Empower
The Breaking Free Show TM:
September 2nd Guest - John Searle
John Searle is Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and is noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and consciousness, on the characteristics of socially constructed versus physical realities, and on practical reason. Searle is known for his development of a thought experiment, called the "Chinese room" argument, in which he set out to prove that human thought was not simply computation; that a computational process in itself cannot have an "understanding" of events and processes.*
According to Searle, “We've inherited this vocabulary that makes it look as if mental and physical name different realms. And it's part of our popular culture, so we sing songs about your body and your soul or we have sayings about how your mind is willing but your flesh is weak, and sometimes the other way around, the flesh is willing but the mind is weak. And we have inherited, not only philosophically but in our religious tradition, we've inherited the idea that there are two quite distinct realms, a realm of the spiritual and a realm of the physical. And I'm fighting against that. I want to say we live in one realm, it's got all of these features, and once you see that then the philosophical mind-body problem dissolves. You're still left with a terrible problem in neurobiology, namely, how does the brain do it, in detail? What are the specific neurotransmitters? What's the neuronal architecture? But I think the philosophical problem, how is it possible that the mental can be a real part of a world that's entirely physical, I think that problem I can solve.”
*Source: https://machineslikeus.com/biographies/john-searle
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