This paper critically examines John Searle's account of consciousness as presented in his article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, focusing on his claim that consciousness is a concrete biological phenomenon grounded in neurological correlates of conscious states. The paper challenges Searle's treatment of subjectivity, arguing that his framework fails to resolve the problem of double-subjectivity inherent in any science that includes self-consciousness. It further explores the distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge as an analogy for Searle's "building block" versus "unified field" models of consciousness, and draws out implications for artificial intelligence — particularly the challenge of programming machines to understand meaning, context, and phenomena such as irony that require genuine thinking.
This paper demonstrates immanent critique — it accepts Searle's own terminology and framework (qualia, unified subjectivity, building blocks) and then uses those concepts against him. By staying inside Searle's conceptual vocabulary, the author shows a sophisticated command of the source material while exposing tensions Searle leaves unresolved, particularly the problem of a conscious observer studying consciousness.
The paper opens with a summary of Searle's core thesis, followed by a focused rebuttal centered on the self-consciousness problem and double-subjectivity. The middle sections introduce the syntactic/semantic knowledge distinction and map it onto Searle's two models of consciousness. The final sections broaden the argument to consider form, content, and the challenge of artificial intelligence, concluding that genuine understanding — and therefore machine intelligence — depends on an account of consciousness that remains elusive.
In his article "Consciousness" in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, John Searle questions the philosophical and epistemological accuracy of the paradigm that has defined the language and study of consciousness for centuries. His contention is that the study of consciousness must be guided by the idea that consciousness is not the "airy-fairy and touch-feely" phenomenon that many assume it to be (Searle, 2000, p. 558), but rather is a concrete result of certain biological processes in the brain known as neurological correlates of conscious states (NCCs). While his argument is soundly presented and internally consistent, he avoids certain questions and considerations of consciousness in order to maintain the central assumption of his argument.
Critical to his theory is the concept of subjectivity. Consciousness, Searle argues, only exists subjectively in that it relies on the existence of a subject as part of its definition. This is somewhat related to the famous philosophical question: "If a tree falls in the forest but there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?" If "sound" is defined as the conscious acknowledgment of the stimulus provided by sound waves, then Searle would argue that the tree does not make a sound, because sound relies on the presence of a subject — a conscious being. Searle counters the position taken by some that the subjectivity of consciousness excludes it as an appropriate object of scientific study, pointing out that the subjective nature of consciousness does not equate to a subjective bias in the study of consciousness. Though consciousness is definitionally subjective, it can nonetheless be treated as an object for the purposes of scientific inquiry, and therefore the scientific study of it can be pursued objectively.
This argument is not entirely convincing. Searle glosses over the phenomenon of self-consciousness as merely one way that some people define consciousness (Searle, 2000, p. 560), and does not return to it specifically in his theory. Yet the phenomenon of self-consciousness is not only relevant to his argument but significantly undermines it. If consciousness is subjective in nature, and if science relies — as it appears to — on the objective engagement of subjective conscious minds with external objects, then any science of consciousness that includes self-consciousness in its scope must be plagued by a troublesome element of double-subjectivity: the subjectivity of both the conscious observer and the object of consciousness.
To illustrate the problem, we can amend the previous example: "If a deaf man screams in the forest, does he make a sound?" Searle's simple answer to the tree question does not suffice here, because the deaf man has a conscious awareness of having produced the sound even though he cannot give the conscious acknowledgment of its existence. The dual nature of "sound" in this case — as a conscious action and as a conscious acknowledgment — and the dual role of the man as both agent and observer call into question Searle's implication that a conscious being is an appropriate agent to undertake an objective study of consciousness.
In a science where the object of study is a third-person object, one can at least rely on the objectivity of that object — that it will be experienced the same way by all observers given the same circumstances. In fact, the very structure of the scientific method relies on this assumption. But this assumption cannot be made in the study of consciousness, not merely because of the subjectivity of the object, but because the subjectivity of the object implies the subjectivity of the observer.
To put it in Searle's own terms, in order for scientists to agree on the "unified qualitative subjectivity" (Searle, 2000, p. 557) that he isolates as the essential characteristic of consciousness, they would have to arrive at a consistent scientific understanding of the qualia experienced by all conscious beings. The difficulty is that no scientist can process the qualia of another's conscious experience without filtering it through the qualia of his or her own conscious experience. The separation of observer and observed that is so central to scientific study is thus violated before the process even gets off the ground.
This is not to say that no scientific knowledge concerning consciousness is possible. As Searle himself points out, advancements have been made in the study of consciousness through the "building block" approach. This approach eases the problem of observer and observed to some extent by isolating individual, instantaneous moments of "microconsciousness" that an observer may largely separate himself or herself from. However, Searle dismisses this approach as inadequate for an accurate study of consciousness as a unified field.
Searle concludes his article by articulating the difference between the view of consciousness as a "computer program" that plays itself out in our brains but could just as well run on alternative hardware, and the view of consciousness as a biological problem in which the brain figures prominently not just as an arena but as an active contributor. This distinction has clear implications for discussions about machine intelligence, human intelligence, and what is meant by intelligence in general.
By thinking, I mean the ability to decipher the entanglement of form and content and to bring to bear both syntactic and semantic knowledge in order to understand and create meaning. Thinking requires consciousness in that it cannot happen in a vacuum of form and content, as the example of irony demonstrates. It relies heavily on a knowledge of context that can only come from conscious experience. Because of this dependence, understanding — and consequently artificially replicating — thinking, or intelligent, beings requires an understanding of the processes underlying consciousness. As Searle's article itself demonstrates, that understanding is one we have scarcely begun to achieve.
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