and object, this model is not what allows for the experienced reality of sight. First-person experience is our basis for asserting the reality of vision and is also the basis of Searle's assertion of the reality of self-consciousness. What he apparently fails to recognize is that the same "modern" model of reality (namely, scientific materialism) that rejects the possibility of introspection equally leaves no room for his experience of selfconsciousness. This model of reality assumes a duality between observed phenomena, which are absolutely objective, and the observations of them, which are absolutely subjective. Thus, Searle's own arguments for rejecting introspection on dogmatic grounds equally refute his own experience of self-consciousness, which bears all the earmarks of introspection.

 

As noted earlier, Searle recognizes the debilitating failure of scientific materialism to accommodate the phenomenon of subjectivity. Yet now, when faced with its inability to account for the experience of the firstperson observation of mental phenomena, he rejects not the faulty dogma but the subjective experience that is incompatible with it! This position is all the more internally problematic in light of Searle's assertion that in the case of consciousness, there is no appearance-reality distinction, for the reality of consciousness is the appearance (122). The statement that consciousness is an appearance of any kind makes sense only if consciousness appears, but according to the dogma with which he refutes introspection, only the objective world, and not subjective consciousness, ever appears.

 

To bolster his argument, Searle points out that while it is easy to describe visually perceived objects on a table in front of one, it is difficult to describe, separately and in addition, one's conscious experience of those objects (127). But Searle apparently does not consider the alternative of initially describing the conscious experience of the visual appearances of those objects, which would then leave the difficult task of describing, separately and in addition, those objects apart from the conscious appearances of them. The problem lies not in the inaccessibility of consciousness, as Searle implies, but in the absolute reification of subjective consciousness versus objective reality.

 

The brunt of Searle's rationalistic argument is that for something to be observed, it must be separate and independent from the consciousness of it; and since conscious states do not fulfill that criterion, they must be unobservable (whether they seem to be experientially observable or not). Thus, he argues, vision is possible because the objects of vision are separate and independent of sight, and the same holds true for the rest of our sensory experience of physical reality. According to this view, which Searle apparently endorses, all particles, systems, organisms, and so on that make up the real world are "completely objective," in consequence of which they are equally accessible to all competent observers (96).

 

This endorsement of objectivism is at variance with the fact that all our normal perceptions of "objective" reality are always structured by such "subjective" factors as memories, desires, and expectations. Thus, as Searle acknowledges,

 

"these features hang together: structuredness, perception as, the aspectual shape of all intentionality, categories, and the aspect of familiarity. Conscious experiences come to us as structured, those structures enable us to perceive things under aspects, but those aspects are constrained by our mastery of a set of categories, and those categories, being familiar, enable us, in varying degrees, to assimilate our experiences, however novel, to the familiar." (136)

 

These points hold equally true for everyday experience as well as for scientific observation, in which a considerable amount of conceptual training and at times indoctrination is generally required before one achieves the status of being a "competent observer." In light of these many subjective conceptual and perceptual influences on our experience of reality, there is a hollow ring to Searle's statement that everything in the real world is completely objective and equally accessible to all competent observers. In short, upon careful examination of everyday experience and scientific observation, it seems contradictory to assert the possibility of observing independently existing physical phenomena in the objective world while simultaneously asserting the impossibility of observing mental phenomena in the subjective world.

 

Despite Searle's criticisms of contemporary scientific materialism, with its physicalism and reductionism, he dogmatically insists that modern educated people are compelled to accept this view and not even consider it to be in competition with other, incompatible worldviews (go). Thus, hypotheses affirming the existence of God or an afterlife are not to be taken seriously, and anyone who claims to believe such things, he declares, must be either ignorant or "in the grip of faith." Little does he seem to recognize the extent to which he and his fellow scientific materialists are in the grip of their own kind of faith.

 

In the course of refuting some of the assumptions of scientific materialism, Searle tries to distance himself from this worldview; and he likens his enterprise to that of an anthropologist trying to describe the exotic behavior of a distant tribe. However, as a fully socialized member of the community of scientific materialists, he is in fact a full-fledged member of that not-sodistant tribe; and his work, too, embodies a good deal of its "exotic behavior." Regarding himself a cognitive scientist who has been practicing this discipline since its inception, Searle concludes: "n spite of our modern arrogance about how much we know, in spite of the assurance and universality of our science, where the mind is concerned we are characteristically confused and in disagreement" (247). Within the community of philosophers of mind committed to scientific materialism, John Searle and Daniel Dennett disagree on a myriad of issues, but on this point they seem to be in complete accord. In a statement mirroring that of Searle, Dennett declares that "[w]ith consciousness . . . we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused." 5

 

Insofar as Searle adopts a genuinely empirical approach to the study of the mind, he opens up innovative and provocative ways of considering this subject in a scientific fashion. But insofar as he falls back on the principles of scientific materialism--with its disregard for the actual boundaries of scientific knowledge--his own theories appear to be confused and in disagreement with themselves and the known world of personal experience. Once again, it appears that dogmatic adherence to the metaphysical principles of scientific materialism actually works against genuine scientific research into the nature and origins of mental phenomena.

 

We are faced here with a dilemma not unlike that encountered by the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution. Scientific materialism assumes that mental phenomena either exist as epiphenomenal functions or emergent properties of the brain or do not exist at all. When it comes to sensory and mental qualia, including cognition and consciousness, adherents of this doctrine are determined to explain conscious events solely in terms of unconscious events. If any subjective, experiential terms are left over in one's explanation, they assume that consciousness has not really been explained at all. 6 Current neuroscientific research into the role of the brain in producing mental phenomena can be conducted with the metaphysical blinders of scientific materialism, but as long as one adheres to that doctrine, all avenues of firsthand exploration of mental phenomena themselves are prohibited. Thus, to encourage the fullest possible range of empirical, scientific methods of studying the mind, a new conceptual framework is needed that will allow for the experiential study of mental phenomena in their own terms.

Edited April 16, 2004 by Fadix