Essay Review of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

摘要

John Searle, a very well-known and highly regarded philosopher of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has written extensively about consciousness, bringing into his philosophical works scientific understandings, especially from cognitive science and the biological neurosciences. In his review of a book by a prominent neu-roscientist's foray into the philosophy of self and mind [Damasio, 2010], Searle maintains that for both philosophy and science consciousness involves qualitative, subjective states of feeling or sentience, including subjective awareness of knowledge, thinking, and intentions. Maintaining an embodied view of the mental and physical, Searle argues that a central problem to be solved is how the brain produces consciousness (qualitative subjectivity), as well as how unconscious states cause conscious thoughts and behavior [e.g., Searle, 2000]. Searle criticizes Damasio for giving an account of mind in which 'he does not see how much consciousness is essential for an understanding of mind' [Searle, 2011, p. 52].