The Rediscovery of the Mind

by John Rogers Searle

Book Overview

In this major new work, John Searle launches a formidable attack on current orthodoxies in the philosophy of mind. More than anything else, he argues, it is the neglect of consciousness that results in so much barrenness and sterility in psychology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science: there can be no study of mind that leaves out consciousness. What is going on in the brain is neurophysiological processes and consciousness and nothing more--no...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 026269154X
• ISBN13: 9780262691543
• Release Date: July 1992
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Excellent start point

I've found this book excellent as a start point for rethinking the way to study the brain and the mind. Searle states very clear the different aspects of his sketicism against the currently installed ideas and opens the path to a much more interesting way of thinking about the our brains and our mind. I recommend reading this book in order to start studying the amazing and interesting world of the mind and it also allowed me to research other books related to areas covered by Searle and shed more light in a yet young science and philosophy of the brain and mind.

Excellent Highly-Accessible Polemic

What a wonderful book! I had tried to access philosophy of mind through David Chalmers and Roger Penrose to no avail. Talk about arcane and inane philosophy! Then, I decided I might try something "lighter." What a difference Searle's dense, but clear, ideas make! This book is a great place to begin (or end) one's enquiring into the philosophy of mind, and a treasure trove of so much that is intuitive. So much in the field of conscious is counterintuitive that it is refreshing to read someone who subscribes to one's intuitive beliefs. First, like most philosophically-minded individuals, I like to think philosophy of the mind is not so arcane and inaccessible that we ordinary individuals can't get it, e.g., Penrose, Chalmers, et al. At least Searle treats the reader like educated adults without unnecessary obfuscation. Don't misunderstand me: This is dense reading, and hardly a sentence passes without something important being claimed. But, rather than being unintelligible, it is wholly intelligible. For example, Chalmers tries to explain supervenience over 40 pages, Searle explains in one paragraph. Not simple, but clear and unadulterated exposition. Second, some other readers must have omitted the Preface and First Chapter. This book is intentionally polemical; Searle makes it clear from the outset. He adamantly opposes some of the philosophical and psychological paradigms currently in cognitive science, and he addresses those problems in the first few chapters (and throughout the book). He opposes dualism and materialism of all sorts and admits that he is a "naive naturalist," whatever that is. His arguments are often contentious, as he admits up front. But as tendentious as he is -- there's a lot riding on the premises and conclusions of others, so in the end he has to highly contentious. Fortunately, he's also persuasive. Third, as a "naive materialist," Searle argues that the simultaneous firing of neurons and existent mental states (hence the phenomenon "consciousness" is irreducible to anything further) are causally interchangeable, because they are the same phenomenon. Ergo, consciousness is not epiphenomenally, nor occurrently, nor simultaneously, but epistemically, empirically, and ontologically foundational (each a different property of the same phenomenon). This is an important, and liberating, concept, forcefully argued throughout the book. What's inimical about all the other concepts Searle fights is their use of the homunuclus fallacy and their anthropomorphizing of physical processes. Fourth, he make the claim for a number of other intuitive, contra counterintuitive, claims. For example, the "unconscious" just does not make any sense. It almost seems like a contradiction, and according to Searle it is. As Gertrude Stein once said, "There's no there, there." Again, I've always thought this to be linguistically intuitive, now he makes a broad-based argument against its existence even morphologically (and several more things lik

A Polished Study

In this book, Searle briefly reviews the history of the mind-body problem and presents his solution to it. The text is less filled with archaic or strictly philosophical phrases than most books in this field, giving it a comprehensibility that is too often lacking in the mind-body problem. Searle is a brilliant rhetorician, and every one of his arguments is worded in a convincing way. Also, the critique that he presents of the previous work on the mind-body problem is revealing, since he gives what he calls "common-sense objections" to each solution. Overall, an outstanding book.

Plain-spoken and compellingly argued

Excellently written and argued, the author proceeds at a calm and steady pace, laying out the many flaws in past and current approaches to the 'mind'.More importantly, equally well layed out is the contruction of his own view of what he calls "biological naturalism". This view is neither a flavor of behaviorilism nor any other kind of reductionist attempt to deny consciousness. Indeed, consciousness retains it's unique position in his model without the kind of apologetic argument or mysticism (of the kind that usually occurs as a result of unwittingly thinking in the Cartesian dilemma mindset).Most shocking to me was the way in which Searle argued that the mind is not and cannot be an information processing system. As counterintuitive and remarkable as that may sound, it is quite apparently true after reading his arguments. He is not saying that we do not *think*, but rather that equating *thinking* and *information processing* is in error, primarily because the interpretation of symbols, syntax and semantics requires an outside intelligence to make the interpretation, so to say that we are information processing machines makes no sense for it is exactly our own intelligence that we are trying to explain. The devastating impact for AI and cognitive science from this viewpoint is also duly noted in a rather understated way.Likewise, the 'unconscious' loses it's imagined place as part of the mind, replaced with an equally (or perhaps moreso)complex 'Background' of non-conscious and potentially-conscious components. Also, so many activities of the brain that have been deemed as "mental" turn out to have no basis for such an ascription: it turns out they are anthropomorphisms placed on neurobiological processes that neither have intentionality nor mentality. As a result (my opinion), much of psychology and probably many theories of neurobiology are as wayward as their AI counterparts.In the end, the 'mind' that one is left with remains utterly rich and complex, with consciousness and all subjective experience intact and valid. However, now bereft of the possibility of computational models and rules and such to understand the brain in an abstracted programmatic way, and bereft of anthropomorphisms of lower-level brain functioning, we find that the brain is an organ - an organ of great ability and complexity that will require an immense effort to understand and appreciate.

Accessible and Convincing

Searle approaches philosophy with unusual clarity and thoughtfulness. This book is a convincingly argued account for a philosophy of the mind that is both naturalist and respectful of subjective phenomenal experiences.The importance of this book's themes is only overshadowed by the extraordinarily lucid style with which Searle approaches his subject matter. By taking actual human experience as his starting point, Searle's argument gains force as well as meaning to less philosphically inclined readers. Searle has a knack for making complex issues in recent philosophy accessible to the less experienced reader while not losing any persuasiveness in conveying his argument. This book is a wonderful introduction to the philosophy of consciousness for anyone who has not done extensive work in the field and also a complex and intriguing argument that needs to be considered by the most serious philosophers.