Last Friday, John Searle came to speak at Northwestern. Justine passed on an email to me inviting interested grad students to have lunch with him before his “dialogue” with Alan Wallace. I don’t have too much to say about the lunch, but, as you might expect, John Searle is a really down to earth, brilliant guy. He is awesome. The food at the Orrington Hotel’s globe cafe looked somewhat creative but tasted mediocre. The service was good, it was overpriced, but the Cog Sci center footed the bill.

I asked him about why he thought people sometimes called him a dualist and about the free speech movement at Berkeley in the 60’s. A lot of the time was spent listening to two of the other grad students debate some of the issues John has written about and that he was invited to speak on. It was fun though, and I’m glad I can say that I’ve hung out a guy I consider to be one the most important American philosophers. The debate was so-so. Searle was funny and animated as he was the last time I saw him speak. His points are strong and insightful, but as he will say himself, not hard to swallow or particularly earth shattering, but important to keep in mind when debating consciousness and the possibility of it’s existence in things besides brains. I paricularly like his view of biological naturalism, i.e. that consciousness is a ‘natural’, biological process, just like digestion or respiration. Robin has posted a summary of the ‘4′ main points he said he wanted to convey, along with her own ideas on the whole thing. Searle doesn’t really know what consciousness is, and as Colin McGinn, my old Rutgers prof who I’ve cited before says, maybe an understanding of consciousness is beyond the grasp of human intelligence altogether. Searle hasn’t gotten us too much closer to what consciousness really is, but his statements of fact about what it has to be are important to keep in mind.

Alan Wallace was also interesting to listen to, although his presentation was a lot of quotes from William James and John Searle, which made the idea of debating somewhat awkward for Searle at first (not for too long though, he is a philosopher after all). He also enunciates all his words and has funny forced looking facial expressions, much like Frasier. On the whole, I don’t think Wallace did a great job at supporting his thesis. He made a great case for introspection as an important tool in understanding consciousness, in addition to other methods (neuro, cognitive), although a lot of his argument was James’s quotes. His inferential leap came in the claim that through Buddhist meditation practices, science could acquire a tool analogous to the telescope in astronomy or the microscope in microbiology, allowing greater clarity and higher resolution in the study of qualitative, mental phenomena (a.k.a. qualia). Searle came to the same conclusion I did here, and said it, namely, that if this is true, what will the results of applying the method look like? Wallace replied that the practices did have clear results: healthy, peaceful lives for practitioners. But, the real point remained unanswered: why should somebody spend time in (or the bigger question in academia, spend money on) a lab that plans to train a bunch of people in Buddhist meditation methods, in order to attain clearer pictures of mental phenomena, when it’s not clear what such clearer pictures would get you in terms of understanding consciousness. A deep meditative state might allow someone to give you a more detailed description of what a pin prick feels like or the color red looks like when viewed, but I’m not sure that anyone’s actually looking for that. Not to mention the fact that experience from an altered mental state throws into question it’s comparibility to quotidian qualia. Wallace is a trained Tibetan monk — shouldn’t he have something to tell us that would say he’s on the road to offering so new info on the consciousness mystery, some results to show for applying the method before evangelizing it to the world? I haven’t read any of his many books, so if anyone out there has, let me know if there are any juicy findings.