83 ideas
| 354 | Wisdom makes virtue and true goodness possible [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It is wisdom that makes possible courage and self-control and integrity or, in a word, true goodness. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 069b) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle also says that prudence (phronesis) makes virtue possible. |
| 370 | Philosophy is a purification of the soul ready for the afterlife [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Souls which have purified themselves sufficiently by philosophy will live after death without bodies. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 114b) | |
| A reaction: Purifying it of what? Error, or desire, or narrow-mindedness, or the physical? |
| 350 | In investigation the body leads us astray, but the soul gets a clear view of the facts [Plato] |
| Full Idea: When philosophers investigate with the help of the body they are led astray, but through reflection the soul gets a clear view of the facts. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 065c) |
| 362 | The greatest misfortune for a person is to develop a dislike for argument [Plato] |
| Full Idea: No greater misfortune could happen to anyone than developing a dislike for argument. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 089d) |
| 3508 | Correspondence to the facts HAS to be the aim of enquiry [Searle] |
| Full Idea: It does not matter whether "true" does mean corresponds to the facts, because "corresponds to the facts" does mean corresponds to the facts, and any discipline that aims to describe how the world is aims for this correspondence. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch.10.V) |
| 13155 | If you add one to one, which one becomes two, or do they both become two? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: I cannot convince myself that when you add one to one either the first or the second one becomes two, or they both become two by the addition of the one to the other, ...or that when you divide one, the cause of becoming two is now the division. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 097d) | |
| A reaction: Lovely questions, all leading to the conclusion that two consists of partaking in duality, to which you can come by several different routes. |
| 3473 | Reduction can be of things, properties, ideas or causes [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I find at least five different senses of "reduction" in the literature - ontological (genes/DNA), property ontological (heat/mean molecular energy), theoretical (gas laws/statistics), logical/definitional (average plumber), and causal (solids/molecules). | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.II) | |
| A reaction: A useful pointer towards some much needed clearer thought about reduction. It is necessary to cross reference this list against reductions which are either ontological or epistemological or linguistic. |
| 3532 | Solidity in a piston is integral to its structure, not supervenient [Maslin on Searle] |
| Full Idea: Searle's defence of causally efficacious supervenient mind won't work, because, unlike the mind, the solidity of a piston is not a distinct and separate phenomenon from its microstructure. | |
| From: comment on John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.6 | |
| A reaction: Searle struggles to find analogies for his position - and that, in my view, is highly significant in the philosophy of mind. If there is nothing else like your proposed theory, it is probably just human vainglory. |
| 3533 | Is supervenience just causality? [Searle, by Maslin] |
| Full Idea: For Searle the supervenience relation is just causality. | |
| From: report of John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.6 | |
| A reaction: 'Supervenience' seems, in that case, to be an irrelevant word, which was only used when the mind-body connection was a bit loose and mysterious. Mind is identical to brain, or a property of the brain. I like 'process of the brain'. |
| 3454 | Reality is entirely particles in force fields [Searle] |
| Full Idea: One can accept the obvious facts of physics, that the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I agree with this proposal, with the cautious proviso that physics may discover further basic aspects to reality. The only obstacles to this view are possible divine and mental substances, neither of which is supported by adequate evidence. |
| 21347 | If Simmias is taller than Socrates, that isn't a feature that is just in Simmias [Plato] |
| Full Idea: When you say Simmias is taller than Socrates but shorter than Phaedo, so you mean there is in Simmias both tallness and shortness? - I do. ...But surely he is not taller than Socrates because he is Simmias but because of the tallness he happens to have? | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 102b-c) | |
| A reaction: He adds that both people must be cited. This appears to be what we now call a rejection relative height as an 'internal' relation, which is it would presumably be if it was a feature of one or of both men. |
| 3471 | Some properties depend on components, others on their relations [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Some system features cannot be figured out just from the composition of the elements of the system and environmental relations; they have to be explained in terms of causal relations among the elements. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.I) | |
| A reaction: One must explain at the molecular level why an apple skin is both red and smooth. In the brain one must explain the movement of glucose and the contents of thoughts by their causal relations (I say). |
| 3472 | Fully 'emergent' properties contradict our whole theory of causation [Searle] |
| Full Idea: The existence of any fully 'emergent' properties (that have a life of their own) violates even the weakest principle of the transitivity of causation. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.I) | |
| A reaction: When Searle talks like this, he sounds like a thoroughgoing reductive physicalist (but is he really?). Any philosopher of mind who uses the word 'emergence' must say EXACTLY what they mean by it. |
| 360 | We must have a prior knowledge of equality, if we see 'equal' things and realise they fall short of it [Plato] |
| Full Idea: We must have some previous knowledge of equality, before the time when we saw equal things, but realised that they fell short of it. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 075a) |
| 1 | There is only one source for all beauty [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If anything is beautiful other than beauty itself, it is beautiful for no other reason but because it participates in that beautiful. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 100c) | |
| A reaction: The Greek word will be 'kalon' (beautiful, fine, noble). Like Aristotle, I find it baffling that such diversity could have a single source. Beautiful things have diverse aims. |
| 368 | Other things are named after the Forms because they participate in them [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The reason why other things are called after the forms is that they participate in the forms. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 102a) |
| 16516 | The ship which Theseus took to Crete is now sent to Delos crowned with flowers [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The day before the trial the prow of the ship that the Athenians send to Delos had been crowned with garlands. - Which ship is that? - It is the ship in which, the Athenians say, Theseus once sailed to Crete, taking the victims. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 058a) | |
| A reaction: Not philosophical, but this is the Ship of Theseus whose subsequent identity, Plutarch tells us, became a matter of dispute. |
| 3490 | Beliefs only make sense as part of a network of other beliefs [Searle] |
| Full Idea: To have one belief or desire, I have to have a whole network of other beliefs and desires. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 8.I) |
| 3491 | Beliefs are part of a network, and also exist against a background [Searle] |
| Full Idea: We need to postulate a network of beliefs, and also a background of capacities that are not themselves part of the network. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 8.I) |
| 357 | People are obviously recollecting when they react to a geometrical diagram [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The way in which people react to a geometrical diagram or anything like that is unmistakable proof of the theory of recollection. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 073a) |
| 359 | If we feel the inadequacy of a resemblance, we must recollect the original [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If someone sees a resemblance, but feels that it falls far short of the original, they must therefore have a recollection of the original. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 074e) |
| 9343 | To achieve pure knowledge, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things with the soul [Plato] |
| Full Idea: We are convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 066c) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the original ideal which motivates the devotion to a priori knowledge - that it will lead to a 'pure' knowledge, which in Plato's case will be eternal and necessary knowledge, like taking lessons from the gods. Wrong. |
| 3482 | Perception is a function of expectation [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Psychologists have a lot of evidence to show that perception is a function of expectation. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 6.I.7) |
| 3493 | Memory is mainly a guide for current performance [Searle] |
| Full Idea: We should think of memory as a mechanism for generating current performance, including conscious thoughts and actions, on the basis of past experience. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 8.III) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be falling into the fallacy of causal and functional theories, which Searle normally dislikes. If memory serves to aid current performance, that doesn't say what memory IS, any more than a foot is defined by walking. |
| 15859 | To investigate the causes of things, study what is best for them [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If one wished to know the cause of each thing, why it comes to be or perishes or exists, one had to find what was the best way for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. Then it befitted a man to investigate only ...what is best. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 097d) | |
| A reaction: A reversal of the modern idea of 'best explanation'. Socrates is citing Anaxagoras's proposal to understand things by interpreting the workings of a supreme Mind. It is the religious version of best explanation. |
| 3463 | We don't have a "theory" that other people have minds [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Except when doing philosophy there is no "problem" of other minds, because we do not hold a "hypothesis" or "belief" or "supposition" that other people are conscious. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 3.IV) | |
| A reaction: Our commitment to other minds is so deep-ingrained that it is a candidate for one of Hume's 'natural beliefs', or even (a step further) for an innate idea. Babies have an innate recognition of faces, so why can't an expectation of a mind be hard-wired? |
| 3457 | Other minds are not inferred by analogy, but are our best explanation [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If we inferred other minds simply from behaviour, we would conclude that radios are conscious; it is rather the combination of behaviour with knowledge of the causal underpinnings of behaviour. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 1.V.4) | |
| A reaction: Personally I am inclined to think that Searle has said the last word on the fairly uninteresting problem of other minds. Dualism generates a deep privacy problem, and analogy is a flawed argument, but best explanation is exactly what we rely on. |
| 3480 | We experience unity at an instant and across time [Searle] |
| Full Idea: We experience 'horizontal unity' in the organisation of conscious experiences through short stretches of time, and 'vertical unity' in simultaneous awareness of diverse features of our experience. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 6.I.2) | |
| A reaction: See Betjeman's poem "On the Ninth Green at St Enedoc". The brain is an information-unification machine, and 'I' am located at the crossroads where these unifications meet. Analysis of mind is good for us, but so is reunification afterwards. |
| 13154 | Do we think and experience with blood, air or fire, or could it be our brain? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Is it with the blood that we think, or with the air or the fire that is in us? Or is it none of these, but the brain that supplies our senses of hearing and sight and smell. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 097a) | |
| A reaction: In retrospect it seems surprising that such clever people hadn't worked this one out, given the evidence of anatomy, in animals and people, and given brain injuries. By the time of Galen they appear to have got the answer. |
| 3479 | The mind experiences space, but it is not experienced as spatial [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Although we experience objects both spatially and temporally, our consciousness itself is not experienced as spatial, though it is experienced as temporally extended. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: This observation was made by Descartes. This seems to require that I experience objects spatially, AND experience my consciousness. Do I experience the time passing, as well as the river moving? Einstein says if it is in time, it must be in space. |
| 3470 | Conscious creatures seem able to discriminate better [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Apparently it is just a fact of biology that organisms that have consciousness have, in general, much greater powers of discrimination than those that do not. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 4.III) | |
| A reaction: This presupposes knowledge of which creatures are conscious. Clearly colour vision gives more information than monochrome vision. But presumably a computer could process more visual information than I could see. It doesn't have a fovea centralis. |
| 3486 | Unconscious thoughts are those capable of causing conscious ones [Searle] |
| Full Idea: The ontology of the unconscious consists in objective features of the brain capable of causing subjective conscious thoughts. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 7.II.7) | |
| A reaction: As it stands, this definition would fit a brain tumour. I think Searle is wrong. There is no sharp line between conscious and non-conscious brain events. Research has surely made it clear that dim brain events directly intrude into my conscious states. |
| 3503 | Consciousness results directly from brain processes, not from some intermediary like information [Searle] |
| Full Idea: There are brain processes and consciousness, but nothing in between; no rule following, information processing, unconscious inferences, mental models, language of thought or universal grammar. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch.10.II) | |
| A reaction: The core of Searle's view. He likes to call consciousness a 'property' of brains. Edelman says consciousness IS a brain process. Essentially I agree with Searle. An unusual physical object can produce consciousness, but mere 'rules' etc. cannot. |
| 3465 | Either there is intrinsic intentionality, or everything has it [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If you deny the distinction between intrinsic and derived ('as-if') intentionality, then it follows that everything in the universe has intentionality (for example, stones seem to want to fall). | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 3.IV) | |
| A reaction: Searle makes this claim because he always takes mental phenomena like intentionality or consciousness to be all-or-nothing - and he's wrong. He refuses to acknowledge non-conscious intentional states - and he's wrong again. |
| 3484 | Water flowing downhill can be described as if it had intentionality [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Water flowing downhill can be described AS IF it had intentionality: it tries to get to the bottom by seeking the line of least resistance through information processing and calculation… | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 7.II.1) | |
| A reaction: John Searle could be described as if he had intentionality, as his neurons chart their way through the information and desires that flood them. I am wary of his all-or-nothing approach to intentionality. |
| 3489 | Intentional phenomena only make sense within a background [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Intentional phenomena such as meanings, understandings, interpretations, beliefs, desires, and experiences only function within a set of Background capacities that are not themselves intentional. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 8.I) | |
| A reaction: Why would the background not be intentional? Presumably the background is a set of beliefs about, or images of, how the world is taken to be. |
| 3494 | Intentionality is defined in terms of representation [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Intentionality is defined in terms of representation. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 8.III) | |
| A reaction: Sounds okay, but representation of a tree (say) can be understood in imagistic terms, whereas extremely abstract concepts are a bit baffling. Then we realise that we conceive trees in that way as well, not as images. |
| 3481 | Consciousness is essential and basic to intentionality [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I claim that only a being that could have conscious intentional states could have intentional states at all, and every unconscious intentional state is at least potentially conscious. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 6.I.5) | |
| A reaction: The alternative to this is that robots and lower animals might have non-conscious states which are about something, because they process useful information but are unaware of it. If so, parts of the human mind might do the same, as in blindsight. |
| 4088 | Pain is not intentional, because it does not represent anything beyond itself [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If I am conscious of a pain, the pain is not intentional, because it does not represent anything beyond itself. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 4.1) | |
| A reaction: Crane quotes this to challenge it. Pain may be about apparent damage to the body. Pains are certainly informative. |
| 8130 | Qualities of experience are just representational aspects of experience ('Representationalism') [Harman, by Burge] |
| Full Idea: Harman defended what came to be known as 'representationalism' - the view that qualitative aspects of experience are nothing other than representational aspects. | |
| From: report of Gilbert Harman (The Intrinsic Quality of Experience [1990]) by Tyler Burge - Philosophy of Mind: 1950-2000 p.459 | |
| A reaction: Functionalists like Harman have a fairly intractable problem with the qualities of experience, and this may be clutching at straws. What does 'represent' mean? How is the representation achieved? Why that particular quale? |
| 3467 | Neither introspection nor privileged access makes sense [Searle] |
| Full Idea: We have the visual metaphor of introspection, and the spatial metaphor of privileged access, but neither one works because I am the thing being viewed, and I am the space being entered. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 4.II) | |
| A reaction: This is quite a good warning against reliance on analogies when dealing with the unique problem of self-knowledge, though the phrase 'hall-of-mirrors' draws assent from most people concerning that topic. |
| 3483 | Introspection is just thinking about mental states, not a special sort of vision [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If by "introspection" we mean simply thinking about our own mental states, then there is no objection to introspection, but if we mean a special capacity like vision of looking inwards, there is no such capacity. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 6.II.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to beg the question of how we can be aware of our mental states in order to think about them. One might image that some animals have mental states, but are quite unaware that they have them, because they are totally focused on content. |
| 3468 | I cannot observe my own subjectivity [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I cannot observe my own subjectivity. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 4.II) | |
| A reaction: I'm not quite clear what Searle is complaining about. He knows very clearly that there is a subjective aspect to his life - so how does he know that fact? There must be something supporting this widely held belief. |
| 364 | One soul can't be more or less of a soul than another [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Is one soul, even minutely, more or less of a soul than another? Not in the least. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 093b) | |
| A reaction: This idea is attractive because unconsciousness and death seem to be abrupt procedures, and so appear to be all-or-nothing, but I would personally view extreme Alzheimer's as an erasing of the soul, though a minimum level of it seems all-or-nothing. |
| 3469 | Mind and brain don't interact if they are the same [Searle] |
| Full Idea: There is no "link" between consciousness and the brain, any more than there is a link between the liquidity of water and the H2O molecules. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 4.III) | |
| A reaction: We say of some properties that 'x is F', and of others that 'x has F', and of others that 'x is F because of y' (as in a knife having sharpness because it is thin and hard). Consciousness might fit the third case just as well as the first. |
| 3487 | Without internal content, a zombie's full behaviour couldn't be explained [Searle] |
| Full Idea: There could be no intentional zombie, because (unlike with a conscious agent) there simply is no fact of the matter as to exactly which aspectual shapes its alleged intentional states have. Is it seeking water or H2O? | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 7.III) | |
| A reaction: The obvious response to this is behaviourist talk of 'dispositions'. The dispositions of scientist when seeking water and when seeking H2O are different. Zombies behave identically to us, so their intentional states have whatever is needed to do the job. |
| 3458 | Mental states only relate to behaviour contingently, not necessarily [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I believe that the relation of mental states to behaviour is purely contingent. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 1.V.5) | |
| A reaction: I don't think I agree, though it will depend on where you draw the line between mental states and behaviour. Since there have never been two identical states since the beginning of time, it is a little hard to test this one. |
| 3485 | Wanting H2O only differs from wanting water in its mental component [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If a person exhibits water-seeking behaviour, they also exhibit H2O-seeking behaviour, so there is no way the behaviour itself, without reference to a mental component, can constitute wanting water rather than H2O. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 7.II.4) | |
| A reaction: What about the behaviour of responding to the discovery that this stuff isn't actually H2O? Or the disposition to choose the real thing rather than ersatz water? An interesting comment, though. |
| 3461 | Functionalists like the externalist causal theory of reference [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Functionalism has been rejuvenated by being joined to externalist causal theories of reference. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 2.VIII) | |
| A reaction: This, however, seems to be roughly the reason why Putnam gave up his functionalist theory. See Ideas 2332 and 2071. However the causal network of mind can incorporate environmental features. |
| 3496 | A program for Chinese translation doesn't need to understand Chinese [Searle] |
| Full Idea: A computer, me for example, could run the steps in the program for some mental capacity, such as understanding Chinese, without understanding a word of Chinese. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 9.II) | |
| A reaction: I don't think this is true. I could recite a bit of Chinese without comprehension, but giving flexible answers to complex questions isn't plausible just by gormlessly implementing a procedure. |
| 3499 | Computation presupposes consciousness [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Most of the works I have seen in the computational theory of the mind commit some variation on the homunculus fallacy. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 9.VI) | |
| A reaction: This will be because there is an unspoken user for the inner computer. But see Fodor's view (Idea 2506). The key idea here is Dennett's: that not all regresses are vicious. My mind controller isn't like all of me. |
| 3501 | If we are computers, who is the user? [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If the brain is a digital computer, we are still faced with the question 'Who is the user?' | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 9.VI) | |
| A reaction: A very nice question. Our whole current concept of a computer involves the unmentioned user. We don't have to go all mystical about persons, though. Robots aren't logically impossible. |
| 3456 | Consciousness is a brain property as liquidity is a water property [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is a higher-level or emergent property of the brain, but only in the sense that solidity is an emergent property of water when it is ice, and liquidity when it melts. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 1.IV) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to know which side Searle is on. These examples are highly reductive, and make him a thoroughgoing reductive physicalist (with which I agree). |
| 3453 | Property dualism is the reappearance of Cartesianism [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Opponents of materialism tend to embrace "property dualism", thus accepting the Cartesian apparatus that I had thought long discredited. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be precisely the current situation. Cartesian dualism is thoroughly marginalised (but still whimpering in the corner), and the real battle is between physicalism and property dualism. The latter is daft. |
| 3455 | Property dualists tend to find the mind-body problem baffling [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Property dualists (e.g. Nagel and McGinn) think that the mind-body problem is frightfully difficult, perhaps altogether insoluble. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 1.I) | |
| A reaction: Nagel's problem is that our concepts aren't up to it; McGinn's is that the very structure of our minds isn't up to it. My view is that the difficulty is the complexity we are up against, not the ontology. |
| 3475 | Property dualism denies reductionism [Searle] |
| Full Idea: What is property dualism but the view that there are irreducible mental properties? | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.III) | |
| A reaction: Being red and being square are separate, but they are both entailed by the material basis, and hence are reducible. Properties may not link directly, but they must link indirectly. |
| 3476 | Mind and brain are supervenient in respect of cause and effect [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Mind is supervenient on brain in the following respect: type-identical neurophysiological causes have type-identical mentalistic effects. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) | |
| A reaction: An interesting statement of what might be meant by 'supervenience'. Searle's version implies necessity in the link (but not identity). I take him to imply that a zombie is impossible. |
| 3477 | If mind-brain supervenience isn't causal, this implies epiphenomenalism [Searle] |
| Full Idea: There are constitutive and causal notions of supervenience. Kim claims that mental events have no causal role, and merely supervene on brain events which do (which implies epiphenomenalism). But it seems obvious that mind is caused by brain. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think the whole discussion is doomed to confusion because it is riddled with a priori dualism. There is no all-or-nothing boundary between 'mind' and 'brain'. Kim's views have changed. |
| 3531 | Mental events can cause even though supervenient, like the solidity of a piston [Searle] |
| Full Idea: That mental features supervene on neuronal features in no way diminishes their causal efficacy. The solidity of the piston is supervenient on its molecular structure, but this does not make solidity epiphenomenal. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) | |
| A reaction: Searle's examples never seem to quite fit what he is saying. Molecules and solidity are supervenient because they are identical (solidity is the presence of certain molecules). Solidity doesn't have causal powers that molecules lack. |
| 3478 | Upwards mental causation makes 'supervenience' irrelevant [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Once you recognise the existence of bottom-up, micro to macro forms of causation, the notion of supervenience no longer does any work in philosophy. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure if the notion of supervenience ever did any work. Davidson only fished up the word because none of the normal relationships between things seemed to apply (and he was wrong about that). |
| 3466 | Consciousness seems indefinable by conditions or categories [Searle] |
| Full Idea: We can't define "consciousness" by necessary and sufficient conditions, or by the Aristotelian method of genus and differentia. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 4.I) | |
| A reaction: We may not be able to 'define' it, but we can 'characterise' it. The third approach to definition is a catalogue of essential properties, which might tail off rather vaguely. |
| 3500 | Can the homunculus fallacy be beaten by recursive decomposition? [Searle] |
| Full Idea: The idea (of Dennett and others) is that recursive decomposition will eliminate the homunculi. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 9.VI) | |
| A reaction: Lycan is the best exponent of this view, which I like. My brain clearly has a substantial homunculus which I call my PA; it regularly reminds of what I have to do in an hour's time. I am sure it is composed of smaller brain components working as a team. |
| 9317 | Searle argues that biology explains consciousness, but physics won't explain biology [Searle, by Kriegel/Williford] |
| Full Idea: Searle appears to argue that phenomenal consciousness is explained in biological terms, but that biological properties are irreducible to purely (micro)physical ones. | |
| From: report of John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992]) by U Kriegel / K Williford - Intro to 'Self-Representational Consciousness' n1 | |
| A reaction: Searle is very hard to pin down, and this account suggests the reason very clearly - because he is proposing something which is bizarrely implausible. The reduction of biology-to-physics looks much more likely than consciousness-to-biology. |
| 3474 | If mind is caused by brain, does this mean mind IS brain? [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I hold a view of mind/brain relations that is a form of causal reduction (mental features are caused by biological processes), but does this imply ontological reduction? (…No!) | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.II.5) | |
| A reaction: What exactly is his claim? Presumably 'causal reduction' implies identity of (philosophical) substance. This seems to imply 'emergence' in a rather old-fashioned and dramatic way, though elsewhere Searle denies this. |
| 3497 | If mind is multiply realisable, it is possible that anything could realise it [Searle] |
| Full Idea: The same principle that implies multiple realisability would seem to imply universal realisability. …Any object whatever could have syntactical ascriptions made to it. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 9.V) | |
| A reaction: This leads to rather weak reductio objections to functionalism. Logically there may be no restriction on how to implement a mind, but naturally there are very tight restrictions. Stick to neurons seems the best strategy. |
| 3462 | We don't postulate folk psychology, we experience it [Searle] |
| Full Idea: We do not postulate beliefs and desires to account for anything; we simply experience conscious beliefs and desires. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 2 App) | |
| A reaction: Searle is too fond of reporting what we 'simply' know. Beliefs and desires are pushed forward by a cultural tradition. What I actually experience is a confusion, always laced with emotion. |
| 3498 | Computation isn't a natural phenomenon, it is a way of seeing phenomena [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Computational states are not discovered within the physics, they are assigned to the physics. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 9.V) | |
| A reaction: The key idea in Searle's later thinking, with which I have some sympathy. There always seems to be a sneaky dualism buried deep in Searle's physicalism. Computation is very high-level physics. |
| 3492 | Content is much more than just sentence meaning [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Sentence meaning radically underdetermines the content of what is said. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 8.II) | |
| A reaction: We have body language, and we have tone, and we have context, and we have speaker's and listener's meanings. I take sentence meaning to be the basis which makes the rest possible. |
| 3464 | There is no such thing as 'wide content' [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I don't believe in the existence of 'wide content'. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 3.IV) | |
| A reaction: I sort of agree, but if I accept the rulings of experts (e.g. that water is really H2O), I am admitting that what I mean may not be in my head. |
| 3506 | We explain behaviour in terms of actual internal representations in the agent [Searle] |
| Full Idea: In intentional explanations of behaviour patterns in the behaviour are explained by the fact that the agent has a representation of that very pattern in its intentional apparatus, which functions causally in the production of the behaviour. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch.10.IV) | |
| A reaction: Problem cases would be where someone's behaviour doesn't come out quite as planned (e.g. the sentence spoken failed to match the proposition intended), and panic behaviour. |
| 3451 | Meaning is derived intentionality [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Meaning is derived intentionality. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Intro) | |
| A reaction: That still leaves something very difficult to explain - how the intentionality of mental events can be 'transferred' to symbolic forms which can exist outside the mind. |
| 3450 | Philosophy of language is a branch of philosophy of mind [Searle] |
| Full Idea: On my view, the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Inclined to agree with this. Intentionality and meaning are virtually the same thing. The role of language in thought has been grossly overrated in modern philosophy. |
| 3507 | Universal grammar doesn't help us explain anything [Searle] |
| Full Idea: No further predictive or explanatory power is added by saying that there is in addition a level of deep unconscious rules of universal grammar. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch.10.IV) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that neuroscientists would be very interested in this prediction, if it were convincing enough. Nothing to stop us from trying to infer the nature of something which is beyond our reach. |
| 3495 | Shared Background makes translation possible, though variation makes it hard [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Difference in local Backgrounds make translation from one language to another difficult; the commonality of deep Background makes it possible at all. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 8.V) | |
| A reaction: That is a very good observation about what is normally swept under the one umbrella of the 'principle of charity'. Quine exaggerated the local, and Davidson exaggerated the deep. |
| 3505 | The function of a heart depends on what we want it to do [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If the only thing that interested us about the heart was that it made a thumping noise, we would have a completely different conception of its "functioning", and correspondingly of heart disease. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch.10.III) | |
| A reaction: Ditto if we were only interested in ears as support for earrings, but that would seriously miss the point of ears. The intrinsic function is the reason for its existence. |
| 361 | It is a mistake to think that the most violent pleasure or pain is therefore the truest reality [Plato] |
| Full Idea: When anyone's soul feels a keen pleasure or pain it cannot help supposing that whatever causes the most violent emotion is the plainest and truest reality - which it is not. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 084c) | |
| A reaction: Do people think that? Most people distinguish subjective from objective. Wounded soldiers are also aware of victory or defeat. |
| 351 | War aims at the acquisition of wealth, because we are enslaved to the body [Plato] |
| Full Idea: All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth, and we want this because of the body, to which we are slave. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 066c) |
| 3504 | Chemistry entirely explains plant behaviour [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Variable secretions of auxin account for a plant's behaviour in following the sun, without any extra hypothesis of purpose, teleology, or intentionality. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch.10.II) |
| 13156 | Fancy being unable to distinguish a cause from its necessary background conditions! [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Fancy being unable to distinguish between the cause of a thing, and the condition without which it could not be a cause. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 099c) | |
| A reaction: Not as simple as he thinks. It seems fairly easy to construct a case where the immediately impacting event remains constant, and the background condition is changed. Even worse when negligence is held to be the cause. |
| 369 | If the Earth is spherical and in the centre, it is kept in place by universal symmetry, not by force [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If the earth is spherical and in the middle of the heavens, it needs neither air nor force to keep it from falling. The uniformity of heaven and equilibrium of earth are sufficient support. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 108e) |
| 3502 | Mind involves fighting, fleeing, feeding and fornicating [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Our conscious life involves the famous "four f's", fighting, fleeing, feeding and fornicating. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch.10.I) |
| 3459 | You can only know the limits of knowledge if you know the other side of the limit [Searle] |
| Full Idea: To know the limits of knowledge, we would have to know both sides of the limit. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 1.V.6) |
| 363 | Whether the soul pre-exists our body depends on whether it contains the ultimate standard of reality [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The theory that our soul exists even before it enters the body surely stands or falls with the soul's possession of the ultimate standard of reality. | |
| From: Plato (Phaedo [c.382 BCE], 092d) |