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I've been getting into the work of John Searle recently because he has a fascinating approach to accounting for consciousness. He's got an awesome 15min TED talk that introduces the most basic concepts that I would highly recommend. Through his work I've added some really great new concepts into my vocabulary such as intentionality, aspectual shape, ontological subjectivity and irreducibility. The focus of John's work is on the philosophy of mind. Which if you are not familiar, basically, goes back to Descartes who proposed that the mind and the physical world are of different substances. A Dualism that regards the mind as being a part of god separate from the physical. There is a tension here on the side for both the mystics and the materialists. The supposed problem is the irreducibility of consciousness. That is that the actual subjective first hand experience that is our conscious experience cannot have a full account through the reduction to lower level processes. Take the example of the color red. Imagine a person who was born truly color blind in the strictest sense. They grow up to be an expert on colors. They know exactly the wavelengths of colors and that red is 600 nanometers in the diameter of these spiraling streams of light. They have seen and measured the effects that these light waves have on the cones and rods in our eyes. They have watched the visual sense data get integrated in an fMRI into our unified conscious experience. And yet they have absolutely no clue what the color red looks like. Think about that for a second. Certain things in reality really are irreducible, and the atomic theory of matter cannot fully account for many of the emergent phenomena in this world. And that doesn't make them any less based in science or real. We don't use physics to account for biological processes. We have a science for that. It's called biology. But this is unsettling for most people who consider this. The mystics tend to want to make the physical the part that is unreal and regard the mind as having primacy over reality, if it does exist. Deepak Chopra says that we all collectively create the physical world through our imagination, for example. The materialists regard those inescapably subjective phenomena as unreal or not based in science and so they disregard the mind and seek to explain consciousness as being like a computer. And if we can only figure out the program, we can have a full account of consciousness that includes beliefs, pains, desires, decision making and all the rest of the subjective first hand experiences we have our own consciousness. John Searle doesn't accept this dualism. Neither does he waste his time on the mystics. What he focuses on is the materialist account of consciousness and how a model of computation cannot ever explain consciousness. He also includes an awesome critique of behaviorism and of Freud's model of the unconscious that will flip some things on their head for you. It certainly changed the way I looked at the unconscious. What I find so refreshing about the whole approach is that he accounts for consciousness in a way that totally accepts our experience of our decision to act in certain ways. Me deciding to lift my arm is what actually happened, is a valid description of the events. He doesn't try to reduce it away to a level of description that says my synapses fired in my motor cortex sending a electrical and chemical information from my brain to my arm activating the muscles in my arm to retract and lift my arm. As if that explained anything about consciousness in the first place. He will convince you that the materialist position on the philosophy of the mind is illogical and anti-scientific despite the enormous support in the world of academia and (many of) those in cognitive science. The book is The Rediscovery of the Mind.