The question of consciousness

This week, another chance to enjoy a virtuoso public performance by one of the most important philosophers in the English-speaking world today: John Searle, Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley. He's talking at'Towards a Science of Consciousness', a conference put on last year by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. More than 350 years ago, the great French philosopher, Rene Déscartes, declared that the mind is a thing that thinks and does not occupy space, whereas the body occupies space and does not think. The decisive argument for this, he said, is that body is by its nature divisible: you can cut it up into little pieces, but you can't do that with a mind. This seems to imply that the mind and the body have a different ontological status - in other words, you don't lump them together when you draw up your ontology, that's to say your inventory of what the universe contains. This is dualism, and John Searle's not happy with the idea. John Searle: I have been trying to get out of the consciousness business for a very simple reason: I think once we get it in a kind of shape where it admits of empirical study, it's essentially a problem for a neurobiologist.