To the Editor:
John Searle and I have a deep disagreement about how to study the mind. For Searle, it is all really quite simple. There are these bedrock, time-tested intuitions we all have about consciousness, and any theory that challenges them is just preposterous. I, on the contrary, think that the persistent problem of consciousness is going to remain a mystery until we find some such dead obvious intuition and show that, in spite of first appearances, it is false! One of us is dead wrong, and the stakes are high. Searle sees my position as “a form of intellectual pathology”; no one should be surprised to learn that the feeling is mutual. Searle has tradition on his side. My view is remarkably counterintuitive at first, as he says. But his view has some problems, too, which emerge only after some rather subtle analysis. Now how do we proceed? We each try to mount arguments to demonstrate our case and show the other side is wrong.
For my part, knowing that I had to move a huge weight of traditional opinion, I tried something indirect: I deliberately postponed addressing the big fat philosophical questions until I could build up quite an elaborate theory on which to found an alternative perspective—only then did I try to show the readers how they could live with its counterintuitive implications after all. Searle doesn’t like this strategy of mine; he accuses me of lack of candor and detects “a certain evasiveness” about the early chapters, since “he conceals what he really thinks.” Nonsense. I went out of my way at the beginning to address this very issue (my little parable of the madman who says there are no animals, pp. 43–45), warning the reader of what was to come. No cards up my sleeve, but watch out—I’m coming after some of your most deeply cherished intuitions.
For his part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain; he has just presented the basic thought experiment over and over again. I just went back and counted: I am dismayed to discover that no less than seven of those published criticisms are by me (in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993). Searle debated me furiously in the pages of the NYRB back in 1982, when Douglas Hofstadter and I first exposed the cute tricks that make the Chinese Room “work.” That was the last time Searle addressed any of my specific criticisms until now. Now he trots out the Chinese Room yet one more time and has the audacity to ask “Now why does Dennett not face the actual argument as I have stated it? Why does he not tell us which of the three premises he rejects in the Chinese Room Argument?” Well, because I have already done so, in great detail, in several of the articles he has never deigned to answer. For instance, in “Fast Thinking” (way back in The Intentional Stance, 1987) I explicitly quoted his entire three premise argument and showed exactly why all three of them are false, when given the interpretation they need for the argument to go through! Why didn’t I repeat that 1987 article in my 1991 book? Because, unlike Searle, I had gone on to other things. I did, however, cite my 1987 article prominently in a footnote (p. 436), and noted that Searle’s only response to it had been simply to declare, without argument, that the points offered there were irrelevant. The pattern continues; now he both ignores that challenge and goes on to misrepresent the further criticisms of the Chinese Room that I offered in the book under review, but perhaps he has forgotten what I actually wrote in the four years it has taken him to write his review.
But enough about the Chinese Room. What do I have to offer on my side? I have my candidate for the fatally false intuition, and it is indeed the very intuition Searle invites the reader to share with him, the conviction that we know what we’re talking about when we talk about that feeling—you know, the feeling of pain that is the effect of the stimulus and the cause of the dispositions to react—the quale, the “intrinsic” content of the subjective state. How could anyone deny that!? Just watch—but you have to pay close attention. I develop my destructive arguments against this intuition by showing how an objective science of consciousness is possible after all, and how Searle’s proposed “first-person” alternative leads to self-contradiction and paradox at every turning. This is the “deepest mistake” in my book, according to Searle, and he sets out to “expose” it. The trouble is that the objective scientific method I describe (under the alarming name of heterophenomenology) is nothing I invented; it is in fact exactly the method tacitly endorsed and relied upon by every scientist working on consciousness, including Crick, Edelman, and Rosenfield. They have no truck with Searle’s “intrinsic” content and “ontological subjectivity”; they know better.
Searle brings this out amusingly in his own essay. He heaps praise on Gerald Edelman’s neuroscientific theory of consciousness, but points out at the end that it has a minor problem—it isn’t about consciousness! “So the mystery remains.” Edelman’s theory is not about Searle’s brand of consciousness, that’s for sure. No scientific theory could be. But Edelman’s theory is about consciousness, and has some good points to make. (The points of Edelman’s that Searle admiringly recounts are not really the original part of Edelman’s theory—they are more or less taken for granted by everyone working on the topic, though Edelman is right to emphasize them. If Searle had read me in the field he would realize that.) Edelman supports his theory with computer simulations such as Darwin III, which Searle carefully describes as “Weak AI.” But in fact Edelman has insisted to me, correctly, that his robot exhibits intentionality as real as any on the planet—it’s just artificial intentionality, and none the worse for that. Edelman got off on the wrong foot by buying Searle’s Chinese Room for a while, but by now I think he’s seen the light. GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned AI—the agent-as-walking-encyclopedia) is dead, but Strong AI is not dead; computational neuroscience is a brand of it. Crick’s doing it; Edelman’s doing it; the Churchlands are doing it, I’m doing it, and so are hundreds of others.
Not Searle. Searle doesn’t have a program of research. He has a set of home truths to defend. They land him in paradox after paradox, but so long as he doesn’t address the critics who point this out, who’ll ever know? For a detailed analysis of the embarrassments in Searle’s position, see my review of The Rediscovery of the Mind, in Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 193–205, April 1993. It recounts case after case of Searle ignoring or misrepresenting his critics, and invites him to dispell the strong impression that this has been deliberate on his part. Searle’s essay in these pages is his only response to that invitation, confirming once again the pattern, as readers familiar with the literature will realize. There is not room in these pages for Searle to repair fifteen years of disregard, so no one should expect him to make good here, but if he would be so kind as to tell us where and when he intends to respond to his critics with the attention and accuracy they deserve, we will know when to resume paying attention to his claims.
Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts
John Searle replies:
In spite of its strident tone, I am grateful for Daniel Dennett’s response to my review because it enables me to make the differences between us crystal clear. I think we all really have conscious states. To remind everyone of this fact I asked my readers to perform the small experiment of pinching the left forearm with the right hand to produce a small pain. The pain has a certain sort of qualitative feeling to it, and such qualitative feelings are typical of the various sorts of conscious events that form the content of our waking and dreaming lives. To make explicit the differences between conscious events and, for example, mountains and molecules, I said consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology. By that I mean that conscious states only exist when experienced by a subject and they exist only from the first-person point of view of that subject.
Such events are the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain. In my account of consciousness I start with the data; Dennett denies the existence of the data. To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies.
I think most readers, when first told this, would assume that I must be misunderstanding him. Surely no sane person could deny the existence of feelings. But in his reply he makes it clear that I have understood him exactly. He says, “How could anyone deny that!? Just watch…”
I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain. How does he think he can, so to speak, get away with this? At this point in the argument his letter misrepresents the nature of the issues. He writes that the disagreement between us is about rival “intuitions,” that it is between my “time-tested intuitions” defending “traditional opinion” against his more up-to-date intuitions, and that he and I “have a deep disagreement about how to study the mind.” But the disagreement is not about intuitions and it is not about how to study the mind. It is not about methodology. It is about the existence of the object of study in the first place. An intuition in his sense is just something one feels inclined to believe, and such intuitions often turn out to be false. For example, people have intuitions about space and time that have been refuted by relativity theory in physics. In my review, I gave an example of an intuition about consciousness that has been refuted by neurobiology: the commonsense intuition that our pain in the arm is actually located in the physical space of the arm. But the very existence of my conscious states is not similarly a matter for my intuitions. The refutable intuitions I mentioned require a distinction between how things seem to me and how they really are, a distinction between appearance and reality. But where the existence of conscious states is concerned, you can’t make the distinction between appearance and reality, because the existence of the appearance is the reality in question. If it consciously seems to me that I am conscious, then I am conscious. It is not a matter of “intuitions,” of something I feel inclined to say. Nor is it a matter of methodology. Rather it is just a plain fact about me—and every other normal human being—that we have sensations and other sorts of conscious states.
