Mind: A Brief Introduction

I used this book to teach a course in the philosophy of human nature and I loved it. Searle touts his brand of philosophy in this work called "biological naturalism." It is the view that all of our conscious states arise from neurobiological processes. The book is also an introduction to the common problems in philosophy of mind. But you better come prepared for a somewhat technical (in some places) discussion of free will, mental causation and the mind-body problem. As usual, however, Searle is crystal clear in his explanations and arguments. Moreover, he appears to be pretty convincing in his refutations of materialism. This book is informative and a pretty good read.

I'm not going to present Searle's thesis (or criticize it) here. That's what the book is for. I will point out how many comments this book has, which discuss its critical points--good evidence that it is wonderfully accessible! If you majored in philosophy, went on to other things, but still have an interest in the field, this is the best book on the Philosophy of Mind you can buy. The same goes for high school students looking to explore the subject. Searle consciously aims his book at "young John Searle," so he presents philosophy clearly without dumbing it down. In my opinion, we of the educated public are not looking for "philosophy of the Matrix" written by nobodies; we're looking for book like this: great ideas aimed at an intelligent audience (think philosophy major graduating seniors at Princeton), written by the leading experts in their fields. Come on, old philosophers...your name and ideas might be circulating in the wider public (outside the APA) long after you are!

If you haven't read any Searle, this is a great place to start. If you have read Searle's work, you will not be suprised by what you find here. Searle is back to his old tricks in what is probably one of the most muddled yet thought provoking books I have read in the last year. Searle's writing is crystal clear in the sense that he doesn't use a lot of jargon, and while reading him it is easy to become convinced that his thinking is just as clear. For the life of me I can't seem to decide if Searle is deeply confused or profoundly correct, a reaction that is ubiquitous for those who read him. The old cliche "you either love him or hate him" is particularly apt for Searle, for he writes with such bravado and confidence as to woo you into agreement. If you do not appreciate his style and his prior commitments to the so-called "common sense" approach to philosophy you will probably just feel outraged. Indeed, the essence of his entire philosophical project is the legitemization of our common sense notions about the world. He takes this to be THE purpose of philosophy: so don't expect him to try and refute ideas like relativism and extreme skepticism. Rather he takes our common sense notions about the world to be the starting place rather than a hopeful ending point. As for the arguments themselves my personal feeling is that Searle is trying to get something from nothing. He introduces odd and spurious-seeming distinctions in order to smooth over conceptual difficulties. He rejects four fundamental assumptions which he says are needlessly plaguing the philosophy of mind but then seems to underhandedly invoke them in strange new ways throughout the work. For instance he wants to abolish the assumption that the mental and physical are distinct, but then goes through great pains to show that the mind cannot be ontologically reduced to the brain! In these and other arguments I am perfectly content to accept that I have probably misunderstood him in some fundamental way. In any event, Searle's work is definitely worth taking the time to read if for no other reason than to disagree with his very original approach to the field.

One of my favorite philosophical sayings is from Berkeley: "The philosophers kick up the dust and then complain they cannot see." John Searle is not this kind of philosopher. Rather, he draws on science and common sense to render ostensibly complex issues simple. The central issue of the book is the mind-body problem. He rejects dualism, materialism, epiphenomenological and functionalist approaches, among others. Rather, he argues that the mind is part of nature, a product of biological evolution, and hence part of the physical world. The mind, he says, is simply the operation of the brain from an organizational point higher than the neuron and synapse, the same as we might say that a computer is the operation of electronic devices, viewed at a level higher than the bit and the byte. How very simple! Why is this pellucid view more acceptable today than a century or a millennium ago? The answer is that modern science has made Searle's answer credible. First, we now can chart the development of mind in animals, and we can be quite certain that many vertebrates are conscious beings. Therefore consciousness and mind are products of biological evolution. Second, modern science is quite at home with the stunning inscrutability of the natural world. Einstein, a Twentieth century scientist with a Nineteenth century aesthetic and morality, never accepted quantum mechanics, considering it just too, too weird. Complexity theory, revealed mathematically and through the power of the computer, allows us to understand the concept of emergence, in which a higher level of complexity supports the emergence of properties that cannot be predicted or analyzed completely from component parts. It used to be thought that science is reductivist, but now we know that sciences is a dynamic tension between reducing wholes to their parts, and recognizing that at critical points, the whole is a complex, nonlinear, dynamical system that transcends it parts. If you understand how profoundly weird the laws of nature are, and if you appreciate how stunningly beautiful and unexpected are the products of evolution, then you will have no trouble accepting Searle's thesis. The human mind is an entity of completely, utterly, overarchingly inscrutable functioning. But, for all that, there is no reason to cast mind out of the realm of the physical, into some other mysterious never-never land. This is Searle's message. All of Searle's positions flow from the above insight. For instance, he resolves the issue of free will vs. determinism by asserting that since mind is part of the physical world, and since physical entities can cause physical events to occur (Searle rejects Humean skepticism concerning causation), then psychological causes are possible, and hence free will is possible, at least at our current level of understanding of mental events. Searle replaces philosophical questions with scientific questions. If mind is part of physical reality, and if free will is possible, th

This is a relatively short book by Searle devoted to the philosophy of mind. This book is something of a hybrid. It is intended as a short introduction to the major themes in the philosophy of mind and does contain an introductory material on this topic. It is, however, largely a presentation of Searle's thinking on this topic. Readers familiar with Searle's work will find repetition of ideas he has presented previously, notably his work on consciousness, the Mind-Body problem, and intentionality. These ideas, however, are presented on a background of other approaches to these problems. The core of the book is an explication of the Mind-Body problem and Searle's distinctive approach to this problem. Briefly, Searle claims to have 'solved' this problem, though like many clever solutions to difficult problems, the answer is a less a solution per se than a redefinition that makes the whole situation more tractable to analysis. Searle's central point is that the first person nature of consciousness is not reducible to material events but is part of the natural world in a causal sense. He finds the mind/body dichotomy to be false. As is true of all his work, this book is written clearly, is without a lot of technical language (though readers need to know the meanings of epistemic and ontologic), and he defends his position vigorously. Searle goes on to examine a number of other issues in the philosophy of mind, including intentionality, free will, the nature of self, and perception. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that Searle highlights certain issues, like the question of free will and the nature of the self, as poorly understood and as targets for future research. In terms of explicating and defending Searle's point of view, this is an excellent book. It is less good on the historic background and alternative approaches to these questions. I suspect Searle's critics will find his discussion of alternatives unsatisfactory, and I suspect some of these complaints will be justified. In my amateur opinion, for example, I think Searle is not fair in his discussions of Hume's treatment of induction and perceptions. In a book that is supposed to be an introduction for a broad reading public, inadequate presentation of other prespectives is a drawback. There is some bibliography but it is not extensive or annotated. A better guide to further reading would have been worthwhile.