Human consciousness is a mysterious thing. As you read this blog post, you’re thinking about the words, which you’re seeing on the screen. You’re conscious of both the meaning of the words, and of the experience of seeing them. You can feel your chair against your body (if you’re sitting down) and possibly a mouse or keyboard under your hand. Maybe you can hear music and smell dinner cooking.

Consciousness is a problem for the materialist types, because it’s not at all clear how our subjective experience of consciousness arises from the functioning of our brains. As John R. Searle points out in his book The Mystery of Consciousness, it’s clear that consciousness does arise from the workings of our brains, because damage to the brain has just a drastic effect on it. (See, for example, Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.) But it’s not clear how. Searle is certain that nothing more than brain function is involved; he’s equally certain that none of the currently popular accounts of how it might work actually hold water. In fact, he’s certain that they don’t.

Searle has written a number of books on more or less this topic, I gather; this one looks at both Searle’s views and the views of the proponents of each of the leading accounts of the subject, including where Searle thinks they fall short. The chapter on Daniel Dennett is especially interesting; Dennett thinks that the subjective experience we all have of being conscious is an illusion. We’re simply meat machines who do what we do for reasons that have nothing to do with our conscious thoughts and experiences, which don’t really exist anyway. Searle points out that you can’t experience an illusion without being conscious of the illusion; and regards Dennett’s views as pathological (which in my view they are). Other thinkers that Searle discusses include Francis Crick and Roger Penrose.

In my view, Searle (like so many others, in so many areas of endeavour) is good at seeing the problem, and perhaps not so good at seeing the solution. He’s right, I think, that none of the theories he discusses really get at the problem; the majority of them, in fact, work more or less by denying that consciousness is real. (To which I reply, you might be an unconscious meat-machine, brother, but I’m not.) Others attribute consciousness to anything that deals with information in any form, including thermostats and automobiles.

But I think Searle’s own views are too limited. He claims, many and many a time, that it is simply a biological fact that consciousness arises from brain processes; that it is purely biological in nature. And when discussing consciousness as we experience it, he mingles perception, memory, imagination, and conceptualization all into the same stew; which is to say, he denies the Aristotelian and Thomist distinction between the Sense and the Intellect.

Now, he’s clearly right that the Sense (perception, memory, and imagination) is in some way physically based; animals have Sense, in the Aristotelian meaning of the word. But the Intellect is an aspect of Man’s immortal soul, and dogs haven’t got one of those. But the Sense is a large portion of what he terms “consciousness”, and a good explanation of how the brain plays into it would be interesting, so more power to him. The trouble is, the methods of modern science might not avail to figure even that much of it out. Aristotle recognized four causes, of which I’ve spoken elsewhere; and the methods of science don’t cover all of them. If there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, there are even more that are undreamt of by the scientific method.

The book itself is both interesting and entertaining (I found it so, at least); and given that most of the chapters started life as book reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, it’s fairly accessible. Recommended.