Week 6 - Assigned Reading - The Problem of Consciousness

John R. Searle's “The Problem of Consciousness” was an intriguing deconstruction of what consciousness really is, how it came about, and how it should be explained. Despite all that I had already learned about the subject of consciousness, I had never really taken the tie to understand what it really is. Deciphering where and how it came to be would be impossible if you didn't even know what it is you are trying to find. According to Mr. Searle, consciousness is a subjective state of awareness. That's may appear somewhat vague, but in actuality it describes a great deal. To have subjective feelings that are independent of your direct attention is a specific phenomenon that can be studied and understood. Mr. Searle's differentiation between consciousness and knowledge, awareness, and self-consciousness is what narrows the field as each of these things can be explained independently of any conscious state. I personally found Mr. Searle's breakdown of what consciousness really “is” to be quite helpful in my understanding of the many subjects in relation to it. It's easy to misconstrue the small, but complex part of ourselves that helps to set us apart from other creatures.

Mr. Searle's section on the relations between consciousness and the brain is the section that I found most fascinating. It points out our understanding of simple processes and how they can create more complex, higher level functions. This is how the brain creates consciousness. Just because we don't know exactly how the brain does this doesn't mean we don't know that it does. This recurring theme of labeling things we don't yet understand as impossible to understand, and further, that they must somehow be metaphysical in nature, is completely ridicules. Science can't give you an answer to something without first studying it. If what you are looking for are quick, often narrow-minded answers to complex problems and questions (that probably have simple solutions) then you should try religion.

I found Searle's description of one particular common mistake in relation to consciousness to be rather pleasing. As opposed to Ken Wilber's “An Integral Theory of Consciousness” which implies that computation and empirical studies are essentially meaningless (especially in relation to consciousness), Searle states that they are merely incomplete. Studies and their corresponding data contain information regardless of their form, but alone they may not mean much; they are not, however, “meaningless.” Wilber appeared to either not understand or to misstate this fact, but Searle states this fact plainly and my appreciation for his work is all the greater for it.