The Reith Lectures

Brains cause minds

George Szamuely

There is no 'doubt about it. Philosophy attracts the macho type. There is something vigorously masculine about clearing your throat in the middle of a discussion and, having thus silenced the participants, proceeding to point out that both the premises and the terms of refer- ence of the debate in question are quite inadequate, that, indeed, far from there being any real disagreement, the protagon- ists' respective positions have more in common with one another than either has with the truth. Philosophers usually have two favourite tricks. They either claim that the truth is right in front of our noses and it is only blindness or self-interest that pre- vents us from seeing it, or they claim that the truth is in front of our noses but it is the reckless pursuit of that truth that prevents us from seeing it. For philosophers, by and large, come in two categories: those who hold that philosophy is where it's at and those who hold that the everyday world is where it's at. What both types have in common is their belief that it is they, the philosophers, who are uniquely qualified in affording us these two profound insights.

This year's Reith lecturer, John Searle, has been clearing his throat pretty loudly and he is certainly very macho. With his John Wayne-like drawl he laid down his credentials straight away by announcing that the `mind-body problem had a rather simple solution'. So why have we not succeeded in solving it? Well, 'we persist in talking about a 20th-century problem in an outmoded 17th-century vocabulary'. Where have we heard this one before?

Although it is true that almost every philosopher has claimed that he has just solved some perennial intellectual prob- lem, I will venture to say that in this case I found Searle's solution quite convincing. What he seems to be arguing is that there is no point in going on scratching our heads and repeatedly asking: 'But how is it possible for one kind of thing called thoughts to refer to, understand and act upon a quite different kind of thing called matter?' All we have to do is to try and grasp the fact that the brain, this 'grey and white, oatmeal-textured substance', is the sort of stuff that gives rise to conscious- ness. Don't ask him how — address your questions elsewhere. The point is that books, tables, chairs, doors, windows and other examples of matter are unable to do this. The brain can and does. And that's all there is to it. Not that consciousness is all that exciting when you come to think of it — particularly so in the light of the enormous claims made on its behalf (the moving force of the universe no less!). After all, its olfactory capabilities are ludicrous, its range of hearing limited, and I swear that each time I trip over my cat in the dark I aim a good kick at him since I am sure that he obstructed my path de- liberately.

But Searle's argument is clever because he does not wish to suggest, as he might appear to do, that the only reality in this world is material and the rest (thoughts, emotions, moods, beliefs) are just a 'froth on the wave', mistakenly and sadly con- vinced that it is they who are pulling the wave along. Searle does not doubt that subjective mental states exist, that the mind represents the world to itself and that the mind can make things happen. Merely, he believes that these are the properties that characterise what we call the mind. Were there to be any other traits then we would not call it the mind. Philosophy leaves the world exactly as it is, as Wittgen- stein put it.

Now, to any mental act of whatever character, there corresponds a chemical reaction in the brain. But when we talk about our thoughts or our hopes or our feelings, we do not refer to molecules or neurons or synapses, we just describe what is going on in our heads as we speak. And it is only in terms of intentions, beliefs, fears, expectations and so on that we understand one another. Were I to talk about the stimulus patterns and neurophy- siological effects that corresponded to each of these (were it even possible to do so) you wouldn't have a clue what I was on about. But the reason Searle makes such a meal of this point throughout these lec- tures is that he belongs to a category of philosophers who believe that what the man on the Clapham omnibus would understand by understanding would be OK but only so long as he stopped listening to people on the wireless who tell him other- wise.

What these clever chappies try to per- `You're not quite as boring as you were now that I'm drunk.' suade him of is that his mind is a terribly complicated affair resembling more the latest high-powered model being turned out on the assembly lines of IBM than the bundle of banal aphorisms traditionally associated with him. (I have never really understood why philosophers idolise him.) My view is that if people want to say that the brain is like a computer then let them say it — it's a free country.

But Searle points out other lamentable instances of great thinkers getting carried away by their metaphors: there was Leib- niz who said that the brain was like a mill, Freud that it was like a hydraulic system, Sherrington a telegraph system and some other old codger whose name escapes me a telephone switchboard. And Searle? He's above that sort of thing — brains are brains and minds are minds, there is one level of explanation appropriate to one and another level appropriate to the other. So what's the problem? Well, philosophers are always looking for some one explana- tion linking the one to the other. Philo- sophers are only human, and like the rest of us, they get over-enthusiastic about the technical geewizzery of their respective ages. The most recent catchphrase is 'in- formation processing'.

Because computers go in for this and presumably human beings as well, some bright spark got the idea that what we are doing, both men and machines, must be about the same sort of thing. Well, that's all right by me. I really cannot see why Searle is getting so hot under the collar about this. According to him, the crucial difference is that we know when we think whereas they don't, and, moreover, we know what constitutes thinking and they don't. Rather pompously he argues: 'Frog.' the fact that I do information processing when I think and the fact that the computer does information processing — even in- formation processing which may simulate the formal features of thinking it . . . doesn't follow that there is anything psychologically relevant about the compu- ter programme.' The point Searle is making is that we do not need anything more than we have at present to help explain how the mind works in practice'. But the amount that We

do not know about the brain is infinite. And although brains undoubtedly cause

minds there is no way that the neurophy-

siological processes going on, in the brain can be correlated with the truly illimitable possibilities of the mind. Searle spelled this

out most clearly at the start of his third lecture: 'We have commonsense explana-

tions of people's behaviour in mental terms, in terms of their wishes, desires . • • and so on. And we suppose there must also be a neurophysiological sort of behaviour

in terms of processes in their brains. Now that leaves us apparently with a gap be"

tween the brain and the mind. Up to the

present time . . . [all] the gap-filling efforts have been failures. All the gar filling efforts fail because there isn't any gap to fill.'

Searle's friend on that South London vehicle will be at home (or if not he ought to be) with the account of free will that was given in his lectures. We cannot, argues Searle, give up our conviction that our acts are free even when confronted with irre- futable scientific evidence that every aspect of our behaviour is determined by the physical forces operating on the particles which constitute our bodies, Why?

'For reasons that I don't really under- stand' he declares with unbecoming mod- esty, 'evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom . . . is built into the very structure of conscious human be- haviour'. In other words, whatever we do — even walking across a room at gunpoint — we cannot help knowing that we could do otherwise. Man is condemned to be free, as Sartre would put it, though, as he perhaps would not put it, science tells us something different. In fact, Searle's lectures have turned out to he little more than the reiteration of this point. Human behaviour must be under- stood in commonsense terms; we must not look for laws that are supposed to govern human actions in the same way that natural laws govern nature; explanations must always refer to the intention in the minds of those undertaking to act; the natural sciences are not like the social sciences; social phenomena are defined by what people think about them, and something again about there being no strict correla- tion between mental states and brain-state types because any social institution can take an indefinite number of physical forms and thus give rise to an infinite range of stimulus effects on the nervous system. (This fact prevents the possible emergence of strict laws of the social sciences.) And that was that. It was a pity that the idealist waffle of the later lecture was allowed to blunt the force of the first lecture. Brains cause minds and never the other way round — the one memorable phrase this year's Reith lectures will leave behind.