John Searle
He holds consciousness to be a biological fact as ordinary as digestion: being lived in the first person does not make it immaterial. Which earns him the rejection of both camps he himself rejects.
American · 1932 – 2025
American philosopher of mind and language: against functionalism, he holds consciousness to be a biological phenomenon, produced by the specific causal powers of the living brain.
Justification
Searle holds consciousness to be an ordinary biological phenomenon, on a par with digestion or photosynthesis: it is caused by low-level neuronal processes and realized in the brain as a higher-level property. That a state is lived in the first person does not entail that it is immaterial: its mode of existence is subjective, its nature remains biological. This biological naturalism refuses both inherited camps, the that makes mind another substance, and the that, to save objectivity, end up treating lived experience as negligible. His critics reply that an irreducibility of principle brings him despite himself close to property dualism: he disputes this by distinguishing causal reduction, which he grants since the brain does produce consciousness, from ontological reduction, which would delete the first-person point of view instead of explaining it. This is what settles his place here: the irreducibility he maintains is indeed that of the subjective character of experience, which he holds to be a first-person ontology, but it does not make consciousness a property added to the brain. For him consciousness is a way the brain itself is, at a higher level, not one more ingredient in the inventory of the world.
"Minds, Brains, and Programs" (1980) · The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)
Justification
The : shut in a room, Searle manipulates Chinese symbols following a rulebook, and his answers pass for a speaker's, without his understanding a word. A program is only a syntax, a set of rules bearing on shapes; understanding further requires a semantics, a relation to the world that formal manipulation never supplies. Yet he does not conclude that only the living think: the brain is a machine, and an artefact reproducing its causal powers would think. What he refuses is therefore not the thinking machine, but the idea that running the right program suffices.
"Minds, Brains, and Programs" (1980)
Justification
Searle holds consciousness to be a higher-level property caused by neuronal processes, as the liquidity of water is caused by the behaviour of molecules although no molecule is liquid. The emergence he accepts is that one: explicable from the parts once their organization is known. He refuses, by contrast, any property that would possess causal powers inexplicable from the elements, which would amount, he says, to magic. He therefore sits barely on the emergentist side, and not at all on the side of a mysterious whole.
The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)