Professor John Searle : Consciousness as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology

Professor John Searle (Willis S and Marion Slusser Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California, Berkeley) gave a public lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Professor programme.

[ryaadrqaad]

I highly appreciated what prof. John said in his interesting lecture in the philosophy of consciousness. I am a former lecturer in the department of philosophy Basrah University in Iraq.Thank you Prof.John again.

[osks]

“That’s the whole problem with science - you’ve got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder” - Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes, the 6-year old philosopher…
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries” - Robert Jastrow, God And The Astronomers

[youmothershouldknow]

Fantastic lecture. Ideally, YouTube should get filled up with stuff like this.

[drunkenlizard]

For me, in between many, greatest virtue of Searle is that he can verbalize, clearly, directly, exactly, shortly, what he wants to say. Simple as it is, and frequent, we all know that is something we all lack, and long for, as well as most philosophers.

[HollowInn]

For the same reasons there is no science of ethics, of law/justice, of story telling, raising children, mentoring, teaching, discourse, logic, etc.. there is no science of consciousness. Science is a 3rd person perspective of the world while consciousness is a 1st person perspective. It would be a paradox to explain a first person experience, in 3rd person. That would be telling you that you are in pain regardless of your experience of being in pain or not. I do not have the authority nor the experience of your experience to say you are in pain. It's absurd. In the same way, it is absurd to let a 3rd person perspective explain a phenomenon it has no access to. All science is doing is playing ping pong with an invisible player (the influence/reaction consciousness has in contact with the world).

[sherlockholmeslives.]

He seems quite knowledgeable this man, John Searle.

[cariboux]

Wow! All the Searle lectures available on YouTube. What a dream! Thank you for posting this!

[SadhuNada]

I like this guy.. He's funny and he makes some great points.. My only issue is that he keeps saying that consciousness is caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and even says it's a fact, but in another part of his talk he admits that we don't really know how that process works, which is to say that it's not a proven fact. It might be a fact. But I think we need to be very careful not to call something a fact until it's actually proven. He does talk about correlates, which suggest that consciousness may be caused by the brain, but that only gives us a very good hypothesis... not a proven fact. The jury is still out on this one.

[mathadventuress]

0:03 im sorry, did he say his name is son goku?

[abhishekshah]

Something just doesn't fit well with Searle's explanation of the MB problem. On one hand, he advocates that computational mind cannot have a true understanding of anything. On the other hand he says that mind/consciousness is generated by a person's neurology. While this is a causally sufficient case, I don't understand why does it imply, according to him, that consciousness is a function of the brain. If it is, then it well should be equivalent to the computational mind, hence, no brain can ever have a true understanding of anything. My take on this is that while neural correlates are correlations, they cannot be in principle, explanations regarding the phenomenological property of consciousness. There is nothing about consciousness that screams neural correlates, except brain imaging. Experience has content that is only accessible to one observer. Till people acknowledge that, the problem will remain intractable.

[truthseeker]

26:10 "You can make epistemic objective claims about observer relative phenomena, even though the phenomena has an element of ontological subjectivity " - I disagree I say you are making epistemic objective claims about an observer's report on his experience of relative phenomena ... not of the relative phenomena itself. ...the relative phenomena itself is not accessible to the person making the epistemic objective claim. Suggesting he does have access, is to smuggle in his own ontological subjective experience with the phenomena into his epistemic claim.

Thus you cannot distinguish between a conscious agent's report on his experience of relative phenomena and that of a philosophical zombie's, and neither that of an AI. This gives me no reason to believe a human' and a potential advanced AI 's consciousness has to be of a different class.

[ryaadrqaad]

Thank you very much for this interesting lecture in the philosophy of consciousness. I highly appreciated that.

[recreatinggg]

Does anyone know some good schools that are doing research in consciousness? I am a prospective PhD student in Psychology and want to study neuroscience/consciousness while integrating psychology and "spirituality, " with the science! Thank you in advance!!

[uncljoedoc]

I like this guy because implicitly he states, tectonic plates exist even if we don't experience them. Also that other people exist is implicit in his thought. That is very advanced.

[IKnowNeonLights]

Up to a certain period in the world's history language has never permitted for itself as a structure to make possible a certain type of sentence. Such types of sentences make almost impossible for anyone to understand consciousness, and in fact even truly be conscious. The problems caused as a consequence of, are infinite, some of the most important ones regard to what is understood as empathy and apathy. Before such a certain period in history language would have never allowed for such types of sentences to be formulated and a as consequence make any sense.

The type of sentence is

Take any possible reference of an extreme negative which operates as a structure of many parts.... Then anyone being themselves as a structure which operates of many parts states and says this....

The X specific extreme negative highlighted as such which operates of many parts, (needs) to be destroyed now.

It is unbelievably scary how much this type of sentence highlights the language problem, which impedes anyone understanding consciousness and within many cases even be conscious. Such a problem, the language problem has implications to the incalculable level, especially in regards to science, specifically to engineering and architecture.

Before the ability to construct such sentences and understand them grammatically, language would have never allowed even the remote possibility of such sentences existing.

I truly stumbled upon it as a clear example when someone intentionally used a terrorist organisation as an X example of an extreme highlighted negative.

A clue rests upon this...

It might be useful to test underground train and tube drivers, during and after work in order to understand more the hallucination problem in regards to philosophy, science, and computer software, I would say read c.s carol instead but that is bit to much for most, although no one believes it to be so.

Copyright
©
Mir
April 4/2024

[justinslade]

pain behaviour can be faked therefore the pain isn't the same as the behaviour. But try feeling pain without the changed brain state! You can't, and that is a real difficulty for his argument that our consciousness has primary executive control. In fact, you can manipulate brain states using drugs or electricity and get all manner of weird effects on conscious experience that cannot be experienced independently of the external physical change. He needs to give an account of how that works.

[spasmenokaravi]

What does Mr. Searle have to say about the claims of Eden Alexander about consciousness?

[chriscroz]

Whenever I listen to Searle I can't help get the feeling that he is trying to gently insert a subject/object quality to consciousness experience itself---that there is an implicit "I" which he is suggesting, if not mentioning directly, that "feels what it is like to be in any particular state", rather than suggesting that consciousness is simply the feeling.  Even though he notes that consciousness is ontologically/epistemically subjective, he continues to use language that suggests an experience/experiencer dichotomy within that subjective state. I'll admit that this is likely an artifact of language but by his own definition this is not possible to assert, as well as a problem that leads to all sorts of recursion issues ("How do I know that I know that I know?", etc.).   

[Stillpoint]

I'm so damn grateful that got to do a semester at Cal in one of Searles classes. I would've taken more if I had had the opportunity.

[justinslade]

For all his beautiful delivery he doesn't note that that the important science he promotes is increasingly showing that the physical brain changes often occur before we are consciously aware of our having made a decision to move our arm. That means something! He also constantly uses 'existence' ontologically ambiguously himself. For anything to move matter it requires information - structured energy - which implies mass. Outside of relativistic physics, the mass/matter must exist, as in really. So where is our consciousness mass? You can't just pick and choose what science you appeal to.