John, the prevailing view among philosophers, and certainly most scientists, is materialism; that only the physical is real. We can

study that. Maybe it's going to be a lot of fantastically interesting things, but basically, there's one physical world.

People who don't like that, or who think it's wrong from either a religious point of view or a philosophical point of view,

point to consciousness as their single arrow that can kill materialism. You don't agree with that?

course, as we like to say, on how you define these terms. And if you define materialism as the view that matter

exists in the sense that all of reality, all of material reality is all reality there is, and it has only a third-person

or objective ontology, where it's equally accessible to any competent observer; and consciousness is the view

that the existence of consciousness—the proposition that consciousness exists—is the view that consciousness has a first-person ontology that is not part of a

third-person reality, then of course the existence of consciousness trivially would refute materialism. But that's that's

a trivial... that's right. But now we want to go, as always in philosophy, you want to get behind the surface issues and see

what's actually at stake here. And materialism is driven—the intelligent materialism is driven by the

conviction that the account that we're getting of reality in subjects like physics and chemistry and molecular biology and evolutionary biology—that

that ultimately gives us an account of how the world works. And I think that's right. If that's materialism, then I am a

materialist. But I also think consciousness exists and it has an irreducible subjective ontology; it only

Two together, then my task is to make the existence of consciousness, in my sense, the real thing, not some acts or

simulation—the real thing, consistent with what we know about how the world works. I claim that can be done, so

consciousness does not refute my version of materialism, but it does refute certain traditional versions. What does

that tell me? Let's get rid of this terminology of materialism and mentalism and so on, and just describe

the facts. I think in terms of the mind-body problem; that's right. But there's something much deeper at stake in these

arguments, because basically most religions are founded on the existence of two different kinds of worlds. Not every religion, but most of the major

religions. So there's a great deal at stake here, so I think we have to probe

further and find out how consciousness deals with this concept of materialism; because if consciousness doesn't refute

the materialism that the only thing that exists is the physical world, if consciousness can't do that and

materialism is real, and there's only the physical world, that's a significant change in the way of thinking for

No, I think that's right. Now, as you point out correctly, there is a big hidden agenda

under discussion here. If you assume that God exists and that God has endowed each of us with an immortal soul, then

materialism, in any version—mine or anybody else's version—is false. What I am trying to do is describe a version of

what we know about the world from physics, chemistry, and all the other hard sciences, and what we even imagine these

carried to the limit, where we had a perfect knowledge—how that is consistent with the existence of an irreducible

Qualitative subjective consciousness. I think I can do that, but you're certainly right to say that

wouldn't satisfy people who believe this for some religious reasons, who want us to get an immortal soul. And I want to

say you don't get an immortal soul out of physics. Okay? There are some other kinds of dualistic views. I think we have some

that are founded on a religious view; some that take quantum mechanics and show that you have to—and quantum

mechanics would say that some would—the consciousness is important to make quantum mechanics work. Uh, others would

point to some sort of panpsychism; that there's some proto-consciousness in almost everything. That's the only way to

explain it. So the concept of consciousness destroying the foundations of materialism has a lot of different, um,

tentacles. Well, I think you're absolutely right that, um, when we get on to this subject, uh, people tend to

lose their normal caution. Uh, I think intellectually we ought to proceed one step at a time. Now there's nothing in

what we know about the universe that would lead me to think we have a good reason for believing in panpsychism;

that consciousness is everywhere. And there's a real problem with panpsychism, and that is it doesn't give a

coherent account of how consciousness comes to us in the units that it does come to us in. If you're going to say the

thermostat is conscious, then what about each screw and each molecule in each screw? So consciousness cannot be

described as a kind of jam spread thinly over the whole universe, because we know it comes in discrete units. Maybe with a

split-brain hypothesis, I have two consciousnesses, but you don't have an indefinite smear of consciousness that

makes no sense. All right, so that's not a serious option. But now another, uh, option that some people have adopted is the

idea that in order to account for quantum mechanics, you've got to suppose that consciousness is a basic feature of

the universe, because it's what brings the collapse of the wave function. And I want to say, just my experience has been

whenever philosophers and indeed even some physicists, when they talk about quantum mechanics, that the density of hot air tends to increase

exponentially. So I'm extremely careful about that. But nothing, it seems to me that I know about quantum mechanics, uh,

would suggest that you can't make sense of the equations, you can't make sense of the experimental results unless you

suppose that consciousness is sort of a basic building block of the universe. See, on my view, consciousness is a higher

level feature of the brain, caused by lower-level brain processes. You can no more have it sort of existing prior to

the existence of its neurobiological base than you could have any other higher-level feature such as digestion. Okay, what would seem to follow

from what you're saying is that in some ultimate science we should be able to create consciousness in principle. I see

no obstacle. We're nowhere near being able to do that, sure. But imagine, look, we ought to hear the question, 'Can you

create consciousness artificially?' as like the question, 'Can you create the pumping of blood that the heart does

artificially?' Now we know the answer to the pumping of blood because we have artificial hearts. But to do that we had

to know how the heart did it. It wasn't discovered till the 17th century, by the

way, that the heart did function to pump blood. But now if we knew exactly how, in detail, I mean really down to the

finest detail how the brain causes consciousness, and I don't see any obstacle in principle to building a

conscious machine. You see, the thing you always want to remember is the brain is a machine; it's a machine made out of

organic substance, big carbon-based molecules. It's not like my car engine, but it is a machine. But there's nothing

special about carbon; it could be made out of anything if you knew—if you knew the principles. We don't know the

principles. Hearts do not have to be made out of muscle tissue in order to pump blood. We don't know what you have to

have to do to create consciousness, but there's one mistake we've got to avoid, and that is the mistake of supposing

that if you simulate it, you've duplicated it. This is a deep mistake embedded in our popular culture—that

simulation is equivalent to duplication, but of course it isn't. A perfect simulation of the brain, say, on a

computer would no more thereby be conscious than a perfect simulation of a rainstorm on a weather-predicting computer will leave us all wet. I mean,

simulate—or the fire department presumably does simulations of five-alarm fires, but they don't burn the

firehouse down. It's just a picture, or model, or diagram; that's what computer simulations are. So the simulation of the

of consciousness is no more conscious thereby than the simulation of a rainstorm will make us all wet. But in

principle, in some ultimate science, consciousness, with the same first-person experience of these qualia—this

what it feels like to see a pink shirt—that can all be created fresh, absolutely. That is, if you—if you adopt what I think

is what we know about how the world works. We know that consciousness is caused by brain processes. If we knew in detail,

Exactly how the brain does it, then we ought to be able to do it artificially.

John Searle - Does Consciousness Defeat Materialism?

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