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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biological naturalism | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_naturalism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:33:14.208407+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Criticism == There have been several criticisms of Searle's idea of biological naturalism. Jerry Fodor suggests that Searle gives us no account at all of exactly why he believes that a biochemistry like, or similar to, that of the human brain is indispensable for intentionality. Fodor thinks that it seems much more plausible to suppose that it is the way in which an organism (or any other system for that matter) is connected to its environment that is indispensable in the explanation of intentionality. It is easier to see "how the fact that my thought is causally connected to a tree might bear on its being a thought about a tree. But it's hard to imagine how the fact that (to put it crudely) my thought is made out of hydrocarbons could matter, except on the unlikely hypothesis that only hydrocarbons can be causally connected to trees in the way that brains are." John Haugeland takes on the central notion of some set of special "right causal powers" that Searle attributes to the biochemistry of the human brain. He asks us to imagine a concrete situation in which the "right" causal powers are those that our neurons have to reciprocally stimulate one another. In this case, silicon-based alien life forms can be intelligent just in case they have these "right" causal powers; i.e. they possess neurons with synaptics connections that have the power to reciprocally stimulate each other. Then we can take any speaker of the Chinese language and cover his neurons in some sort of wrapper which prevents them from being influenced by neurotransmitters and, hence, from having the right causal powers. At this point, "Searle's demon" (an English speaking nanobot, perhaps) sees what is happening and intervenes: he sees through the covering and determines which neurons would have been stimulated and which not and proceeds to stimulate the appropriate neurons and shut down the others himself. The experimental subject's behavior is unaffected. He continues to speak perfect Chinese as before the operation but now the causal powers of his neurotransmitters have been replaced by someone who does not understand the Chinese language. The point is generalizable: for any causal powers, it will always be possible to hypothetically replace them with some sort of Searlian demon which will carry out the operations mechanically. His conclusion is that Searle's is necessarily a dualistic view of the nature of causal powers, "not intrinsically connected with the actual powers of physical objects." Searle himself does not rule out the possibility for alternate arrangements of matter bringing forth consciousness other than biological brains.
=== Property dualism === Despite what many have said about his biological naturalism thesis, he disputes that it is dualistic in nature in a brief essay titled "Why I Am Not a Property Dualist". Firstly, he rejects the idea that the mental and physical are primary ontological categories, instead claiming that the act of categorisation is simply a way of speaking about our one world, so whether something is mental or physical is a matter of the vocabulary that one employs. He believes that a more useful distinction can be made between the biological and non-biological, in which case consciousness is a biological process. Secondly, he accepts that the mental is ontologically irreducible to the physical for the simple reason that the former has a first-person ontology and the latter a third-person ontology, but he rejects the property dualist notion of "over and above"; in other words, he believes that, causally speaking, consciousness is entirely reducible to and is nothing more than the neurobiology of the brain (again, because both are biological processes). Thus, for Searle, the dilemma between epiphenomenalism and causal overdetermination that plagues the property dualist simply does not arise because, causally speaking, there is nothing there except the neurobiology of the brain, but because of the different ontologies of the mental and physical, the former is irreducible to the latter:
I say consciousness is a feature of the brain. The property dualist says consciousness is a feature of the brain. This creates the illusion that we are saying the same thing. But we are not, […]. The property dualist means that in addition to all the neurobiological features of the brain, there is an extra, distinct, non-physical feature of the brain, whereas I mean that consciousness is a state the brain can be in, in the way that liquidity and solidity are states that water can be in.
== See also == Chinese room Direction of fit Evolutionary ethics Hylozoism Qualia
== References ==
== Sources == John R. Searle, "Biological Naturalism". John R. Searle, "Consciousness". John R. Searle, "Why I Am Not a Property Dualist". John R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (London: Granta Publications, 1998). John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994). John R. Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
== External links ==
Rafael E. Núñez, What Brain for God's-eye? Objectivism, Biological Naturalism and Searle