Biological naturalism: can consciousness be both irreducibly first-person and a biological feature of the brain?

John Searle, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Consciousness is a biological feature of human and certain animal brains. It is caused by neurobiological processes and is as much a part of the natural biological order as photosynthesis, digestion, or mitosis.¹ Conscious states are higher-order features of the brain, real, causally efficacious (not epiphenomenal), and ontologically subjective — they exist only from the first-person point of view.²³⁴⁵

The mind-body problem dissolves once we reject the exclusion principle that mental and physical properties must exclude each other. I am neither a dualist (substance or property) nor a reductive materialist. The asymmetry between the third-person micro level (neurons) and the first-person macro level (consciousness) is a fact of nature, not a paradox to be explained away by denying one side.

Sources

1. If there is one theme that runs throughout this book it is this: consciousness is a natural, biological phenomenon. It is as much a part of our biological life as digestion, growth, or photosynthesis.

   The Mystery of Consciousness, pp. 16–17

2. In short, the way to reply to materialism is to point out that it ignores the real existence of consciousness. The way to defeat dualism is simply to refuse to accept the system of categories that makes consciousness out as something nonbiological, not a part of the natural world. I said that we should not think of dualism as a theory exclusive to Western philosophy.

   Mind, Language and Society, pp. 65–66

3. Consciousness is a biological process that occurs in the brain in the way that digestion is a biological process that occurs in the stomach and the rest of the digestive tract. So it looks like consciousness is material and we have a materialist account. But wait! Consciousness has a first-person ontology and so cannot be material, because material things and processes all have a third-person objective ontology.

   Mind, Language and Society, pp. 64–65

4. From the fact that consciousness is entirely accounted for causally by neuron firings, for example, it does not follow that consciousness is nothing but neuron firings. Why not? What is the difference between consciousness and other phenomena that undergo an ontological reduction on the basis of a causal reduction, phenomena such as colour and solidity?

   Philosophy in a New Century, p. 156

5. In its simplest form, the question is how exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause conscious states and processes, and how exactly are those conscious states and processes realized in the brain? So stated, this looks like an empirical scientific problem.

   Philosophy in a New Century, p. 11

Where the argument is made

• Intentionality (1983), Chapter 10
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), Chapters 1-5
• The Mystery of Consciousness (1998), the introductory chapters and the exchanges with Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004), Chapters 4-5
• "Why I am not a Property Dualist" (2002, reprinted in Philosophy in a New Century)

How the argument was received

Held in full force since Intentionality (1983) and defended across every subsequent book on the mind. The position is the single most-pressed point in my philosophy of mind — opponents from both directions push me to admit conceptual dualism (the property dualists) or to admit that subjectivity is unscientific (the eliminativists). I admit neither. The analogy to digestion is structural: just as digestion is a biological feature of the stomach explained in part by the action of cells, consciousness is a biological feature of the brain explained in part by the action of neurons. The apparent asymmetry — that digestion is third-person objective while consciousness is first-person subjective — is a feature of the world, not a defect of the analogy.