Searle’s Ontologies

Carl H. Flygt

February, 2005

Let us say that biological naturalism has added two crucial points of description to its account of consciousness, and has granted that all consciousness has the features of energy and self-control. Let us stipulate further that this naturalism’s ambitions range beyond the merely mundane forms of consciousness that everyone knows as a basic matter of social adaptation, and that extends into occult matters, into narcosis, meditation and spiritual explanation generally. And to cap the picture, let us say that biological naturalism is unafraid of experimenting with new methods that promise to illuminate the nature of consciousness in a rigorous and consensual manner, but in a way that transcends the methods of logical analysis and materialist application. Can Searle’s naturalism be counted here, or will it veer to one side?

I think the answer is that it can, but that some internal inconsistencies will need correction. The most substantial inconsistency is Searle’s professed commitment to “multiple ontologies.” The one world, many ontologies stance, which reflects an unfathomed and unmusical liberalism, will need to be replaced in favor of something more principled and more profound. The problem of consciousness, if it is to be solved satisfactorily, will give us insight into the realities of birth and of death in themselves, and thereby into the reasons for our conducting ourselves as living beings in a cosmic situation that simply outorders and outclasses any conception that fails to make art of its insights. A unitary world can only have a unitary ontology, and a view that fails to appreciate the metaphysical necessity of that basic idea must be regarded as fundamentally incomplete.

Here is the problem I see with multiple ontologies. On the dual doctrine that brains cause minds and that minds are realized in brains, the pain I experience when my foot is caught in a punch press is, according to Searle, really a feature of the intentionality of my brain. My brain is able to produce contents (features of itself) that are about events in my body and things in the world. Presumably that mechanism exists because evolution put it there. It is useful to complex nervous systems that they represent worlds to themselves, and thereby cause consciousness. The same sort of analysis must hold for the table in front of me. The aspect under which I see it is really in my brain. But these representations are all quite real. They are real representations with causal functions.

The problem with this theory is that it mixes ontological claims. The sensations in my foot and the aspect of the table are, according to Searle ontologically subjective. Their existence, presumably, belongs to a different order of reality than the thing-in-itself existence of the objective order. That is what ontology means. But the next thing to be said about these sensations and this aspect is an appeal to just this objective order. Real pain is in the brain, says Searle, where the brain presumably is part of the objective order. Why this irrational jump to the objective? What about ontological subjectivity? Does Searle take it seriously? Or does he think that really, deep down, subjectivity is not important? If he were serious about ontological subjectivity, Searle would say that real pain is not in the foot, but in the astral body. That at least would be consistent, because the astral body is, if anything is, ontologically subjective.

I think I know what is going on. Searle thinks scientific knowledge is the only knowledge worth having. For him, occult knowledge, like that of the astral body (and which holds, by the way, just this conception of the location of pain), is not on the radar screen because we have no institutions that appear to be capable of consensualizing it. Searle’s view has its merits, but also its demerits. No one in his right mind would want a return to a social organization based on the occult initiation of the Pharaoh in the Great Pyramid at Cheops. No one would want a Thousand Year Reich based on some mystical fantasies (and practices) and a perverse reading of Immanuel Kant. But in the absence of a coherent institutional approach to the esoteric spiritual, the alternative appears to be materialism. Material science is successful, and so is market economics, and in the hands of a decent political system, both are relatively benign and foster human freedom. This is why Searle, at bottom, is a logical materialist.

Notwithstanding this materialist limitation to his approach, which can readily be seen to be a consequence of his institutional (and lifestyle) commitments, Searle should be met and answered where he stands, and he stands at a very interesting position in history. Cristof Koch, under the acute and watchful eye of Francis Crick, has begun, with a bevy of others, the scientific attack on the problem of consciousness. Embarrassingly for Searle, Crick and Koch have turned to just those conceptions of consciousness that were worked out by Kant in his idealist conception of phenomena and noumena. “You are not directly conscious of something in the world, say a chair,” writes Koch, “but only of its visual and tactile representation in the cortex.” Similarly, “A bilingual person can express a thought in either language, but the thought that underlies the words remains hidden.” Realities are occult, noumena hidden.

The crucial element in Crick and Koch’s conception is a non-conscious and non-intentionalistic homunculus in the forebrain that accounts for the everyday experience of who “I” am. This homunculus perceives the world through the senses, thinks, and both plans and carries out voluntary actions. The “homunculus,” is really a set of neuronal networks in the frontal lobe of the cortex that receives massive sensory input from the more dorsal segments of the cortex, but that connects in the reverse direction in a completely different way. Koch characterizes these functions as supramental, as distinct from the submental domain of the brain’s more primitive processing stages that likewise escape conscious access. This unconscious self-sense is what is invoked in the highly skilled activities that human beings enjoy and in many cases live for – expertise at skiing or baseball, for example – where consciousness just goes along for a ride.

Searle wants to resist the idea that the “I” is not conscious. He thinks we are conscious in the ordinary everyday. He thinks he’s ok, and he thinks you’re ok, as long as everyone is smart and is playing more or less the same benign institutional game. But this stance is anathema to initiation knowledge. The occult is about the purported fact that we are not conscious at all, that we go through life as spiritual sleepwalkers unless we make the right sorts of efforts and fall in with the right sort of company. On this line of reasoning, idealism and not materialism, is the correct picture of consciousness and of the human position in the cosmos. Notwithstanding the dogmatism of Plato, the abstruseness of Kant and the arrogance of Hegel, and notwithstanding the terrible political mistakes that are possible in its name, the reality of our consciousness is transcendental and spiritual. There are higher worlds beyond ours, and they can be reached by special exercises. Our ontological subjectivity (our consciousness) exists for the purpose of implanting these worlds, artfully, into this one. The purpose and end of philosophy are occult knowledge, spiritual experience and technical moral action, and when these are satisfied, philosophy ceases.

I would not make this argument if I did not have a responsible and positive program to introduce to philosophy and to the New Age in general, and much of this is based on Searle’s commonsense contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. I think that conversation in general can be shown to have a necessary structure, and that this structure conduces to esoteric development. I am generally sympathetic to biological naturalism and its materialist underpinnings, but I do believe there is a great deal of objective and socio-political knowledge to be explored about features of living systems that are “ontologically subjective.” Orthogonally jumping to facts about the brain has the effect of bypassing the moral and institutional groundwork necessary to explore the real dimensions of subjectivity. Without a commitment to the arts of human energy and self-control, not even a theory of conversation can deliver us from the ennui of materialism.