- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
correlates of conscious versus unconscious, but for the correlates of different types
of processing and experience. What he calls a ‘fundamental theory of conscious-
ness’ would formulate simple and universal laws that explain these connections.
Yet, argues Chalmers, data about conscious experience cannot be expressed wholly
in terms of measures of brain processes and the like. In other words, first-person
data are irreducible to third-person data (Varela and Shear, 1999).
Along with Chalmers, the B team includes Searle, Nagel, Levine, Pinker, and many
others. Searle (1997) agrees with Chalmers about the irreducibility, although they
disagree about much else (Chalmers, 1997). Searle puts it this way: ‘consciousness
has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything
that has third-person or objective ontology. If you try to reduce or eliminate one
in favor of the other you leave something out’ (Searle, 1997, p. 212).
Searle asks us to pinch our own forearms. Do it now and see what happens. Accord-
ing to Searle, two totally different kinds of thing happen. First, neuron firings begin
at the receptors and end up in the brain, and second, a few hundred milliseconds
after the pinch, we experience the feeling or quale of pain. These are the objective
and subjective events respectively, and one causes the other. By ‘subjective ontol-
ogy’, Searle means that ‘conscious states only exist when experienced by a subject
and they exist only from the first-person point of view of that subject’ (1997, p. 120).
According to Searle, the difference is not just epistemic – that you can know about
your pain in a way that nobody else can – it is ontological: pains and other qualia
have a subjective or first-person mode of existence, while neuron firings have an
objective or third-person mode of existence. Others have argued that conscious-
ness is epistemically but not ontologically irreducible. For
example, Metzinger explains that our conscious experience ‘is
truly an individual first-person perspective. Our phenomenal
model of reality is an individual picture. Yet all the functional
and representational facts constituting this unusual situation
can be described objectively, and are open to scientific inquiry’
(2003, p. 589). In other words, if we knew everything that was
going on in the body and brain, we could identify the indi-
vidual’s perspective, and there would then be nothing more
to discover. For Searle, on the other hand, there is not just a
subjective point of view; there are irreducible subjective facts,
and these are what a science of consciousness has to explain.
‘Searle’s proposed “first-person” alternative leads to self-con-
tradiction and paradox at every turning’, claims Dennett
(1997, p. 118). On his A team, he lists the Churchlands, Andy
Clark, Quine, Hofstadter, and many others. For them, studying
consciousness does not mean studying special inner, private,
ineffable qualia, but means studying what people say and do,
for there is no other way of getting at the phenomena, and
when we really understand all the third-person facts about
brains and behaviour there will be nothing else left to explain.
Here we meet another classic argument: the incorrigibility of the first-person view.
The B team argues that we have privileged access to our own experiential states,
Searle’s ‘subjective facts’; that is, only we can observe them and we cannot be wrong
about them. The A team contends that we have privileged access only to how it
‘the development of
more sophisticated
methodologies for
investigating first-
person data [. . .] is the
greatest challenge
now facing a science of
consciousness’
(Chalmers, 1999)
‘consciousness has a
first-person or subjective
ontology and so cannot
be reduced to anything
that has third-person or
objective ontology’
(Searle, 1997, p. 212)
FIGURE 17.1 • According to Searle’s ‘subjective
ontology’, two completely
different things happen when
you pinch yourself. There are
the objective effects on skin
and neurons, and the irreducible
subjective fact of feeling the pain.