II.

'PHILOSOPHY - RIGOROUS SCIENCE OR INTUITIVE THOUGHT: A CRITIQUE OF MIND BY JOHN SEARLE' BY RICHARD SCHAIN Ever since its origins in the antique Hellenic world, philosophy has been bedeviled by a double identity - a search for meaning in human existence or a search for reliable knowledge of the world. The first approach will always be associated with Plato, of whom Alfred North Whitehead said that all subsequent philosophy was only a series of footnotes. The second is exemplified by Aristotle, who in the Middle Ages was regarded as 'The Philosopher.' To be sure, there are many overlaps of both aspects of philosophy in these two great figures of the antique world, but the relative emphasis in them is clear. In the twentieth century, this duality of philosophy was noted by the mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell in a comment that all philosophers were either inclined to science or to mysticism. Russell himself regarded intuitive aspects of philosophy as mysticism. There was no doubt where Russell's sympathies lay; he and other proponents of the analytic method in philosophy are responsible for the pejorative meaning now usually associated with the term 'mysticism.' The 'mystics' may be regarded as being predominant throughout most of the history of western philosophy when the latter was dominated by Christian dogma with its substructure of Platonic metaphysics. However, beginning with the Siecle des lumieres, then followed by the incredible scientific revolution of the past two centuries, philosophy has come to adopt the scientific world-view and even regard itself as a science. Most contemporary philosophers identify with Husserl's defining philosophy as 'rigorous science' (strenge Wissenschaft). William James once joked that if they dared, philosophers would wear white coats. The problem for scientific philosophy today is that the mind - which has been an essential focus of philosophical thought since Descartes - already has not one but two fields of science connected with it, neurology and psychology. The neurological sciences have taken giant steps in studying brain structures and relating them to mental processes. The psychological sciences have equally progressed by analyzing perception, cognition, and behavior and subjecting them to experimental study. What then is left for philosophy as science other than popularizing the scientific advances made by scientists in these fields? It is notable that the history of 'scientific' philosophy reveals that its domain has steadily diminished as astronomy, medicine, physics, and physiology matured into bona fide scientific specialties. The same has happened with psychology in the last century. John Searle is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley who has published extensively on the philosophy of mind. His most recent book on this topic proposes to provide a comprehensive review of the entire subject. The reader is immediately exposed to Searle's style when the author asserts at the beginning that 'all of the most famous and influential theories [on the mind] are false.' Searle later puts forth his own point of view that places subjective mental phenomena as part of nature but ontologically distinct from object phenomena. Searle reviews contemporary theories of mind from the perspective of philosophy as rigorous science. There are discussions of consciousness, intentionality, mental causation, free will, and the self. The last chapter is entitled 'Philosophy and the Scientific World-View.' He makes the following categorical statement: 'So if we are interested in reality and truth, there is really no

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such thing as "scientific reality" or "scientific truth." There are just the facts that we know. I cannot tell you how much confusion in philosophy has been generated by the failure to perceive these points.' Like the emotionless Detective Friday of the American television series Dragnet whose trademark saying was 'just the facts, ma'am, just the facts,' Searle wants just the facts. Of course, he is not alone in this viewpoint in contemporary academic philosophy; it is shared implicitly or explicitly by most analytically minded philosophers committed to the scientific world-view. In fact, Searle would have to be placed among the more open-minded academicians since he accepts concepts such as consciousness and the self as bona fide mental realities in their own right, not ontologically reducible to physical entities. He views the former 'as much as part of the natural world as is photosynthesis or digestion.' Searle does not want to be classified as a materialist or a dualist. Searle's approach reflects the pervasive influence of phenomenology in modern philosophy, although there is no mention of Husserl in his discussions. Consciousness is a real phenomenon; therefore it must be objectively described in its own right. In fact, Searle seems to be skirting dangerously close to dualism with his point of view. The mere fact that he views the brain as causally related to the mind does not obviate the fact that he accepts the latter as a realm ontologically distinct from the neuronal network of the brain. This sounds like Cartesian dualism with an unspecified relationship between the two ontological realms instead of the pineal gland performing this function. Still, Searle thinks of Descartes' ideas as a 'disaster' for philosophy, a common point of view among materialist philosophers. One might compare his formulation with that of Schopenhauer, who labeled Searle's mental 'first person ontology' as will and his object 'third person ontology' as representation [Wille und Vorstellung.] Of course they differ in that Schopenhauer was deeply pessimistic about the principle of individuation he called 'will' while Searle, as befits an unbiased proponent of 'biological naturalism' toward the mind, avoids value judgements either way. The phenomenology of Searle reveals itself in that he is not interested in the rich intuitive content of western philosophy that has characterized it ever since the era of Socrates. Plato is not even mentioned in this book described as an introduction to the philosophy of mind. Nor is Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Berdyaev, Whitehead, or Teilhard de Chardin. William James gets a passing comment. Presumably these are philosophers whose ideas about the mind do not meet the strictly factual criteria subscribed to by Searle. Not for him is the proclamation of Kierkegaard that 'truth is subjectivity' or Berdyaev's discovery of meaning in creativity. He uses the same approach in his 'first person ontology' as in his 'third person ontology.' The knowledge of subjectivity is just materialism pitched at a different level. When one reads Searle's book, it is possible to feel as Socrates is said to have felt when he came across the book of Anaxagoras on the mind. The story is recounted by Plato in the Phaedo. Socrates had heard that Anaxagoras taught that Mind [Nous] was the cause of all things. He expected to find the mind's ideas about the common good in Anaxagoras' writing. However, he was grievously disappointed because all he found was physical and physiological discussions but nothing about what he thought was important about the mind. After that, Socrates turned to his own mind in his search for wisdom. If one expects to find philosophical depth in Searle's book, he or she will be similarly disappointed. Philosophy as rigorous science is the only topic; there is no consideration of the mind's search for man's place in existence or of the

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wisdom that accrues from a higher type of mental activity. For the philosopher, the important thing about mind should be its content of creative thought not the mechanics of its operation. The latter can be left to scientists who are competent in these problems. Philosophy in this latter area will never be taken seriously by scientists anyway, since philosophers do not engage in the principal requirements of modern science - data collection, data analysis, and verification of hypotheses. Without these functions, philosophers can only perform as armchair theorists, relying on the discoveries of others to propound their theories and incapable of verifying them by scientific methods. The risk exists of philosophy again becoming a sterile scholasticism. However, philosophy is indispensable in the search for meaning in the world since meaning stems from the subjective element of existence, an element not explicable by scientific investigation. The sciences may provide useful metaphors in this search but the mind thinking creatively is the only source of meaning in human existence. Profound philosophy about the mind existed prior to modern science. Another way of expressing this dichotomy is to recognize the universal metaphysical need of human beings as distinct from their need to objectivize existence. This need has been historically gratified by religions; thus Schopenhauer thought of religion as 'the metaphysics of the people.' Schopenhauer, who was an elitist of the first order, believed that philosophy should perform this role for those of greater intellectual capacity. However one may view Schopenhauer's prejudices, he is correct in thinking the metaphysical need is properly satisfied in unfettered philosophic activity. Man has been referred to as the animal metaphysicum and philosophy is metaphysics. These concepts require valuation of the mysteriously rational, mysteriously mystical human mind above mere phenomenological analysis. (c) Richard Schain 2005 E-mail: rjschain@lycos.com Web site: http://rschain1.tripod.com/index.html Mind: A Brief Introduction by John R. Searle Hardcover 336 pages Oxford University Press 2004 ISBN: 0195157338

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I. 'MIND, BODY AND PERSONAL IDENTITY' BY JAMES MARTIN 'Philosophy has always gone astray by giving the name of "I" to the most unlikely things but never to the thing you can call "I" in your daily life.' -- Jose' Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1995) ('In Search of Goethe from Within') Who am I? And who am I not? Why am I 'me'? What have I become? And what have I 'lost' in the process of attempting to define my 'being' in this interlude between our two eternities? How much of 'me' is 'pure thought', or worse yet: simply a physical response in origin and perhaps substance. Am I nothing more than an involuntary response? Gone mad. There is something exciting happening here. Something that grabs my thinking to enable an enthusiastic response. It's not academic. I am not here to examine what Descartes, Berkeley et al 'meant'. Although it seems I have spent an extraordinary time block with these 'great thinkers' of philosophy, religion and politics over my mature lifetime. Because of, and despite this fact, I would rather examine 'me' now, and then compare my own search for identity -comprising both mind and body with what 'they' (classic philosophers) have discovered or discerned on their own -- and in their own time. There are no real road maps or clues that can yield the elements of a 'personal identity' -- but, there is something here larger than our thinking, grander than formal education, more meaningful than the lives of our ancestors: Our Perceived Experience. That which is unique to our individual life. The one that is perceived. And examined. The one that cheers for itself. And suffers alone. And the one that struts and strains for a physical presence that preserves and pretends itself part of the whole. At odds with itself perhaps, the mind-body connection is Descartes legacy. But my child. The problem appears to lie in what makes 'identity' of one person in time -and through time. For me, 57 years of perceptions yields experience (and experience equals perception) -- events, both major and insignificant. From a remembered childhood, to the current hour of my life. Every experience has yielded some result or other -- a degree of satisfaction, a so-called success, periods of boredom, consistent disappointment, grief, sorrow -- and yes, longing. How generous I have been to myself in my own thinking! to elicit such responses in these thousands of clashes, arguments, resolutions or reconciliations -- with myself -- and those I loved over a lifetime, and those long forgotten even in the moment. Events in review, both locked and floating as charged memory cells, isolated in that part of the brain reserved for recall. Perception as remembrance. Intangible acts of thought -- dependent on physical processes. Or not. What is identity? Is it nothing more than the subtraction or addition of some conscious elements and labels of identity that precedes us -- and follow us, often thrown upon us by society that yields some definition, no matter how elusive it is manifested? No one seems to disagree with Samuel Butler who said, "everything is what it is and not another thing". I've been told the difficulty here is to know when we have one thing and not two. Let me begin: I was a husband once. For 31 years. We had two children. Now they are 30 and 26. The sense of 'identity' that motivated my actions it appears were

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institutional labels that became conscious relating. Marriage is an interesting concept. Society often demands it if we are to conceive and raise out children with some formal structure using the 'family' as it central focus. Yet, it doesn't take much research to realize half the marriages, more or less end in divorce. Dissolved is the idea that this institution (marriage) is mandated for life. A necessary perception. Does this mean our identity is locked up already, one predetermined set of outcomes after another? Universal in its application and resolve. It seems not only does the relation between mind (perception) and body (physical processes) compete for attention and relevance -- but that even our perceptions are not our own...where in fact, they belong to the necessity of 'man' to believe in his relevance and continuation. You might think that perhaps even 'perception' has an organic base, rooted in process and resolve. Why not? The body functions that mingle with the mind include learned responses of walking and movement, both required integrations dependent on the signals sent from the brain to the limbs and back again. Our perceptions are shaped by our mental experiences and the physical consequences; the ability to interpret them rests on our need to make 'sense' of our life in each stage of existence. Mid-life seems an appropriate time lime to meditate a while on the roles we have played throughout our life. Child, adolescent, adult, and finally at life's termination point. Oddly enough, the older we become, more often than not, we see our 'identity' comprised of monitoring a physical self and its eventual decline, as well as our perceptions of 'who we once were'. The relevance of such a definition is that we in fact are 'following' both our physical presence and at last, what was our most important 'thoughts' that comprised our belief system of perceptions over a lifetime. The Big Three responses to the problem of defining what 'me' is: Dualism, Materialism and Idealism -- each offers some sense of continuity 'after the fact': that is, from my own examination of my life, inside and out, I see myself in these linguistic labels. Am I the sum of my body and mind? Each taking a center stage to the understanding of the other. Body-mind, Mind-body. I call on one. One calls on me. I can control my thoughts. At least as I am conscious to think of thinking. But I react to the pain of an unknown throbbing in my chest. I think of my possible demise. The incomplete life not quite fulfilled. My mind and body are in perfect harmony, are they not? One relies on the other. Physical signals sent to my brain and resolved by my thoughts. And so it goes with the rest of my collection of organs. Each interdependent on the other. Oh! this body and its parts. What a wonder of biology. To be dissected, labeled, reissued, used again in transplants. A physical presence we hold preeminent. But without thinking about them, how do we know they really exist? Are their names or labels required to make them real? Two entities, the physical, and mental, separate but equal perhaps. The physical cannot be the mental. Or can the mental ever become the physical? Can mind and matter unite? as one. Or do they co-exist, each to be reacted to by the other. When I think a thought, does my body care? or is it simply 'listening'. And when I think a thought, is my body 'on alert' to the mind's orders of the day? It seems so. One can't live without the other, or at least the thought of a complete human being includes body and mind functioning in some harmony or a parched chaos. I suppose the

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very thought of mind-body relationship often wore out Descartes late at night; sleeping till noon was a requirement. Or, can I describe 'me' in terms of a materialistic self, that is, the body obviously exists in this state, but for the materialist, it appears that mental states are not separate from the body. Such is the view the world is entirely composed of matter. The Ancient Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus might say I consist of invisible and indivisible bits called 'atoms'. And much later (17th century), Hobbes' "Leviathan" captured the same notion in his long poem. That the laws of nature dictate our best being. Direct observation of nature might explain it all based of scientific knowledge -- not from a first philosophy of philosophic reasoning. Known also called 'physicalism', based on the laws of physics that matter resolves into forces and energy. I suppose for the physicist, matter and energy mix. But it doesn't answer (hopefully) the nature of the mind and its companion processes -- essentially consciousness. Of course, I remember the epigram I wrote: 'If we are but the charge between the cells, what have we lost and what can we gain?' -- from 'A Man's Life' James Martin (Four Seasons Press 1994) There is that possibility then. And what about consciousness? Nothing more than a physical state too? And what we think doesn't matter? Babbling idiots, us. Trapped in the body. Mind is body. Body is body. Very confusing existence I would say. For now, I must pass. However, I think I will drift to the third response for possible comfort and maybe a sense of security to house the 'me' I have come to think about. Idealistically speaking, of course. As I observe my life past, in the moment, and to its completion, I do so with the understanding my physical existence are the experiences I am left to conceive of -- all of which take place in my mind's view. So in retrospect, my perception is based on my perceptions of events. There is neither pain or pleasure in these associations, at least not at the moment. They (perceptions) simply 'were'. Yet, it seems to me there is a dilemma here too: how can we both aware of physical objects while it appears physical objects are independent of us, holding court in an external world outside our ability to create them? I mean, now what can we authentically perceive outside our internal senses. Of course, the argument becomes more dense with Locke's Representative Realism vs. Berkeley's notion that we can hold fast to the physical world itself and believing ideas are dependent on the mind. And what is 'real' through Idealism is a mind-construct. Hmm. That seems hard to prove otherwise, since it is impossible at this juncture to characterize a perception outside the medium of the mind. You have to admire a man like Berkeley. At least he can't be disproved. Yet. My-Oh-my. All these barriers toward a unifying theme of 'Identity'. Yet, when one considers Dualism, Materialism, and Idealism, are not each interdependent in a way that accounts for our viewing 'self' if not comprehensively, perhaps as best we can? all the time realizing , we do not create worlds, but find ourselves in one. Or do we? I'm not in Ohio anymore. My wife is dead. Two years this month. My Son flew back to Washington DC recently after a brief visit with me in Wisconsin. I see his Mother in him. Her conscious state lingers there. But so does mine...and

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all who passed his way, genetically, as well teachers, friends, and every influence ever recorded and absorbed. We (and they) are all there is seems. Identity is hopefully never stagnant, but perhaps transitory, migratory -- and finally, collective in its conscious-absorbing 'self'. And the desire to Love takes hold once again. It is the same inflection and the same song -- perhaps the same inflection with a new twist. Who would have thunk it? Yet 'what was' 'is'. In a odd and mysterious way, to love again, is to love always -- and also, to never stop loving. Its temporal object may physically change, but its necessity changes us. Even though the outcome is often in doubt. My daughter and her husband are six months pregnant -- the first in the next generation will be a girl. We are all there too as 'collective identity'. Yet, neither philosophy or poetry will answer us completely this time. But we hear their call, and eagerly move closer to what we cannot know -- with tears, laughter...and in awe of our very soul that it be known somehow. Someday. (c) James Martin 2002 E-mail: sheldonjamesmartin@hotmail.com

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I. 'SCIENCE AND THE MIND' BY D.R. KHASHABA "I think, therefore I am", said Descartes. Why "therefore"? As if my being could be in doubt and needed proof, whereas my being - and specifically my being as a self-conscious mind - is the most evident reality for myself. And if Descartes thought his Cogito proved more than the reality of the immediate awareness of our being, then the conclusion was not adequately grounded. But Descartes was not really interested in establishing that conclusion. He was using the Cogito as a model of the axiomatic evidence that should characterize all trustworthy reasoning. Yet that - the criterion of clear and distinct ideas as a test of truth - was nothing new; it had always been the standard proceeding of mathematics. What was new and what spread and seeped into the philosophical thought of the following centuries and vitiated it was the implied split between the I that thinks and the I that is, as if the thinking I were one thing and my being another. Whereas, as a knowing being, my knowing is my being and my being is my knowing. The split implicit in the Cogito was a twin to Descartes' explicit and better-advertised bifurcation of mind and body, and, in my view, was no less damaging. I hold that all the fruitless travail of modern philosophers with the quandaries of self-body, mind-brain, and the like, springs from our taking these distinctions for more than working fictions. To think, we have to break up a whole into distinct aspects - substance-attribute, subject-object, knower-known, etc. - but to take these aspects as having any reality apart from the whole is to be deluded and to fall into endless error. As if the Cartesian double-split between mind and body and between knower and object known were not bad enough, the British Empiricists thought that the objectively given is all we need to bother about. Rationalists and Empiricists thus unwittingly joined hands in perpetrating the mind-body problem which I see as a pseudo-problem. While Empiricists, if they concede to mind any kind of being at all, see it as an epiphenomenon that we can simply disregard, Rationalists having split the integral act of knowledge into knower and object known, forgetting their own edict of separation, try to see the knower as an object. Now neuroscientists, philosophers of mind, and psychologists are in a flurry looking for the mind (or consciousness or the soul or whatever). I believe they will continue to labour in vain so long as they fail to realize that our mind is our reality, and that it is a reality that is not amenable to study by the methods of the natural sciences. To speak of consciousness as a phenomenon is already to have gone astray. We can surely study the phenomena of consciousness by scientific methods, but the phenomena of consciousness are not consciousness. Consciousness gives rise to the phenomena of consciousness but transcends those phenomena. It is meaningless to ask, What is consciousness?, as if we could define consciousness in terms either of what is not consciousness or of the content of consciousness. It is meaningless to ask, What am I? [= what is a person?], for, except in a biographical intent, I am not definable in terms of the present content of my experience (let alone of my physical being) or in terms of what I was or what I will be: I am just this moment of living intelligence that utters the I. Those who speak of mind as a negligible epiphenomenon do so because they proceed from the presupposition that only what is objectively given is 'real'.

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But it is the nature of mind not to be an object: yet that makes it not less but more real, if we may be permitted to speak in this manner. That is why I insist that we have to make a radical distinction between the meaning of reality and existence. In my philosophy what exists (what is given) is not real, and what is real does not exist: but there is nothing existing that does not secure its existence in reality, and there is no reality that is not actualized in some manner of existence. These are two dimensions of being, without which nothing could be. (This condensed statement necessarily sounds enigmatic, but it is not intended to be paradoxical or to mystify; it only sounds enigmatic because in my terminology 'reality' and 'existence' have special senses which I find it necessary to distinguish.) So to the question, Can science solve the puzzle of consciousness?, my answer is, Science cannot. Does that mean that the puzzle will remain unsolved? No, for in fact there is no puzzle. Science creates the puzzle by trying to turn mind into what is not mind. Once we realize that mind is mind and nothing else, the problem vanishes. It is often asserted that the problem is a modern one, but I think it is the same problem that lay at the base of what Plato called the Battle of the Gods and the Giants, or of Idealists and Materialists. ('Sophist' 245e ff.) Idealists seek reality in the verities of the mind. Materialists think there is nothing beside what could be observed objectively. Jerry Fodor in a review of Joseph LeDoux's 'Synaptic Self' (Times Literary Supplement, May 17 2002) finds fault with LeDoux's work and with much current neuroscience in that "the models of the brain [they are] building are designed to implement a cognitive psychology that nobody with any sense has believed for decades." I think that the trouble goes much deeper. Fodor rightly maintains that the question, "What makes us what we are?", interpreted in terms of the philosophical problem of personal identity, "isn't one that it would be reasonable to expect brain science to answer." But are there any philosophical questions that brain science - or any science, including 'cognitive science' - can answer? Fodor suggests that the question: "What is going on in your brain when you think about what is going on in the world and decide what you are going to do about it?" is the "big question" that neuroscience should address. The question thus formulated may possibly outline a good - or the best - programme of research for that science. But that research, however fruitful, will not give us an answer to the parallel philosophical question: "What goes on in your mind when etc., etc.?" The answer to this latter question can only be in terms of ideas, not in terms of descriptions of observable and measurable phenomena and processes. The mind (consciousness) is not an object amenable to scientific study, but is a dimension of being that can only be understood by a philosophy that recognizes its radical difference from objective science. To express my position bluntly: I believe that thinking and neurological events pertain to two distinct and incommensurable dimensions of the one, whole, mind-body thing we call a person. Our subjective life is a reality not reducible to brain structure. No knowledge gained in neuroscience or in genetics, however great, can help advance our understanding of the mind or the human being any more than advances in, say, astrophysics can. All science deals with phenomena and processes extraneous to the quite distinct world of ideas, ideals and values that constitute the reality of the mind and the specifically human realm, which is the concern of philosophy.

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On the other hand, I think that what is wrong with cognitive science is that it hovers in a no-man's-land between philosophy and science. It can either be good as science, raising questions about observable phenomena and processes, or good as philosophy, raising questions about meanings and values, but by trying to be both it gets lost in a maze of insoluble riddles. Unless we recognize the radical distinction between philosophy and science, both our science and our philosophy will continue to suffer. What is the alternative to the vain attempt to get to the mind through the brain? Is it the view that the mind is a 'soul-stuff' of some sort? The trouble lies in the word 'stuff': however much we refine that stuff, as long as it is regarded as something objective, it will fare no better than the brain. Why don't we accept the simple solution that stares us in the face - that mind is in fact the reality we know best and most immediately? Or, as I would rather say, that mind is the only reality we know and that it cannot be reduced to anything else? And we lose nothing by this: we would still have our neuroscience that can go on progressing indefinitely and we would still have all the objective truths we have ever had or can ever have; only we shall have to acknowledge that these will never explain the mind any more than any facts can ever explain the colour of a single flower. We can perhaps say that brains become minds; or, to put it in a deservedly more flowery manner, brains flower into minds. But I will not say that brains generate minds. Brains become minds in a creative move, just as all becoming is creative, just as the coming into being of a sonnet or a symphony is a creative move. Earth and water and air and sun become a red rose, but the colour and the fragrance of the rose are realities in their own right and cannot be reduced to what went into their making. Shall we find the alternative in diving down into the ever receding depths of the constituents or the basic structure of the physical world till we reach a level where matter is no longer material but dissolves into mathematical equations and concepts? I would still say, No; for these would still be objective givennesses that will never yield the subjectivity of mind. Philosophers, baffled by the irreducible realities of the subjective sphere, invented the word 'qualia'. That was good as far as it went, as far as it was an acknowledgement of the reality of those realities. But then they went on to apply to qualia the same reductionist methods that they had been applying to mind, with the same result. The reality of mind will remain a mystery, just as Being will always remain an ultimate mystery; and the ideal content of our minds can be understood in terms of - and only in terms of - the ideas created by those very minds. (c) D. R. Khashaba 2002 E-mail: dkhashaba.hotmail.com Web site: http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com

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I. 'PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS' BY TONY FAHEY Abstract Whilst it is fair to say that since the seventeenth century philosophers such as Descartes, Hegel, Brentano, Husserl and Bergson, to name but a few, have dealt, in one way or another, with the issue of human consciousness, it can be argued that none have dealt adequately with the question of the origin of consciousness: how consciousness arises. In the prologue to his book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, the Dalai Lama suggests that where scientific discoveries expose weaknesses in long held traditional beliefs, these beliefs should be abandoned, and the scientific discoveries embraced.[1] Taking the view that a convergence of science and philosophy can lead to a greater understanding of consciousness, and to the dissolution of some of the more traditional views on this issue, this paper sets out to discuss the scientific view that consciousness is not some kind of mysterious entity that evades all forms of scientific analysis, but a 'biological phenomenon' that is the result of the evolution of human mental development. What is meant by 'consciousness? From the outset it is important to say that, in this paper, what is meant by consciousness is a particular state of subjective sentient awareness which, whilst species specific to human beings, is rarely recognised for what it is. Let me explain: very occasionally, perhaps in the quietness of morning, as we awake, we may, for a brief moment, experience the sensation of 'just being': the feeling that 'I am'. Almost immediately this experience passes as thoughts intrude to attach all kinds of appendages to it: 'I am late', 'I am hungry', 'I am a doctor' and so on. However, before these intrusions occur, in that fleeting moment, it is possible to enjoy the unique experience of what it is just to be. It is the contention of this paper that this state of awareness is an a priori mode of perception which is species specific to homo sapiens -- and which has developed through the evolution of mental development. John Searle supports this view when he describes consciousness as, ... the central fact of specifically human existence because without it all other specifically human aspects of our existence -- language, love, and so on -- would be impossible.[2] In a sense, this is a polemic against the Cartesian view that takes this a priori condition and attaches to it the predicate 'thinking', thus concluding that because 'I am thinking, therefore I am', not realising that thinking is not in itself being, but an activity which occurs as a consequence of being: to think, first one must be. To develop further the view that, without consciousness, all other aspects of being would be impossible, I would argue that there is a case to be made that thinking is a posteriori: it occurs as a result of empirical experience or sensory perception (one's potential to

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think is another thing altogether, and is associated with an innate instinct to structure language in an ordered fashion -- an issue addressed in the next section). In other words, in conjunction with one's ability to see, touch, smell, hear, and speak, thinking allows one to make sense of the phenomenal world. But it is not one's essential being, it is not what I am. It is important to realise that the claim is not being made that human consciousness is in any way a 'mystical' or 'other worldly' experience. What is being argued is that each individual possesses, a priori, the experience of being: of I am -- and that this experience has developed over the course of human history through the process of natural selection. Consciousness as a product of evolution The modern theory of biological evolution begins in 1859 with Charles Darwin's 'Origin of the Species by means of natural selection'. According to Darwin's theory, as random genetic mutations occur within an organism's genetic code, beneficial mutations are preserved and inherited by the next generation. This process is called 'natural selection'. Natural selection, then, acts to preserve and accumulate advantageous genetic mutations. For example, if a member of a species were to develop a functional advantage its offspring would inherit that advantage, which in turn it would pass on to its offspring. In short, natural selection is the preservation of a functional advantage that enables a species to compete more effectively in a complex and often an alien world. The basic concept of natural selection is that 'nature' (the physical and biological environment) 'selects' variations in characteristics or traits which improve individual survival and reproduction (adaptive traits) and selects against unfavourable traits which burden individuals (maladaptive traits).[3] As long as environmental conditions remain the same, or similar enough, the trait's adaptive values will remain unchanged, and when traits are heritable, adaptive traits will become more common and maladaptive traits rarer over generations. Sudden or gradual physical or environmental changes alter the adaptive value of the trait regardless of the trait's previous evolutionary history. Organisms that exist today are those that have survived to pass on their genes to the next generation. As Richard Dawkins explains: Every generation is a sieve. The genes that will exist after a million generations of sieving have what it takes to get through sieves. They have participated in the embryonic structuring of a million bodies without a single failure. Every one of these bodies has survived to adulthood... [and] every single one of them proved capable of bearing or begetting at least one child.[4] According to Dawkins, the Darwinian explanation for why living things are so good at what they do is very simple: they are good because of the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors. However, this wisdom is not something that is learnt or acquired; rather it is something that first arose in virtue of some random event -- some alteration of physical or environmental conditions -- that was then selectively

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recorded in the genetic database of the species. One of the arguments against natural selection was that since it was only a theory it might contain gaps for which there was no factual evidence. However, the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, and for which, along with Maurice Wilkins they were awarded Nobel Prize in 1962, led to the definitive verification of the principle advanced by Darwin almost one hundred years before.[5] The 'double helix' structure of DNA consists of two interlinked spirals of biochemical units called nucleotides (hence the name). There are four nucleotides, known by their initial letters G, A, C and T. In a molecular model of DNA, they resemble a twisted stepladder. Now, all living creatures have the same genetic code. This code translates the sequence of DNA nucleotides into amino acids, the corresponding building blocks of proteins. Random mutations in DNA, together with the genetic mixing that takes place through sexual reproduction, make possible the variations that drive evolution. Recent studies by a team of researchers at Trinity College Dublin, adds further weight to reliability of Darwin's theory. According to the team's findings, a random genetic mutation some 100 million years ago helped to deliver the yeast species that allows us today to enjoy bread and wine. The research, which was published in the prestigious journal, Nature (16/03/06), describes how a progenitor yeast living some 100 million years ago mutated by producing an extra copy of its entire genome. The result was a collection of new yeast species including the important Sacchromyces cervisiae, the yeast used to make bread and wine. According to Trinity's Smurfit Institute of Genetics professor Ken Wolfe, this research helps to explain one of the most difficult things to explain in genetics: 'it teaches us something about the process through which new species can be formed'.[6] As Wolfe explains, an organism evolves by gaining or losing genes. If genes are duplicated they tend to be dropped as extra copies are no longer required. These genome changes either help the organism to survive, thus increasing the chances that they will be passed on to the next generation, or work against survival and cause the organism to die off.[7] In the same way that the yeast we find in bread and wine has evolved to its present form over the millennia, so too, for Searle, is the evolution of human consciousness the result of a long history of increasing human mentality. According to Searle, consciousness, or 'the sentient awareness' of one's own existence, is a 'neurobiological phenomenon' that privileges us human beings with the wherewithal to understand the world in which we live, and our place in that world.[8] It is the sensory experience of one's own existence. It is an experience that precedes experience of the outside world, but upon which experience of the world depends. As Christof Koch and Francis Crick say: Consciousness is a property of the human brain, a highly evolved system... The function of the neuronal correlate of consciousness is to produce the best current interpretation of the environment -- in the light of past experiences -and to make it available, for a sufficient time, to the

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parts of the brain which contemplate, plan and execute voluntary motor outputs'.[9] In this context it might be thought to be something akin to Kant's 'space and time' and the categories of quality, quantity, modality and relation, or Chomsky's 'universal grammar' in that it is an a priori condition of the human mind. But it is more than this. Before we can experience space and time, causality, and before we order language grammatically, we must have consciousness. While Kant and Chomsky may give plausible explanations for the existence of a priori conditions in the human mind, they do not succeed in explaining how these conditions arise. To understand just how these 'conscious states' come about we must return to Darwin's theory of evolution. As Ken Mogi says, it is highly probable that the fundamental principle behind the origin of consciousness corresponds to 'random mutation' or 'natural selection' that was so instrumental in the Darwinian theory of the origin of the species.[10] Where Mogi infers a probable connection between Darwin and the origin of consciousness, for Searle there is no ambiguity. Conscious states, he says, are the result of lower level neurological processes in the brain which are themselves higher level features of the brain. As far as we can tell, 'variable rates of neuron firings in the different neuronal architectures cause all the enormous variety of our conscious life'.[11] What should be understood is that while the lower level neurological processes lead to consciousness, the conscious states that arise from them are not themselves some added substance or entity, but a higher feature of the whole system.[12] In essence, the lower level neuronal processes in the brain lead to consciousness, and consciousness is just a higher level feature of the system that is made up of the neural and lower level neuronal elements. Thus, when it is said that certain conscious states are a priori, it should be said that they are a priori not because they were implanted in the human mind since the creation of the species by some divine architect, rather they are a priori modes of perception which have, over the history of humankind, proven beneficial to the continuing evolutionary development of the species. One has only to consider how vulnerable human beings are in the physical world to realise how essential it became for the evolutionary process to provide humans with a form of consciousness that is species specific. In a world in which the development of human beings from infant dependency to adult independency is amongst the slowest in the animal world, it became imperative that the human mind should develop a mental dexterity that would allow them to anticipate, to negotiate, and to overcome obstacles; to consider the consequences of their circumstances and, where necessary, to modify their responses and reactions accordingly. So how does it work? According to Searle, the stimuli the brain receives through sensory experience are converted by the nervous system into 'variable rates of neuron firings at synapses'.[13] Neurons are the basic information processing structures in the nervous system, synapses are connections

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between neurons through which 'information' flows from one neuron to another. Neurons process all of the 'information' that flows within, to, or out of the central nervous system.[14] Robert Stufflebaum tells us that absolutely all of the motor information through which we are able to move; all of the sensory information through which we hear, see, smell, taste and touch; and all of the cognitive information through which we are able to reason, think, dream, plan, remember, and do everything else with our minds is processed in this way. Processing so many kinds of information requires many types of neurons. It is estimated that there may be as many as 10,000 types of neurons. It is also estimated that there are as many as 200 billion neurons in the brain alone. Since each of these is connected to between 5,000 and 200,000 other neurons, the amount of ways that information flows amongst neurons in the brain is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.[15] Ken Mogi gives us an example of how this process operates on a practical level: Let us suppose, he says, that one is watching a dog. One sees that the dog has white hair, that the ground below the dog is covered with violets, and that the dog's ears are triangular. Here, one presumes that the dog, hair, violets and so on are out there, and that one is perceiving them as a result of the causal connections that begins with the reflectance of sunlight from the surfaces of these objects, via the photoreceptors in one's retina, and finally the firing of the neurons in one's brain.[16] However, Mogi goes on to point out that while in one sense the statement 'one perceives something outside one' may be true, in another sense it is misleading. Everything one perceives: the dog, the white hair, the violets, are but phenomenological 'apparitions' caused by the neural firings in one's brain. Thus, ultimately, the perceived dog is not 'outside' one, but 'within one'. Everything one perceives, even the image of a star billions of light years away seen through a telescope, is nothing but the result of neural firings in one's brain. Even if there is a dog standing in a field of violets, if the neurons in one's brain do not fire in an appropriate way, one would not perceive the dog or the violets. Conversely, even if the 'dog' and 'violets' were not there, if the neurons in one's brain were stimulated in the appropriate manner, one would have a perception of the dog and the violets. Hence, the entities outside one, and one's perception of these entities, are in principle separate things. It is only that in normal circumstances, a highly reliable correlation is expected between the external entities and one's perception of them. In principle, one's perception could be independent of the actual external objects that normally invoke it.[17] It must be said that while Mogi clearly makes a valid point, it still remains that the neurons must be triggered by some external stimuli, either in the present or from the past, and that the images one perceives will always be those that have their source in sensory experience: one cannot have a perception of a dog if one has never seen a dog at one time or another. This particular feature of consciousness is called intentionality. Intentionality

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Intentionality is that feature of consciousness by which the mind brain contemplates states of affairs in the world. As a feature of consciousness, intentionality is like a screen onto which objects and acts are projected; without this screen objects and acts would not exist. It is important to realise that this does not imply that the real world does not exist; rather that it is only realisable in virtue of this particular feature. It should be stressed that intentionality is a feature of consciousness and not consciousness itself. Without consciousness, nothing else is possible. It is before all acts and objects; and before all other a priori modes of perception and all other evolutionary mental developments. That intentionality has arisen as a development of evolution is well aired by Darwinian scientist Harvey Whitehouse who, in his paper entitled 'Darwin and the Scientific Study of Religion'[18] explains that through the process of natural selection the human brain has evolved to a stage at which it became 'naturally biased to creationism'. 'Obsessed with intention', says Whitehouse, 'we seek to identify order and design in the world we see around us'. Allied to this 'intention' to design is a tendency towards 'narcissism': the tendency to project human characteristics onto inhuman things. These characteristics can include not only physical attributes such as heads, hearts, eyes and so on, but attributes such as compassion, intelligence, justice, beauty, as well as their opposites. It is from this property of the mind that religious beliefs arose. The human brain, says Whitehouse, 'has evolved hazard precaution mechanisms': faculties or perhaps, more accurately, instincts that warn us against dangerous substances, occurrences, and events. These 'warning signs' become crystallised in our minds into notions of 'right' or 'wrong' behaviour. Those which threaten the harmony or wellbeing of the individual or his or her environment are deemed to be wrong, whilst those that are deemed advantageous are good. For Whitehouse, science can show that human consciousness did not derive from some metaphysical source or realm; rather it arose in virtue of a random beneficial mutation that was preserved and passed on to successive generations by natural selection. The instinct of equilibrity Consciousness, then, privileges us with an awareness of our existence. Intentionality, as a feature of consciousness, privileges us with the wherewithal to contemplate affairs of the world. However, in order to order phenomena, nature, or natural selection, has furnished the mind/ brain with another, equally important, feature which I will call the instinct of equilibrity: an innate sense of equilibrium which is essential in the making of judgement calls necessary for our safety and development. It is this essential feature or element that allows us to intuit that which may serve us best in our struggle of the survival of the fittest. It is in virtue of this feature that we recognise those qualities in others that are worth borrowing for our own evolutionary purposes. It is in virtue of this feature that we turn away from that which we feel may affect us negatively, and turn towards that which we feel may benefit us. It is in virtue of this feature that we have developed our sense of beauty, justice, goodness, and truth, and their opposites -- qualities

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indefinable in themselves but essential in establishing an environment in which human beings can live and prosper. It could be argued that when Keats said that 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty! -that is all/ Ye know and all ye need to know' it was this sense of balance of which he spoke: at its most refined beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. But it is also justice and goodness; and together they are but manifestations, even interpretations, of the unique feature which is the instinct of equilibrity. Allied to this faculty is another faculty which evolutionary biologists call reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruism has its roots in what scientists call biological altruism. At base, then, there is biological altruism. That is, it is found that an organism may behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms. Now it seems that there are selfish genes and altruistic genes. While selfish genes can, on a one versus one basis, destroy an altruistic gene, where two or more altruistic genes come together, they will gain dominance over a selfish gene. Without going into scientific detail, this process is found to through different species: there is biological altruism (as shown above), kin altruism which runs through the animal kingdom, and reciprocal altruism which is more evident in humans. This predisposition manifests more recognisably in family or group solidarity, but can extend on a wider scale, particularly where there exists some form of empathy with these other individuals, groups, societies etc. It is held that a society where the majority of people are genetically predisposed to be altruistic will exhibit more caring tendencies, even to the extent that one may be prepared to sacrifice one's life so that the group will survive -- it is said that this tendency is also evident at biological and kin altruistic level (For a more detailed account of this see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/). Conclusion Whilst the oldest human related fossil -- the Sahel Man from Chad -dates back 7 million years, most anthropologists agree that Homo erectus began to evolve into Homo sapiens about 500,000 years ago, at the very last instant, of the 4.5 billion year history of our planet.[19] If we consider the life of the planet in terms of a twenty four hour clock, it can be said that human beings have only been around in the last few minutes. Thus, it follows that, for the greater part of its existence, the earth has managed perfectly well without us. On this evidence it can be argued that human beings are contingent to the existence of the planet upon which they live: the earth just doesn't need us. Even if we accept that, at the time of our appearance, nature had decreed that there was need for such a species of animal, recent evidence of man's impact on the world supports the view that that need may well be long exhausted. Given that human beings could well be the dinosaurs of the present age, and that we too, due to some physical or environmental change in the climate, will outlive our usefulness (if we ever had any, and if we have not outlived it already) and become extinct, the argument must be made that human consciousness, since it is a neurobiological phenomenon, will disappear with us -- and so will the paradigms, the

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ideas, and the dogmas we have devised, over the course of human history, in our attempts to understand the world, and our place in it. Philosophy has given much attention to the roles human mental intuitions, modes of perception, and faculties play in the formation of concepts and ideas. One of the most influential of these thinkers was Immanuel Kant who held that in order to have a recognisable, discussable experience it must fall into a pattern. The very order or form of this experience, he said, belongs to the mind, and not to the outside world. We neither have nor can conceive of any possible experience except in through the a priori modes of perception of space and time, and the categories of quantity, quality, relation, modality, existence/ non-existence, and necessity.[20] However, whilst Kant turned things around by arguing that knowledge of the world depends on certain a priori conditions, since we cannot assume that the human mind has always been privileged with such conditions, it must be argued that he fails to satisfactorily answer the question as to how these conditions may have arisen. In this paper we have seen that there is strong 'scientific' evidence to support the view that consciousness is a neurobiological phenomenon that has arisen in the human brain/ mind as a result of the evolution of mental development; and that it is through the process of natural selection that human beings have developed the mental tools which have allowed them to survive, to compete, to develop, and to evolve in a complex and often alien world. As a consequence of this evidence, those who remain convinced by the view that ideas, religious or otherwise, derive from some transcendent realm, and/ or that certain states of consciousness have always existed, may find that it is time to measure their own views on these matters against the discoveries of science. As mentioned in the introduction to this paper, the Dalai Lama holds that where scientific discoveries prove conclusively that some of our beliefs to be false, we must be prepared to eschew these beliefs in favour of science. If philosophy is to come to a greater understanding of consciousness and its manifestations, it must be at least prepared to put its own prejudices in parenthesis and examine the discoveries science has made in this area. For philosophy to ignore the inroads science has made into the area of consciousness is to risk reducing philosophy to just another form of dogma. Footnotes 1. Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (New York, Morgan Road Books, 2005, p. 13) 2. Searle, John: Minds, Brains & Science, (London: Penguin Books, 1984) p.16 3. See Darwin, Charles: The Origin of the Species, (Ware: Wordsworth Literature, 1998), pp 61-86 4. Dawkins, Richard: Climbing Mount Improbable, (London: Penguin books, 1997), p. 76

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5. See Carmisoni, Penni: 'From Darwin to the Human Genome', California State University 6. Wolfe, Ken: in 'Demonstrating the origin of the species' by Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times, 16/03/06, p.17 7. See ibid. 8. See Searle, John: 'The Problem of Consciousness'; http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/searle.prob.html 9. Koch, Christof and Crick, Francis: '116 Consciousness, neural basis of' from Commentary on 'The Mystery of Consciousness' University of California, Chico, Nov 4, 1999 10. Mogi, Ken: 'Qualia and the Brain', Nikkei Science, Tokyo, 1997, http://origin-of-consciousness.blogspot.com 11. See Searle op.cit. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. See Stufflebaum, Robert: 'Neurons, synapses, and neurotransmission: An introduction http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/neurons_intro/neurons_intro.php 15. Ibid. 16. Op.cit. 17. Ibid. 18. Whitehouse, Harvey: 'Darwin and the Scientific Study of Religion', Trinity College Dublin, 10/02/06 19. See Raven, Dr Peter: "Our Planet" (UNEP's magazine for environmentally sustainable development), Vol 6, No 4, 1994 20. See Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason, trans by Norman Kemp Smith, (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), pp. 65-91 (c) Anthony Fahey 2010 E-mail: fahey.anthony@gmail.com

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II. 'THE PROBLEM AND PROMISE OF CONSCIOUSNESS' BY RICHARD SCHAIN 'The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after all, the most amazing fact of human life...' Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, 1917 In a recent interview with David Chalmers conducted by Seher Yekenkurul (Philosophy Pathways Issue 123), it was stated that the 'basic question in the philosophy of mind is the mind/ body problem.' The term body really refers to the brain since it is the connection of mind to brain that concerns a large number of philosophers who are attempting to decipher the mystery of this relationship. The vast majority of these individuals accept the materialist thesis of modern science, namely, that all reality is reducible to materia. Lately, however, because of the intractability of the problem of reducing the conscious mind to brain processes, the dichotomy between monism and dualism has been fudged by philosophers like David Chalmers and John Searle who say that consciousness is an 'emergent property' of the brain and is not reducible to specific neuronal events. A growing literature exists on the merits of this idea. The concept of philosophy as an aspect of the human condition refers to one's consciousness of the nature of the self and of the universe, the so-called higher consciousness. This is a primary datum, first arising in the western world within the Ionian societies of Greek-speaking peoples. Philosophy came to be valued by these peoples as a unique aspect of their culture. Subsequently, it was adapted by the Romans and then by all later European civilizations. The establishment of philosophy in universities rather than solely within church institutions resulted in the widespread dissemination of philosophic thought in western culture. It became an independent branch of European culture, intimately associated with the Enlightenment movement in Europe. However, coincident with the Enlightenment and the rise of an independent philosophy, a distractive phenomenon began to emerge, namely, the preoccupation of philosophers with the mind-brain relationship. It had been known since the days of Hippocrates that the brain was intimately connected to the psyche, but not much importance was given to this realization except in certain disease states like epilepsy or brain damage. Philosophers did not concern themselves with the mundane issue of the mind-brain relationship. They concentrated on the development of their minds. The establishment of the Christian doctrine of duality of spirit and body strengthened this approach. Descartes was perhaps the first philosopher to concern himself closely with the nature of the mind-brain relationship. His infamous assertion that the pineal gland was the site of interaction of soul and brain irreparably damaged his reputation in the modern era. Soon afterwards, Leibniz asserted that brain processes and mental processes unfolded simultaneously, but without any connection other than that in the mind of the Creator. Here was the ultimate dualism looked upon now with derision by hardheaded scientists. These questions were peripheral to mainstream philosophy until the nineteenth century when the scientific revolution extended into detailed studies of the human brain. Scientists began to wonder about the significance of higher consciousness if it could only arise from an inauspicious-looking three-pound lump of grayish, gelatinous substance in the cranial cavity. The eminent German neuropathologist Rudolf Virchow joked that after examining hundreds of human brains, he had never found any evidence of a soul. Gradually philosophers began

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to turn their attention to the brain, especially since the prestige of scientific investigation could be used to bolster the reputation of a field that many thought of as worthless, unscientific rumination. The discovery of the microscopic complexity of the brain underneath its undistinguished physical appearance lent fuel to their interest. Somewhere, amidst the billions of neurons making up the human brain and their complex interactions must lie the secret of consciousness. Actually, from the point of view of rigorous science, there is no more knowledge today about the relationship of consciousness to the brain than there was in the era of Vesalius in the sixteenth century. Vesalius was a Flemish anatomist who was the first to carefully describe the anatomy of the brain, based on his many dissections of that organ. He knew that the living brain was necessary for the mind to function but could say no more than that. What more has been added by all the variegated descriptions of neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters and brain electrical phenomena? Much has been learned about the fine structure of the brain and associated neural mechanisms. However, there is virtually no connection of all these details to an understanding of the conscious mind. Neuroscientists who study the brain are much more inclined to relate their findings to disease states originating from pathological processes. Infinitely more is known now about the pathophysiology of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, paralytic strokes and encephalitis. Motor and sensory functions and, to a lesser extent, speech mechanisms have been localized to specific brain areas. Most neuroscientists, however, avoid the problem of the mind-brain relationship. Those few who have done so, like Charles Sherrington, John Eccles and Wilder Penfield, have often ended with a position of frank dualism. For a long time, reputable British and American neurophysiologists confined themselves to studying the reflex systems of the spinal cord. Moving above this locus would expose them to the charge of mysticism. There is probably no one in the history of philosophy who thought more deeply about the problem of the relationship of the mind to the brain than did William James, longtime professor of psychology and philosophy at Harvard University. It is worth quoting from him. After the most detailed consideration of all the possible relationships of consciousness to brain, he concluded that 'nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being, but how or why, no mortal may ever know' (Principles of Psychology, Chap. VI, The Mind-Stuff Theory, 1890). I cannot see how this situation has changed any since James penned his profound thought on the matter. In recent decades, however, philosophers have moved in where angels feared to tread. It is in the modern era of analytic philosophy that intricate speculative webs have been spun about ways in which consciousness may make its appearance in individuals. Utilizing behavior theory, cybernetics, quantum mechanics or recent advances in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, philosophers have rivaled medieval scholastics in speculating about the nature of consciousness. One of the leaders in this modern day scholasticism is John Searle who is explicit that 'Consciousness is caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain and is itself a feature of the brain' (The Mystery of Consciousness,

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1997). Intuitive thought does not permit one to conceive how billions of individual neurons, modifying billions of synaptic structures secreting myriads of neurotransmitter substances can give rise to a unitary sense of self with a unitary consciousness. Recognizing this problem, some contemporary 'neurophilosophers' like Searle have resorted to the metaphysical idea of consciousness as an 'emergent property' of the brain. In other words, it is still a mystery from the point of view of scientific monism. Thus the difficulty in imagining any way in which even an elementary consciousness can be reduced to neuronal processes -- not to speak of the higher consciousness out of which philosophy itself has emerged -- has forced philosophers with a broader scope to acknowledge that the traditional concept of dualism has some merit albeit they will rarely acknowledge themselves as dualists. Instead, the idea is put forth of 'property or emergent dualism' in which subjective experiences ('qualia,' a resort to the time-tested scientific habit that if you don't understand something, think up a new name for it) represent a different ontological reality from the material brain. Stubbornly, however, philosophers like Chalmers and Searle maintain that they are not really dualists because they conceive of the conscious mind as a feature or property of the brain. All this may seem like pedantic quibbling to the ordinary observer. But such is the ingrained resistance against dualistic thought in an academic philosophy imbued with the worldview of scientific monism. I fail to see any logical contradiction to the concept of dualism except there is no reason to believe that reality is limited to only two realms of existence. Physicists now talk of an eleven dimensional universe instead of the conventional three or four, if time is included. The notion of a concrete material reality is ever more blurred by advances in sub-particle physics. Even the apparent phenomenon of absolute time and space has disappeared, to be replaced by relativity theory. Philosophers, more than others, should realize that our awareness of reality is as much determined by our own perceptual apparatus than by what is actually out there beyond our selves. It is all well and good to confine oneself to strict materia-oriented, causality-determined scientific principles when building a bridge or repairing the plumbing but when it is a question of higher consciousness, it is philosophic insight not scientific methodology that is needed. It seems to me that with respect to the question of consciousness, much of contemporary philosophy has lost itself in the pursuit of trivia. What is to be gained by the continuous pursuit of newly discovered brain functions that correlate with conscious states? The philosophic fallacy referred to by Aristotle as a metabasis eis allo genos (Posterior Analytics), a passing from one realm of being to another in philosophic discourse, is constantly being committed. Now that neurologists have learned with the use of radioisotopes to convert metabolic activity of the brain into brightly colored visual images, one can foresee a whole new domain of brain correlates to be related to conscious states. Perhaps we will be confronted with a new form of phrenology that will connect characteristics of the mind to images generated by positron emission tomography (PET) rather than to bumps on the cranium. But all this is so much trivial pursuit. One thought from Plato is worth a thousand PET scans. For the philosopher, the temptation to sell one's philosophic soul for a mess of neurological pottage is best avoided. Anyway, since philosophers do not engage in laboratory studies, they will never be more than camp followers of the neurosciences.

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The history of conceptions of a higher consciousness in the western world goes back thousands of years to what Bruno Snell called 'the discovery of the mind' in Greek-speaking civilization. Subsequently, philosophy as a manifestation of higher consciousness continued its development in the west, even with the restrictions laid upon it by Christianity and the backwardness of the Middle Ages. The European Enlightenment gave rise to a flowering of philosophy that could be compared to the heyday of the Greek polis. A new phenomenon in philosophy arose in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the emergence of a remarkable group of 'existentialist' philosophers, the most notable of which were Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. But after that, a blight seems to have descended upon philosophy. Instead of fresh insights into the nature of man and the universe, there has appeared an obsessive preoccupation with science -- cognitive science, computer science, neurological science, critical thinking science -- anything to avoid the challenges of philosophical thought as it was known to Plato and his successors in the history of western philosophy. Perhaps Nikolai Berdyaev, Teilhard de Chardin and Abraham Joshua Heschl were the last important philosophical minds of our era not to be intimidated by the sciences. Today the old physical tyrannies of Christianity have been replaced by the psychological tyranny of scientific thinking. The models of creative metaphysical thought seem to be confined to representatives of churches, albeit still constrained by Christian or Judaic dogmas. This is a sad situation for philosophy. Since the neurosciences have given no insights into the basic phenomena of consciousness such as wakefulness or intentionality, it is hardly to be expected that they will shed light on higher consciousness; e.g. ideas about the significance of man in the universe, about the nature of time and creativity, and on the traditional areas of philosophy -- axiology, epistemology and eschatology. These are the substance of philosophy; their importance lies in their intrinsic content, not their connection to the brain. Philosophic thought is a dimension of reality in its own right and not merely a vehicle for some other purpose. There is a certain Quixotism inherent in philosophical activity. No pragmatic or sophistical benefits should be expected of it. The unique mix of intuition, rationality and passion that enters into philosophy represents the highest achievement of the human condition. Individuals may die, the whole human race may come to an end; but with the growing awareness of the relativity of time, it is reasonable to envision that the phenomenon of a higher consciousness will find its place embedded in the canvas of eternity (R. Schain, In Love With Eternity, 2005). With such a perspective, consciousness does not represent a problem of cognitive or neurological science but a promise of personal fulfillment. If I may paraphrase an assertion by that unique philosophical mind of antiquity, Jesus of Nazareth, the kingdom of heaven is to be found within the mind of every authentic philosopher. (c) Richard Schain 2007 E-mail: richardschain@yahoo.com Web site: http://www.schainphilo.com

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III. 'THE CONTRIBUTION OF GILBERT RYLE'S THE CONCEPT OF MIND TO THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE' BY MUNAMATO CHEMHURU The Concept of Mind is a book by Gilbert Ryle about the philosophy of mind. However, as a text that examines the operations of minds, it appears the text is not only confined to the study of mind. By looking at the language that results from the functions of minds, Gilbert Ryle sets forth to discuss how our language can be affected or distorted by a dualist approach to the human being. This is the approach known as the official doctrine of the 'ghost in the machine' that Ryle attempts to discredit as compromising and distorting the way we use our vocabulary. In this paper, therefore, Gilbert Ryle's The concept of Mind is examined in an attempt to consider his contribution and significance to our study of the philosophy of language. Perhaps a consideration of what philosophy of language entails might be valuable before an examination into how Ryle might have benefited and contributed into such a discipline. Generally, philosophy of language is a discipline that examines the way we use words in language. Unlike traditional disciplines of philosophy such as metaphysics where the role of philosophy is to come up with new knowledge and speculation, the philosopher of language considers what we mean when we talk about the universe using propositions. Philosophy of language is a philosophical project initiated by the analytic philosophers in the nineteenth century who shifted attention from cosmological speculation to attempting to look at how we can unpack the language that we use in philosophy. According to J.F.Rosenberg and C. Travis: Philosophy of language is concerned with philosophical questions about language. Traditionally, it includes but is far from being exhausted by the following questions: what if anything is meaning? What is it for something to be meaningful? What is it for something to mean such? What sort of attribute is the ability to speak a language? How does one try to acquire it? What is conventionality? What is the relation between meaning and reference? How does one manage to use words with pre-established meanings to refer to or talk about particular things? (1971:2-3) Thus, in philosophy of language, these are the sort of questions that are addressed. It is in view of this, therefore, that it appears Gilbert Ryle too seems to be pre-occupied with these sorts of questions in his philosophy of mind, hence his contribution to philosophy of language cannot go unexamined. Philosophers of language generally have one unifying characteristic. This characteristic is in their tendency to consider 'language' as a tool for clarifying meaning in philosophy. According to philosophers of language, scientific language contains ambiguities that need clarification. This is not however to lump all the philosophers of language in one single block, as some, like the 'early' Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell rightly belong to the logical atomist school, while J.L. Austin and G.E. Moore can be considered as belonging to the ordinary language movement. Wittgenstein used the method of philosophical analysis and influenced the logical positivists like A.J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap Otto Neurath and Schlick among others. Gilbert Ryle also applies conceptual analysis in his philosophy of mind and language. Thus, all these analytic philosophers are united in holding the

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position that philosophy must study language, since for them, the logic for our language is misunderstood. According to Bertrand Russell, the aim is to, ...inquire into various departments of traditional philosophy, showing in each how traditional philosophy and traditional solutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of symbolism and out of misuse of language. (1962:ix) In this case therefore, it will be seen here that this is the project with which Gilbert Ryle is preoccupied, that is, the clarification of our language, hence his contribution to philosophy of language is invaluable. Gilbert Ryle belongs to the school of conceptual analysis, as well as partly to the ordinary language movement (as seen by D.J.O'Connor), which are the two stages in the analytic movement of philosophy. The main argument by philosophers of language in these camps is that the role of philosophy is to study language, and clarify on the nature of the language that we use. Almost all the philosophers of language reject the idea of offering new knowledge in philosophy, but instead they try to rectify such knowledge in terms of what can be considered as philosophically significant or nonsense, hence, in his introduction to The Concept of Mind, it is apparent that Ryle takes an analytic approach to the language that we use when we describe the mind in philosophy of mind, as he states in the following: This book offers what may with reservations be describes as a theory of the mind. But it does not give new information about minds. We possess already a wealth of information about mind, information which is neither derived from, not upset by, the arguments of philosophers. The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended not to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge which we already possess. (1949:07) It is against the background of these remarks therefore that Ryle's attempt in his philosophy of mind is not so much into offering new philosophical propositions about the operations of our minds, but to play an analytic role in the field of philosophy as a philosopher of language, just like other philosophers of language in the analytic movement such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.J. Ayer, W.V.O. Quine and others. Ryle is thus playing a complementary role to our study of language although he might still be regarded as more of a philosopher of mind. Gilbert Ryle can be placed within the conceptual analysis movement as well as the ordinary language movement according to O'Connor. This conceptual analysis movement which comprises of philosophers of language like J.L. Austin and P.F. Strawson believed in the idea that language should be a way of solving philosophical problems, hence they were inspired by their predecessors like Russell and Wittgenstein. According to O'Connor: The philosophers of the ordinary language movement are in agreement with Wittgenstein on a number of points. Both saw the task of philosophy as critical. They believed the proper object of its criticism to be those general propositions

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about knowledge and the world in defiance of common sense, which constituted traditional metaphysical philosophy. They believed the proper method of criticism to be a demonstration, by a careful attention to the ordinary uses of words, that these metaphysical propositions both embodied and rested upon misuses of language. (1964:546) Following the same trend, Ryle examines the way we use mental language and he observed that the mistakes that we make in language are the result of such use of mental language as it appears to be metaphysical, in view of the fact that: When people employ the idiom 'in the mind', they are usually expressing over-sophisticatedly what we ordinarily express by the less misleading metaphorical use of 'in the head'. (Gilbert Ryle, 1949:40) Ryle's contribution to our study of language is very significant. He saw himself as attempting to map the logical geography of our concepts, by exploding Rene Descartes' myth of the ghost in the machine. He argued that: Descartes left as one of his main philosophical legacies a myth which continues to distort the logical geography of the subject. (1949:08) His argument is that the dualist approach to the human being by Descartes that the human being is made up of the physical (body) and spiritual (soul), is actually a myth which is ill founded, and consequently distorts the way we use our language. According to Ryle, ...a myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is a presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them. And this is what I am trying to do. (1949:08) Ryle sees the Cartesian dualist approach to the human being as a myth, and his attempt is to explode it such that the logical geography of our language is mapped. Put in other words, his attempt is to consider Descartes' dualist position as distorting the way we use our language as he remarked that: The key arguments employed in this book are therefore intended to show why certain sorts of operations with the concepts of mental powers and processes are breaches of logical rules. I try to use the 'reductio ad absurdum' arguments both to disallow operations implicitly recommended by the Cartesian myth and to indicate to what logical types the concepts under investigation ought to be allocated. (1949:08) In his contribution to the study of language, Ryle starts by discarding Cartesian dualism or Descartes' official doctrine that the human being is dually constituted. His major premise for this attack was that this 'purported' interaction between the 'mental' and the 'body' is mysterious and absurd. Against it, he argued:

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I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail, but in principle, it is not merely an assemblage of particular mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or a range of types of categories) when they actually belong to anther. The dogma is therefore a philosopher's myth. (1949:16) According to Ryle, in terms of our language, this official doctrine affects the way we use our language because it leads to a category mistake which involves attempting to allocate concepts to logical types to which they do not belong. For example, such a category mistake might arise when a person visiting the University of Zimbabwe Department of Philosophy and being shown all the various lecturers in philosophy courses like logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of education, social and political philosophy, asks, 'But where can I find the Philosophy?' An example given by Ryle is a person who of assumes that in a game, say of cricket, there is a separately identifiable thing called 'team spirit'. According to Ryle, this error is similar to the dualist assumption that the mind and body are separate entitles, and it is a mistake of allocating logical types to which they do not belong. The category mistake according to Ryle leads to errors in the use of our language. It leads to language distortions. In other words, since viewing man as dually constituted leads as such a 'category mistake', that category mistake will spill into the way we use words in language and how we use certain concepts in our vocabulary, hence the temptation of his stranger in his example watching the first game of cricket, to consider team spirit as an independent concept from the game itself. According to Ryle: The illustration of category mistakes have a common feature, which must be noticed. The mistakes were made by people who did not know how to wield the concepts... Their puzzles arise from inability to use certain terms in the English vocabulary. (1949:17) It is against this background therefore that since the category mistake affects the way we use our language, Ryle thrust attacks such a 'double life' theory which is a result of the category mistake of allocating logical concepts to categories which they do not belong. It compels us to think of reality from two perspectives, that is, from what takes place in our private thought and from the results of our physical actions. In view of this therefore, Ryle contributed immensely to our study of philosophy of language, as he noted that dualism is language distortion, thus according to D.J.O'Connor: Cartesian philosophers have mistakenly reified the apparent references of our mental vocabulary. (1964:547) Gilbert Ryle argued that psychological vocabulary is a result of dualism, hence according to D.J. O'Connor: In the course of the argument he mentions among the class of misleading referential looking expressions phrases that appear to refer to such mental entities as feelings, ideas and concepts. (1964:546)

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These misleading referential expressions are a result of the dualist conception of a man as seen by Ryle, hence the dogma of the ghost in the machine is an incorrect and misleading dogma. According to E.S. Stumpf, in his analysis of Ryle's The Concept of Mind, to say that the mind is the body is metaphysical, and our language seems to describe mental events or activities, yet there is no one who has direct access to these mental operations, such as dreaming, hoping, willing and knowing. This is what Ryle is against, hence his contribution to the study of philosophy of language is invaluable. In his attack on psychological vocabulary, he highlighted that: Part of the purpose of this book has been to argue against the false notion that psychology is the sole empirical study of people's mental powers, propensities and performances together with its implied false corollary that 'the mind' is what is properly describable only in technical terms proprietary to psychological research. (1949:327) Ira Altman therefore might be justified in his position that: Ryle's analysis is in keeping with the Wittgensteinian thesis that mental language has no private sense. ('The Concept of Intelligence') Just like the later Wittgenstein, therefore, in his major contribution to language, Ryle argued that language should be public and not private. This is perhaps the basis for his attack on the idea of imagining things going on in people's heads as he argued: The phrase, 'in my mind' can and should always be dispensed with. Its use habituates its employers to the view that minds are queer 'places', the occupants of which are special-status phantasms. It is part of the function of this book to show that exercises of qualities of mind do not save 'per accidents' take place in the head', in the ordinary sense of the phrase and those which do so have no special priority over those which do not' (1949:40) Thus, following this attack on psychology by Ryle, it appears, with the language that we use, he saw that the beliefs, ideas, thoughts which are a result of the mind ('in my head') mislead us into thinking that 'they' represent things in reality which are 'non-physical' (spiritual). This prompts the mistake of looking at language as having a private sense, thus for Ryle, using such psychological references as referring to private mental processes is wrong. It is in view of this, therefore, the language of mental states like these according to Ryle must be tied to publicly observable behaviour. This also is in keeping with the early Wittgensteinian thesis that: It will therefore be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. (1921:03) Like the later Wittgenstein, Ryle's contribution to the philosophy of language was that language ought to follow certain rules that must be tested by logic in public. There should be a common pool of publicly observable experiences where we share experiences, hence his behaviourist stance to the philosophy of

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language. In his behaviourist approach to intelligence, where he saw that intelligence is a behavioural disposition, Ryle's claim is to the effect that the words that we use to describe intelligent acts which are the verbs, actually derive their meaning, from the way we act or behave. According to Ryle: When a person is described by one or other of the intelligence epithets such as 'shrewd' or 'silly' 'prudent' or 'imprudent', the description imputes to him not the knowledge or ignorance of this or that truth, but the ability or inability to do certain sorts of things. (1949:27) Thus, our behaviour/ actions determine how we will use language, hence intelligent acts or unintelligent acts cannot be explained directly in terms of 'the mind', but the ability of the human body to do certain things under certain conditions. Ira Altman, however, criticises Gilbert Ryle's dispositional analysis of the concept of intelligence when he argues: Gilbert Ryle's dispositional analysis of the concept of intelligence makes the error of assimilating intelligence to the category of dispositional or semi-dispositional concepts. Far from being a dispositional concept, intelligence is an episodic concept that refers neither to dispositions nor to 'knowing how,' but to a fashion or style of proceeding whose significance is adverbial. ('The Concept of Intelligence') It appears, for Gilbert Ryle on the other hand, such adverbial words are still the outcome of our myth of the ghost in the machine. Language is thus distorted and influenced by words which are episodic like, 'knowing that', 'aspiring' 'willing' etc as seen by Ryle who argued that: The vocabulary we use for describing specifically human behaviour does not consist only of dispositional words. The judge, the teacher, the novelist, the psychologist and the man in the street are bound also to employ a large battery of episodic words when talking about how people do or should act and react. These episodic words no less than dispositional words, belong to a variety of types, and we shall find that obliviousness to some of these differences of type had both fostered,and been fostered by the identification of the mental with the ghostly. (1949:117) In view of the foregoing discussion on Ryle's contribution to our study of language, however, it appears his critiques to the Cartesian dualism cannot go wholly unchallenged. Ryle appears to have considered his relegation of private language as the only way out of the problems of language, where public language is the solution. The problem now, might be to do with a justification for his relegation of private language such as our inner thoughts. It still remains to be seen

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whether every human activity like 'thinking', 'feeling', and 'dreaming' among other mental activities can be explained in terms of our behaviour. It appears that Ryle was not fully successful in convincing us of the need to dislodge the 'official doctrine'. Despite these remaining doubts, following the discussion here presented, it might be justified to consider Gilbert Ryle as one of the analytic philosophers who have contributed immensely to the study of language. BIBLIOGRAPHY Altman I. 'The Concept of Intelligence' http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Mind/MindAltm.htm O'Connor D.J A Critical History of Western Philosophy Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, U.S.A. (1964) Ryle G. The Concept of Mind Barnes and Noble Publishers, United Kingdom (1949) Rosenberg J.F Readings in the Philosophy of Language Prentice Hall, London (!971) Stumpf E.S. Philosophy : History and Problems McGraw Hill Book Company, New York (1989) Wittgenstein L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Routledge and Kegan Paul, Britain (1921) University of Zimbabwe Dept of Religious Studies, Classics and Philosophy Box M.P. 167 Mount Pleasant Harare (c) Munamato Chemhuru 2007 E-mail: mchemhuru@arts.uz.ac.zw

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II. 'MIND IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE' BY RAJAKISHORE NATH This study will explore the states of mind in artificial intelligence. As we know the main aim of artificial intelligence is to reproduce mentality in machines. That is to say that AI aims at producing machines with mind. If we say that machines have minds, then we have to ascribe certain 'belief', 'knowledge', 'free will', 'intention', 'observations', etc. to a machine. In that case, the machines will perform intelligent tasks and thus will behave like human beings. We may raise a question: Why should we want ascribe mental qualities to machines at all? According to MacCarthy,[1] there are many reasons for ascribing belief and other mental qualities: (i) Although we may know the program, its state at a given moment is usually not directly observable, and we can explain performance of a machine only by ascribing beliefs and goals to it. (ii) Ascribing beliefs may allow the derivation of general statements about the machine's behaviour that could not be obtained from any finite number of simulations. (iii) The difference between this program and another actual or hypothetical program may best be expressed as a difference in belief structure. Following above it can be stated that the thought itself is not static and random: It develops in ways that obey different rules of inference.[2] Haugeland says, since correct application of the rules of reason to particular thoughts depends on what those thoughts mean, it seems that there must be some active rule-applier, which understands the thoughts (and rules), and which applies the rules to the thoughts as well as it can. If the activity of this rules applier, following the rules of reason, is to explain the rationality of our thought process, then it must be regarded as a complete little person -- or homunculus (in Latin) -- inside the head, directing the thoughts like a traffic cop. The trouble is: a theory that involves an homunculus to explain thinking has begged its own question, because the homunculus itself has to think, and that thinking has not been explained.[3] Cognitive scientists can be materialists and mentalist at the same time. They are materialist because they support the view that the mind is a complicated machine or matter. On the other hand, some support that along with mind the body exists. They can offer explanation in terms of meaning and rule following, without presupposing any unexplained homunculus. It would be peculiar to start assigning geometrical shapes and locations to the internal program routines and operation of a system. These same decisions clearly cause physical behaviour, yet no one is worried that the laws of physics are being violated. According to Haugeland, when the machine plays, it follows rules in at least two senses: it always abides by the rules of the game, and it

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employs various reasonable rules of thumb to select plausible moves. Though these rules are in no way laws of nature, the machine's behaviour is explained (in part) by citing them -- and yet, no unexplained 'compunculus' is presupposed.[4] Thus this explanation will necessary invoke the system's internal reasoning processes; yet it is far from easy to figure out processes that will consistently lead to the observed behavioural response. Dennett rightly says that human mind is a semantic engine, that is to say that the way human mind handles the meaning of a word or sentence, in the same way a machine handles the literal meaning of a word or a sentence. Thus Dennett's view shows that human mind is a machine like AN ordinary machine because both mind and machine have the same quality, the difference is only apparent. As we have seen, the main thesis of AI is that the human brain is like a digital computer, and the human mind is just a computer program. It tries to prove that the relation between the program and the computer hardware is like the relation between mind and brain. Some supporters of AI argue that we have every reason to believe that computers have intelligence. At the same time, some others argue that the computers' intelligence is limited whereas human intelligence has no limit. Nowadays computers have achieved some modest success in proving theorems, guiding missiles, sorting mail, driving assembly-line robots, diagnosing illness, predicting weather and economic events, etc. Computers receive, interpret, process, store, manipulate and use information. Thus, intelligent behaviour is programmed into the computers. On the contrary, we have no idea how the brain functions, but we have an idea of the general relationships between brain processes and mental processes. Mental processes are caused by the brain activities which are functions of the elements constituting the brain. Strong AI argues that it is possible that one day a computer will be invented which can function like a mind in the fullest sense of the word. In other words, it can think, reason, imagine, etc., and do all the things that we currently associate with the human mind. On the other hand, weak AI argues that computers can only simulate human mind and are not actually conscious in the same way as human minds are. According to weak AI, computers having artificial intelligence are very powerful instruments in the hands of man. Whereas Strong AI holds that computer is not merely an instrument in the study of the mind, but that the appropriately programmed computer is really a mind in the sense that computers can think and do reasoning like the human beings. In Strong AI, the programmed computer has cognitive states, so the programs are not simple tools that allow us to test psychological explanations; rather the programs are themselves the explanations. Strong AI, according to Searle, basically claims that the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states, and that the programs thereby explain human cognition. The main aim of AI is to reproduce mentality in computational machines, and to try to prove that the functions of a machine are similar to the functions of the human mind. But the question is: Could a machine have mental states? For AI, in the words of Searle, there is nothing essentially biological about the human mind. The brain just happens to be one of an indefinitely large number of different kinds of hardware computers that

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could sustain the programs, which make up human intelligence. On this view, any physical system whatever that had the right program with the right inputs and outputs would have a mind in exactly the same sense that you and I have minds.[5] Searle is here critical of the view that any physical system that has the 'right program with the right inputs and outputs' would have a mind in exactly the same sense that human beings have minds. The cognitive scientists believe that perhaps they can design the appropriate hardware and programs -artificial brains, and minds -- that are comparable to human brains and minds. Strong artificial intelligence is a reductionist theory, because strong AI reduces mind or mentality to physical properties. Here, the term 'reduces to' names a relation between theories. When this relation holds between a pair of theories, for example, R1 and R2, then R2 is said to be reducer of R1. According to Fodor, the reduction relation is transitive and asymmetrical, hence irreflexive. By the 'unity of science' I shall mean the doctrine that all sciences except physics reduce to physics. By 'physicalistic reduction' I shall mean a certain claim that is entailed by, but does not entail, the unity of science; viz, the claim that psychology reduces to physics.[6] Reducibility involves a good deal more than the ontological claim of supervenience, according to which things that satisfy descriptions in the vocabulary of R1 also satisfy descriptions the vocabulary of R2. This condition is stronger than the ontological requirement that whatever falls under the generalizations of R1 should also fall under those of R2. On this view, there is an important sense in which syntax is preserved under reduction. That is to say, reduction permits us to redescribe the events in the vocabulary of R2. Thus according to strong AI, mental states reduce to the computational states in the same way. On the other hand, weak AI is non-reductionist, because this theory is not aiming for a reduction of the human mind in terms of machines, but it can only simulate human mind and this does not mean exact replication. The above statement shows that the weak AI view is non-reductionist. For the physicalist, life is a higher order property, which emerges out of the physical properties. The question remains, however, what we should say about the philosophical idea of a 'zombie'. In a zombie, there is claimed to be a complete absence of consciousness. In other words, the logical possibility of a zombie world is considered as a world physically identical to our world, but conscious experiences do not exist in this world. The zombies may be psychological or phenomenal zombies, which are physically and functionally identical to human beings but they lack experiences. According to Chalmers, the logical possibility of zombies seems equally obvious to me. A zombie is just something physically identical to me but which has no conscious experience -- all is dark inside.[7] The zombie and me have identical physical properties but differ in high-level properties like consciousness. The zombies lack consciousness. Therefore, if

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Chalmers is right, the high-level property of being conscious is neither reducible to, nor logically supervenient on physical properties. References 1. McCarthy, John, 'Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines,' in Philosophical Perspective in Artificial Intelligence, Martin Ringle (ed.), The Harvester Press, Sussex, 1979, p.164 2. Haugeland, John. 'Semantic Engines: An Introduction to Mind Design' in Mind Design: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, (ed.) John Haugeland, p.3 3. Ibid., pp. 3-4 4. Ibid., p.4 5. Searle, John R., Minds, Brains and Science, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984, p.28 6. Fodor, J. A., Representations: Philosophical Essay on the Foundation of Cognitive Science, The Harvester University Press, Sussex, 1981, p.149 7. Chalmers, David J., The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, p.96 Dr. Rajakishore Nath Faculty in Philosophy Department of Humanities & Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Mumbai-76, India (c) Rajakishore Nath 2008 E-mail: nath@hss.iitb.ac.in

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