PHL 240 H1 F - Persons, Minds and Bodies - Part II: Consciousness

Lecture 7: EMBODIMENT AND BIOLOGY

I. The Relevance of Life to the Mind-Body Problem and Consciousness
Contemporary discussions of the 'hard-problem of consciousness' tend to focus on features of
perceptual experience that can only be experienced from the first person point of view.
Some familiar examples include:

the redness of a red apple

the sound of a piece of music
the smell of freshly baked apple pie

Changing trends in our analysis of consciousness and the mind-body problem: Examples such as
these represent a methodological shift away from a certain facet of the way Descartes framed his
discussion of the mind-body problem. Namely, the issue is transformed from one centered on the
incorrigibility of one's capacity to think about oneself to facts about how being conscious allows us to
relate to the world through perception.
Methodological Question: How does biology bear on the hard problem as it is articulated by
philosophers like Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers? One answer that we have seen so far is that it
is irrelevant. Descartes certainly thought so and Chalmers probably would agree. Today we will look
at two different answers to this question that say that biology is deeply relevant.
II. John Searle's Biological Naturalism
III. Evan Thompson's Enactivism
These two views share much in common by way of answering the methodological question posed
above. Here are two important points of similarity worth considering before we get into the details of
each approach:
i. Individuating consciousness by looking at organisms

If we start from a more-or-less pre-theoretical point of view, we notice that all the things that we
are confident are conscious are organisms. If we're being computational cognitive scientists, we
might be curious about whether or not some computers are conscious, but at that point we have
already taken on a kind of theoretical attitude towards the question.

The point here is to look at things from the point of a view of common sense. From that
perspective, the only things we know are conscious are ourselves and probably other
organisms like us, with some gradient of indeterminacy that extends backwards down the
phylogenetic chain. When we pick out conscious things pre-theoretically, we pick out
things that are alive.

ii. A philosophical/methodological middle-path between dualism and materialism

According to Searle, dualism takes consciousness seriously as an ontological phenomenon but at the
cost of a plausible explanation as to how it fits into the world. By contrast, materialism correctly

claims that the universe is comprised of whatever physics tells us is ultimate but has no choice but to
eliminate or explain away consciousness (cf. Searle, p. 14).
Searle thinks that by thinking more carefully about how consciousness is causally realized by the
biological forms in which it seems to inhere, we can move beyond the metaphysical dispute between
dualists and physicalists/materialists (we'll get into the details of how this might go below).
II. John Searle's Biological Naturalism
Scientific Common Sense vs. Philosophical Dogmatism
Searle wants us to let go of our Cartesian heritage and take on a scientifically literate common sense
view about the nature of consciousness and its relation to the physical world, specifically, the brain.
By taking on such a point of view, he thinks that you will agree with him about the following points.
Four Important Points about the Nature of Consciousness: Conscious states are...
1.Qualitative: there is something it is like to be conscious of the world. This qualitative feel is
indexed to the objects that we are conscious of (see the 'familiar examples' above).
2. Ontologically Subjective: Conscious states with a qualitative feel on exist for human or animal
subjects. There are two different ways to read the subjective-objective distinction for Searle:
a. Epistemic: a feature of knowledge claims that purport to represent different types of facts.
b. Ontological: "Consciousness is ontologically subjective in the sense that it only exists
when experienced by a human or animal subject" (Searle, p. 3).

The point here is that what it is for consciousness to exist is intrinsically tied to an
experiencing subject with a point of a view on the world. Searle also emphasizes that
we can have epistemically objective knowledge of ontologically subjective
phenomenon. This makes a science of consciousness an epistemic possibility (woo!).

3. Unified: any part of your experience (your visual experience right now, say), is part of an overall
experience (comprised of your other sensory modalities and cognitive-emotional life), and are
experienced by you as such.
Note: 1-3 come as a package deal. "For a [mental] state to be qualitative in this sense implies that it is
subjective. For a state to be qualitative and subjective implies that it is part of a unified field of
qualitative subjectivity..." (Searle, p. 3).
What this means is that the world appears to us as qualitative precisely because we have a subjective,
first-personal point of view through and in virtue of which some of our mental states represent the
world as appearing thus and so. We perceive the world in different ways with different sensory
modalities and these cohere into a quasi-stable conscious field that is populated by sights, sounds,
smells and tastes, not to mention our cognitive lives.
4. Mostly Intentional: Most but not all conscious states are about something in the world. They
purport to represent the world as being a certain way. Intentionality has often been said to be the
'mark of the mental'. Searle disagrees with this because he thinks that there are 'undirected feelings'
like well-being or anxiety which do not represent the world as being in any particular way. Question:
are affective moods intentional?

Four Claims about how Consciousness fits with the Natural World
NW1. Consciousness is real: it cannot be eliminated or reduced. Why? Because in order to eliminate
or reduce X, X needs to be an apparent reality which is then explained way in terms of some Y which
is actual. Since consciousness has a subjective ontology, its appearance is sufficient for it to be real.
This is because, "...where the very existence of consciousness is in question we can't make the
appearance-reality distinction, because the appearance of the of the existence of consciousness is the
reality of its existence" (Searle, p. 5).
NW2. All conscious states are caused by low-level brain states: there is a lot of empirical evidence
that this is true, but we also don't know how or why it is true.
NW3. Conscious states are realized as higher-level or system features of the brain: It takes a brain
working hard to produce a conscious experience. The lower level neurons are causally necessary (see
NW2), but the actual neural correlate of an experience is a feature of the brain system, not its
neurons.
NW4. Conscious mental states are causally efficacious: there are different types of causal stories we
can tell about how mental states work. We can tell an intention-in-action story which adverts to my
desire to raise my arm and the consequent movement or we can tell a neurally specific story that
doesn't advert to psychological properties like intentions.
Searle's point is that these two stories, "...are not separate causal structures; [they are] a single causal
structure described at different levels" (Searle, p. 6).
Summary: "The views I have advanced are, appropriately understood, matters of scientific common
sense in that they are, I believe what one would say if one had a modicum of scientific knowledge but
was free of traditional philosophical categories" (Searle, p. 7).
Task: Common sense and scientific literacy is a great place to start for building an intuitively
plausible view about the nature of conscious mental states. However, in order for the view to have
theoretical plausibility, it must be squared with a critical interlocutor who is not free of traditional
philosophical categories.
Four Objections to Biological Naturalism
O1. Consciousness cannot be both an ordinary biological process (materialism) and irreducibly
subjective (dualism).
R1. Yes it can. The incommensurability between physical and mental kinds is an artifact of how we
frame the question.

#
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Mental
Subjective
First person ontology
Qualitative
Intentional
Not spatially located
Not spatially extended
Not explainable by physical processes

Physical
Objective
Third person ontology
Quantitative
Non-Intentional
Spatially located
Spatially extended
Causally explainable by microphysical
processes

8.

Incapable of acting causally on the

physical

Acts causally and as a system is causally

closed

Searle thinks our conception of the 'Mental', necessarily includes 1-4 but that endorsing 1-4 does not
imply 5-8 (Searle, pp. 9-10). Our initial departure point of scientific literacy seems to suggest that
consciousness is in fact physical (5-8) in some relevant respect.
O2. Biological Naturalism entails epiphenomenalism. This is the view that all conscious mental
states are the causal bi-products of physical goings on (in the brain, say), but that consciousness
itself has no causal efficacy. Note, that epiphenomenalism entails a rejection of NW4.
R2. This is another carry-over from dualistic metaphysics. "No one in her right mind would say that
solidity is epiphenomenal on the grounds that it has a microphysical explanation. Exactly
analogously when you decide to raise your arm you can tell the story at the level of the intention and
the bodily movement but you could also tell the story at the micro level, the level of neuron firings..."
(Searle, p. 11). These are two ways of describing the same causal process at different levels of
description (cf. NW4).
O3. Biological naturalism is self-contradictory because causal reduction entails ontological reduction
(cf. Searle, p 11). This objection can be framed as a question: why doesn't causally reduction entail
ontological reduction?
R3. Searle says, "...in the case of solidity the fact that we can give a complete causal explanation of
solidity in terms of micro physical processes leads us to say that solidity is nothing but a certain sort
of microphysical phenomenon. Causal reduction leads to ontological reduction. But in the case of
consciousness we are unwilling to make the ontological reduction. Consciousness is entirely caused
by neuronal behavior, but all the same we are unwilling to say that consciousness nothing but
neuronal behavior" (Searle, p. 11).
Why?
Answer: Searle's answer is essential Nagel's. The idea is that causal reduction does not lead to
ontological reduction because the latter would involve re-defining the phenomenon under
investigation. Explaining a first-personal subjective ontological fact in third person terms would be
useless because any motivation for having the first-personal concept in the first place would
disappear (Searle, p. 12).
O4. The view is a species of dualism because mere causal realization means there are two things, the
brain processes (causes) and the conscious states that are realized by them (effects).
R4. Causation does not entail a relation between discrete events. There can be simultaneity in causal
relata.
In Searle's words: "...the causal explanation of why my brain is in its present state of consciousness is
in terms of, let us suppose, massive rates of synchronized neuron firings at synapses. But this does
not require that, first, the brain behave in a certain way and then, later, consciousness exists, rather
the conscious states are realized simultaneously with the neuron firings" (Searle, p. 14).
Question: What are the pre-theoretical facts that Searle relies on: neurocentrism and the idea that
there are no micro-minds?

A panpsychist would reject no micro-minds, having been convinced of the dualistic framework
that Searle rejects, thus positing basic mental constituents as fundamental properties of the
world in order to respect irreducibility and keep the metaphysics consistent.

Enactivists will reject neurocentrism for reasons we will now explore.

III. The Enactive Approach to Experience

The enactive approach to experience represents an alternative way of trying to carve a middle path
between dualism and materialism. Enactivism can be characterized in terms of its commitment to
the following five principles:
a. Living beings are autonomous agents. Organisms actively generate and maintain their own
self-world boundaries through metabolism. Their interactions with their environment cannot be
accurately captured simply in terms of causal sensory input and motor output.
b. The nervous system is an autonomous system. The brain does not compute information
but creates meaning in a dynamic and reciprocal way that is sensitive to sensory perturbations.
c. Cognition is a form of embodied action. 'Cognition' here is a catch-all term for mental
activity of any kind. The idea here is that our most basic form of contact with the world is a kind of
practical skill that allows us to cope with our environment and that this capacity is at the foundation
of all other kinds of mental activity.
d. The world is not pre-specified. The world we interact with is one that we partially construct
through interaction.
e. Experience is not epiphenomenal. Our experience of the world is deeply tied up with our
embodiment and our living body's biologically entangled relation to a meaningful world. Thus, it is
not a causally inefficacious bi-product of information processing in the brain but is at the centre of
our dynamic access to the world outside of our bodies.

The main upshot of these ideas that we need to think of in our consideration of Biological
Naturalism is the following: "According to the enactive approach, the human mind is embodied
in our entire organism and embedded in the world, and hence is not reducible to structures
inside the head" (Thompson, 408, emphasis mine).

This position amounts to a rejection of Searle's neurocentric reading of 'biological'. According to

enactive approach, the relevant scope of 'biological' in thinking about the nature of consciousness
must take account of the whole organism and its place in its environment, not just what is going
on in the skull.

More precisely, there are levels of self-world interaction that are relevant here:
1. Self-regulation: homeodynamic equilibrium, or the capacity to maintain balance in the face of an
often hostile world. This goes on at a cellular level and is a basic principle of sentience that
underwrites more specialized forms of self-world interaction in the brain and via specific sensory
modalities.
2. Sensorimotor coupling: This is the way that movement informs what shows up for us in
perception (more on this below in relation to ontological subjectivity)

3. Intersubjective interaction: The way that our interactions with other embodied selves conditions
our sense of being who we are.
Note: We are going to think about how 1-2 bear on the issue of getting more precise on two points
that arise out of our consideration of Searle's Biological Naturalism.
QI: What is the proper biological basis for the causal realization of consciousness?
AI: Searle thinks that it is the brain. Enactivism rejects this view. Why? Self-regulation is a
biologically basic process that facilitates sentience at a level of organization below the complexity of
the nervous system (think of cells).
The brain is sustained and integrated via the peripheral nervous system into the entire living body.
Focusing only on the brain at the expense of the entire self-regulating living body is too narrow.
QII: How and in what way does consciousness have a subjective (rather than objective) ontology?
AII: The mind-body problem is really the body-body problem. A proper specification of the mind
will necessarily advert to its embodiment and a proper specification of the physical basis of the mind
is a living organism.
"In the body-body problem, the gap is no longer between two radically different ontologies ("mental"
and "physical"), but between two types within one typology of embodiment (subjectively lived body
and living body). The gap is no longer absolute, because in order to formulate it we need to make
common reference to lie or living being" (Thompson, 409).
Embodied Subjectivity: touching and seeing work together to facilitate perception of the world.
Examples:
Touch - Picking up a hot cup of tea
Sight: Perspectival variation
IV. Conclusions and Outstanding Questions
We have now looked at two different approaches to integrating a philosophical conception of the
biological into our consideration of the mind-body problem and the nature of consciousness.
Some questions to consider moving forward:

What does it mean for consciousness to be a biological phenomenon (neurocentrism vs.

embodiment)

What is the proper biological basis for the causal realization of consciousness (a first-personal
subjective ontology)?
Are these biological approaches to the hard-problem satisfactory paths between the extremes of
materialism/physicalism and dualism?