Adam Panflick Converses With John Searle in A Manner of Speaking.

The following material from John Searle is taken from an extensive 1999 online interview.

Adam Panflick is the well-known protagonist of evolving novellas, most recently The Manhattan Bully Wars, documenting his successful 1946 assault on bullying at Parousia Academy. The Boston Car Wars of the late 1980s is legendary as the first instance of anti-automobile fiction in history.

Dr. Searle’s many achievements are referenced in this Wikipedia article.

John Searle Interview — Introductory 1999

SEARLE:

… it seems to me there are two principles which, if properly understood (it’s not all that easy to understand them, but if properly understood –) provide you with a solution to the traditional mind-body problem. Those principles are first, all of our mental processes are caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain. We assume that it’s at the level of neurons, but that’s for the specialists to settle in the end. Neurons and synapses — maybe you’ve got to go higher, maybe you’ve got to go lower — but some sorts of lower-level processes in the brain, whether it’s clusters of neurons or subneuronal parts or neurons and synapses, their behavior causes all of your mental life. Everything from feeling pains and tickles and itches, pick your favorite, to suffering the angst of post-industrial man under late capitalism, whatever is your favorite.

Or stubbing your toe.

Or stubbing your toe. Whatever is your favorite feeling. Feeling ecstatic at a football game, feeling drunk when you’ve had too much to drink. All of that is caused by variable rates of neuron firings in the brain or some other such neurobiological phenomenon, we don’t know in detail what. Okay, that’s principle number one. Brains cause minds. All of our mental life is causally explained by the behavior of neuronal systems.

The second principle is just as important: the mental reality which is caused by the neurobiological phenomena is not a separate substance that’s squirted out. It isn’t some kind of juice that’s squirted out by the neurons. It’s just the state that the system is in. That is to say, the behavior of the microelements causes a feature of the entire system at a macro level, even though the system is made up entirely of those elements that cause the higher level behavior. Now that’s hard for most people to grasp, that you can accept both that the relation between the brain and the mind is causal, and that the mind is just a feature of the brain. But if you think about it, nature is full of stuff like that.

PANFLICK:

Yes, well. The man who depends on specialists may end up safe and sorry at the same time. Or so my synapses tell me. I can feel them at work as I speak. However they are not firing on all cylinders.

Causes all mental life? Indeed. How does he know? I am smiling but have not broken out into peals of laughter.

That said I quite believe with, my friend Nietzsche, that mind and body are one and that Descartes is out.

SEARLE:

Philosophy is, in part, the name for a whole lot of subject matters that we really don’t know how to settle the issues in, where we don’t have established methods for resolving questions. Now for me that’s part of the fun, it’s wide open. You’re not hemmed in, you’re not trapped in a narrow little research program. But a lot of people find that uncomfortable, that you can’t fall back on an established body of philosophical truths. Okay, now you have this wide-open area, but as soon as we can get a question into a precise enough form that it admits of a systematic answer that everybody can see is right, we quit calling it philosophy. We call it science or mathematics or logic. And that’s happened in a whole lot of questions. That happened to the problem of life. So at one time: How can inert matter be alive? That was a philosophical issue. Now it’s very hard for us to remind ourselves how important that was. We can’t recover the intensity with which our great-grandparents fought that question. Now we know how it works. And this, I think, will happen to the problem of consciousness. We will get a way of resolving it as a scientific question. This has a funny result for philosophers, namely, this is why science is always “right” and philosophy is always “wrong,” because as soon as we’re convinced that it’s right we quit calling it philosophy and call it science.

PANFLICK: Sort of like putting beef into a meat grinder and getting a burger. Yes, well, I quite like the notion that philosophy has to do with what you cannot pin down. Rather like theology dealing with what you cannot know. I’m liking this Searle.

SEARLE:

You just have to avoid saying things that are obviously false. And you’d be surprised how many famous philosophers say things that are obviously false. I mean, Berkeley says the material world doesn’t exist, it’s all just ideas. A lot of contemporary philosophers say the mind doesn’t really exist, it’s just a computer program or it’s a way we have of looking at things. Consciousness doesn’t really exist, it’s just a certain type of computer program. I would say, if you can proceed rigorously, you have an open mind, and you avoid making obvious mistakes, avoid saying things that are obviously false, well, I don’t guarantee you a successful career in philosophy, but you’re off and running. I mean, you’re doing better than a lot of famous people.

PANFLICK:

I like him better and better. Rigor. That speaks to me. I am one of the few persons extant who actually has time to practice rigor. To do so effectively requires overcoming a fear of mortis and this of course leads to the abolition of the car. It is always salient to come across a like mind.

SEARLE:

I use computers every day. I couldn’t do my work without computers. But the computer does a model or a simulation of a process. And a computer simulation of a mind is about like computer simulation of digestion. I don’t know why people make this dumb mistake. You see, if we made a perfect computer simulation of digestion, nobody would think, “Well, let’s run out and buy a pizza and stuff it in the computer.” It’s a model, it’s a picture of digestion. It shows you the formal structure of how it works, it doesn’t actually digest anything! That’s what it is with the things that a computer does for anything. A computer model of what it’s like to fall in love or read a novel or get drunk doesn’t actually fall in love or read a novel or get drunk. It just does a picture or model of that.

PANFLICK:

Yes. Exactly. I could not have said it better myself. I would never think of feeding my computer, though I might strangle it on occasion. There is, however, one thing that computers can do that we human beings cannot, to our knowledge, do. Backups. Therefore, in my own cogitations, I have rather hoped that the Deity we cannot know has arranged a backup function for us as we pass through our material phase. We could then bring up different versions, times, er, relationships. Those of us who are already in our dotage are particularly affected as we might well prefer something a bit earlier.

SEARLE:

The Free Speech Movement, within its own initial objectives, was successful. We did change the university regulations so the kind of thing that was done to me as an assistant professor couldn’t be done after 1964, and I don’t believe it could be done today. I may be wrong about that but I don’t think so.

However, two other things happened that really we couldn’t have predicted and they were not so fortunate. One is, we created a whole lot of radical expectations. This is characteristic of revolutionary movements; people involved get a sense of enormous possibility. “All kinds of exciting things are going to happen, we can create a new kind of a university. We can create a new kind of a society. It’s all going to start right here in Berkeley.” That’s one thing that happened: we created unreasonable expectations about what could be achieved by a student movement of this sort. And a lot of people wanted to keep going after the FSM because we had this marvelous student movement here, we’ve got all this energy and idealism. It’s very hard after you’ve had the heady and exhilarating triumph of overthrowing the university administration to then go back to your classes and start doing homework, taking notes, and writing term papers. A lot of people found that very hard.

The second thing that happened was an issue came up that really made it impossible to carry on a normal civil life in the United States, and that was the Vietnam War. By the late sixties, from ’66 afterwards, it became progressively more difficult to run the university in the face of the amount of protest that went on against the Vietnam War. So the FSM, by providing an example of successful student protest, created imitators all over the United States, and it was possible for a lot of people to have the illusion that, well, we have created a national student movement, and this national student movement is going to have an enormous change, an enormous effect on the process of change in American life, beginning with the Vietnam War.

I mentioned two things; actually there was a third thing that happened, and that is the set of totally dreadful vulgarizations of culture that occurred under the general name of “the sixties.” In the sixties, people had a whole lot of really quite stupid theories about life. They thought, you get immediate gratification through drugs, and indeed if you can’t get immediate gratification through drugs then you get it through some other equally instantaneous form of gratification. The idea that satisfactions in life normally take a lot of work, you have to do years of preparation to do anything worthwhile, in the sixties it was very hard to convince people of that.

PANFLICK:

Yes, again. The sixties were not about any of this stuff initially. We were engaged in something that Searle does not refer to.

Berkeley did breed untoward enthusiasm and a secular self-righteousness that was positively noxious. But behind it there lies a certain harmless passivity that must come from being in California, if one ventures to suggest a cause and effect that, while the thought may originate in the brain, refers to a pervasive and debilitating external phenomenon. A penumbra if you will.

“Abba’s Way” is a response to these words of Jacques Deridda, “We need the unprecedented; otherwise there will be nothing, pure repetition.”

Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language — The Entire Book Digested Online in Nested Form READ IT HERE