Volume 46, Number 10 · June 10, 1999
Can We Ever Understand Consciousness?
By Colin McGinn
Mind, Language, and Society:Philosophy in the Real World
by John R. Searle
Basic Books, 175 pp., $21.00
On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997
by Paul M. Churchland, by Patricia S. Churchland
Bradford/MIT Press, 349 pp., $30.00
Consciousness is hard to miss but easy to avoid, theoretically speaking. Nothing could be more present to you than your current state of consciousness—all those vivid sensations, pressing thoughts, indomitable urges. But it has proved only too easy for theorists of mind to turn a blind eye to what gives them a sense of sight to start with. Thus for most of the century consciousness has been comparable to sex in Victorian England: everyone knew it was there, throbbing away, but it was not a fit subject for polite conversation, or candid investigation. With the rise of behaviorism, in both philosophy and psychology, consciousness was deemed the 'ghost in the machine,' an ethereal legacy of Cartesianism that could be neither observed nor measured, a purely private realm of no conceivable relevance to objective science.
Review, 6047 words
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