Mental Causation in Searle's "Biological Naturalism"

Abstract

Searle calls it Many other simple, easy, and obvious solutions are offered throughout the book, for example, to the problems of other minds (76), consciousness (93), and reductionism (18). The bad news, as you would expect, is that none of these solutions seem either simple or obvious; at least in the case of the mind-body problem, Searle's solution strikes me as fraught with ambiguities and difficulties-of the sorts that are not really new. There is much in Searle's book that I find refreshing and stimulating, and, on some important points-in particular, on the issue of the purported properties studied by cognitive science, namely formal/computational properties allegedly abstracted out of the physical/biological nature of cognitive agents-we are in basic sympathy, if not full agreement. But I believe that his biological naturalism, which provides the basic metaphysical scheme for him, needs to be rethought from the ground up. There might really be a simple solution to the mind-body problem, but I don't think we find it in Searle's biological naturalism. Why has practically everyone missed Searle's simple solution that, according to him, has been staring us in the face for a hundred years? According to Searle's recounting of the history of philosophy of mind, it's because most of us, including contemporary materialists and functionalists, are still in the