Antti Revonsuoin or to care about, but those features are metaphysically nothing special and imply no ontologi-
cal asymmetry.
Searle leaves room for this kind of fiddling, because his account is ambiguous about the onto-
logical status of consciousness and about the ontological status of higher levels of neurophysiol-
ogy. If a higher macro-level has no ontological status different from its micro-level basis, then
the higher-level merely constitutes a level of description for our practical purposes, not an ontological
level of organization in the world itself. Typically, when Searle talk about levels, he only talks in
terms of “levels of description”:
The fact that the brain has different levels of description is no more mysterious than
that any other physical system has different levels of description.
(Searle 2007: 328)But to have a level of description in our vocabulary when talking about the brain in neuro-
scientific terms does not entail that there is a corresponding ontological level in reality. Perhaps
the levels of description just happen to be convenient tools for our scientific practises. At any
rate, Searle leaves it open whether the levels he talks about are ontologically real, existing
out there in the physical world, independent of our descriptions, or are they only levels of
description that serve human purposes, but no such levels “really” exist in the physical reality
of the brain.
His characterization of consciousness suffers from a similar ambiguity about ontological
status. On the one hand, it seems obvious that he is committed to the view that consciousness
is ontologically and metaphysically different from any third-person, objective, physical phe-
nomena. But on the other hand, when he needs to explain why the ontological reduction of
consciousness is impossible, he ends up denying that consciousness is ontologically or meta-
physically in any way special. Should we carry out the ontological reduction of consciousness
to its neurophysiological basis, all we will lose is a convenient vocabulary, a level of description.
But this betrays Searle’s own definitions of the essential ontological features of consciousness.
Unified qualitative subjectivity defines the fundamental ontology of consciousness, not just a level
of description.
BN thus fails to offer a coherent account of how the first-person ontology of consciousness
is related to the third-person ontology of neurophysiology. Searle suggests that BN solves (or
dissolves) the philosophical mind-body problem, but this turns out to be a mere promissory
note. Significant philosophical problems remain. Searle however never directly addresses them.
The famous problems known as the Explanatory Gap (Levine 1983) and the Hard Problem
(Chalmers 1996) are precisely the types of inescapable philosophical problems that any bio-
logical (or emergent physicalist) theory of consciousness must face. They arise after we commit
ourselves to something like BN, and they arise precisely at the interface between the first-person
ontology of consciousness and the third-person ontology of neurophysiology.
It is too early to hand the explanation of consciousness from philosophers to neuroscientists.
The interaction between philosophy and neuroscience has in fact been going the other way
around recently. Some leading neuroscientists who used to be firmly committed to some-
thing like BN in the 1990s, such as Giulio Tononi (then working with Gerald Edelman) and
Christof Koch (then working with Francis Crick), have recently turned away from biologically
based metaphysics for consciousness (Koch 2012). Because the Explanatory Gap and the Hard
Problem remain unsolved and no imaginable solutions are in sight, neuroscientists may not find
biological approaches such as BN convincing any longer. The failure to directly address these
problems significantly weakens the case for BN.