Biological Naturalism and Biological Realismof consciousness cannot be carved off, and still preserve some underlying “real” consciousness.
Consciousness ceases to be real consciousness if its essential features are carved off. The reality of
consciousness is its appearance, and therefore the way we practise ontological reduction in other
cases just does not work in the case of consciousness.
At first glance, the contrast between first-person consciousness and its third-person causal
basis would thus seem to imply an ontological dualism of some sort. Yet, Searle argues that the
ontological irreducibility of consciousness has no deep metaphysical implications. Rather, he
claims it is a trivial consequence of how we define “reduction” and of what we find the most
interesting features of consciousness. He says that the irreducibility of consciousness does not
reveal a deep metaphysical asymmetry as to how conscious experiences relate to their causes.
Searle at one point even goes so far as to admit that (Searle 2004: 120–121) if we wanted, we
could carve off the surface properties of consciousness and redefine it in terms of its underlying
neural causes, thereby conducting an ontological reduction. But the price we would pay for that
is we would lose the vocabulary to talk about the surface properties of consciousness, and sub-
sequently, we would lose the purpose of having any concept of consciousness at all. We would
still need some kind of vocabulary to talk about the surface features of consciousness, because
precisely those features of consciousness are the ones that we care most about, and which are of
most interest to us, says Searle (2004).
Searle’s attempt to avoid the looming metaphysical asymmetry is not entirely convincing. At
this crucial point, Searle is trying to have his cake and eat it too. First, he is trying to have his cake:
According to his own account, consciousness is real and essentially consists of unified qualitative
subjectivity. Its first-person ontology is its essential feature; its very mode of existence. That’s
why it is ontologically irreducible to any objective physical phenomenon. But then he suddenly
also tries to eat his cake by denying that the first-person ontology is in any way metaphysically
asymmetrical with the third-person ontology of the causal basis of consciousness. There is no
ontological breach in the world between brain and consciousness; it is just our definitional
practises and the trivial pragmatics of reduction that make it awkward to ontologically reduce
consciousness to brain processes, but we could do it at least in principle (Searle 2004: 120–121).
Going through with the ontological reduction of consciousness just would not serve our interests
very well, because then we would have difficulties in finding words to describe the features of
consciousness that most interest us, features that we most care about.
At this point, Searle’s line of argument loses its credibility. Suddenly, the essential, defin-
ing ontological features are treated as accidental features of consciousness that are important
only relative to our interests and to our descriptive vocabulary. This move implies that after
all, consciousness as unified qualitative subjectivity was not the definitive characterization of a
phenomenon ontologically and metaphysically different from third-person physical phenomena.
Instead, when we describe conscious states in subjective and qualitative terms (their surface fea-
tures), we just happen to pick up some accidental features of consciousness that happen to interest
us and that we happen to care about.
By this line of argumentation, Searle seems to paint himself into a corner that he has often
warned others about: He warns against confusing the intrinsic features of the world with its
observer-relative features, or descriptions that are merely relative to someone’s interests. Now he
seems to be guilty of exactly that mistake. Or rather, he first treats unified qualitative subjectiv-
ity as intrinsic features of consciousness that define an ontologically and metaphysically distinct
phenomenon irreducible to a third-person basis, but then, when ontological subjectivity starts
to sound like a metaphysical breach in the brain between consciousness and neurophysiol-
ogy, Searle treats it (or its surface features, which also happen to be its essential features) as an
observer- or interest-relative description whose surface features we just happen to be interested