Searle's bright, forceful, and well-deserved swipes at his colleagues are, as always, a delight to read. I am sometimes struck, in reading such remarks, by how reminiscent their style is of Ayn Rand. Consider, for example, his characterization of eliminative materialism:
The idea is that, contrary to a widely held belief, there really aren't any such things as beliefs. [2]
Or:
If you are tempted to functionalism, I believe you do not need refutation, you need help. [3]
Or his explanation of a common rhetorical technique in modern philosophy of mind, which he dubs "the heroic-age-of-science maneuver":
When an author gets in deep trouble, he or she tries to make an analogy with his or her own claim and some great scientific discovery of the past. Does the view seem silly? Well, the great scientific geniuses of the past seemed silly to their ignorant, dogmatic, and prejudiced contemporaries. Galileo is the favorite historical analogy. .... Other favorites are phlogiston and vital spirits, and again the idea is to bully the reader into supposing that if he or she doubts, for example, that computers are actually thinking, it can only be because the reader believes in something as unscientific as phlogiston or vital spirits. [4]
The more serious substance of Searle's criticism, again, uses a remarkably Rand-like method; his method can accurately be summed up by Rand's dictum: "check your premises". Searle is not satisfied to analyze technical issues on his opponents' terms, and expose their specific errors on these issues (which is what he did in many cases in the past, e.g. in his "Chinese Room" argument); instead, Searle identifies, and challenges, his opponents' basic premises, and the false dichotomies on which their approach to the issues is based.
Searle sees one major false premise at the root of all the problems with modern philosophy of mind; the false premise referred to by Objectivists as the mind-body dichotomy.
Along with the Cartesian tradition we have inherited a vocabulary, and with the vocabulary a certain set of categories, within which we are historically conditioned to think about these problems. .... The vocabulary includes a series of apparent oppositions: "physical" vs. "mental", "body" vs. "mind", "materialism" vs. "mentalism", "matter" vs. "spirit". Implicit in these oppositions is the thesis that the same phenomenon under the same aspects cannot literally satisfy both terms. .... Thus we are supposed to believe that if something is mental, it cannot be physical; that if it is a matter of spirit, it cannot be a matter of matter. [5]
Searle's complete rejection of this dichotomy is stated repeatedly, clearly and forcefully, and serves as the central theme of his book.
If there is one thesis that I would like to get across in this discussion, it is simply this: the fact that a feature is mental does not imply that it is not physical; the fact that a feature is physical does not imply that it is not mental. [6]* * * What I want to insist on, ceaselessly, is that one can accept the obvious facts of physics --- for example, that the world is made up entirely of physical particles and fields of force --- without at the same time denying the obvious facts about our own experiences --- for example, that we are all conscious and that our conscious states have quite specific irreducible phenomenological properties. [7]
Searle sees the "mind-body problem" as a pseudo-problem, which appears difficult only because of the prevalent false premise of the mind-body dichotomy.
Searle's view of the "mind-body problem", and of the nature of consciousness, is stated in the opening sentences of his book:
The famous mind-body problem, the source of so much controversy over the past two millenia, has a simple solution. This solution has been available to any educated person since serious work began on the brain nearly a century ago, and, in a sense, we all know it to be true. Here it is: mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain. [8]
The central target of Searle's criticism is what he calls "the Materialist Tradition in the Philosophy of Mind". The first two chapters in Searle's book are a description, and criticism, of materialism in general and of its various forms: behaviourism, type identity theory, token identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism.
Searle's description of the essential theory of materialism, common to all its forms, is:
[materialists] deny the existence of any irreducible mental phenomena in the world. They want to deny that are any irreducible phenomenological properties, such as consciousness. [9]
The form of materialism of which this description is most clearly true is the theory known as "eliminative materialism", the theory which explicitly denies the existence of the mind or of mental states such as beliefs, desires, etc.
In its most sophisticated version, eliminative materialism argues as follows: our commonsense beliefs about the mind constitute a kind of primitive theory, a "folk psychology". But as with any theory, the entities postulated by the theory can only be justified to the extent that the theory is true. Just as the failure of the phlogiston theory of combustion removed any justification for believing in the existence of phlogiston, so .... if it turns out that folk psychology is false, we would be unjustified in believing in the existence of beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, etc. According to the eliminative materialists, it seems very likely that folk psychology will turn out to be false. It seems likely that a "mature cognitive science" will show that .... the entities that we have always supposed to exist, our ordinary mental entities, do not really exist. And therefore, we have at long last a theory of mind that simply eliminates the mind. [10]
Other materialists are less blatant.
Very few people are willing to come right out and say that consciousness does not exist. But it has recently become common for authors to redefine the notion of consciousness so that it no longer refers to actual conscious states, that is, inner, subjective, qualitative, first-person mental states, but rather to publicly observable third-person phenomena. Such authors pretend to think that consciousness exists, but in fact they end up denying its existence. [11]
Searle identifies materialism not as a rejection of dualism, but as a consequence of dualism. Materialists accept the mind-body dichotomy; given this premise, it follows that consciousness and mental phenomena, if they exist, are separate from matter and beyond the realm of natural science. In a desire to accept a world view consistent with science, they are therefore led to deny consciousness, or try to explain it away.