Searle's Wisdom Tooth
Biological naturalism: consciousness as digestion
First published: J. Searle, *The Rediscovery of the Mind* (1992).
A wisdom tooth has chemical-causal properties that are not "physical" in a reductive sense, but no one thinks teeth are non-physical. Mind is like that — biologically real but irreducible.
Searle's "biological naturalism" insists that consciousness is a real biological phenomenon, fully natural and caused by neurobiological processes, but not reducible to (or eliminable in favour of) those processes. His analogy: a wisdom tooth's causal properties are biological, irreducible to bare physics in any usefully reductive way, but uncontroversially natural. Mind, on Searle's view, is similarly natural but irreducible — neither classical materialism nor dualism captures its mode of being. The position is a live (if minority) alternative to both physicalism and panpsychism in the philosophy of mind.
Formulation
Premise: physical phenomena have causal properties that depend on, but are not reducible to, their micro-physical constituents (e.g., teeth, digestion, photosynthesis). Premise: no one calls these non-physical. Conclusion: consciousness can be biological, natural, non-reductively physical, without being dualist or eliminable.
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Physicality: a middle position between dualism and reductive materialism.
Matter
Bears on Matter · Ontological Status: are higher-level biological properties real-but-irreducible features of matter?
Responses — How Schools Engage
Affirms / takes the bait 1
A process metaphysics finds Searle's position natural: consciousness is a process, irreducible to substrate, fully natural.
Denies / rejects the premise 1
Searle's position is incoherent: either consciousness is reducible to neurobiology (reductive materialism) or it has its own ontological status (some flavour of dualism). The middle position is unstable.
Reframes the question 3
Reductive naturalism resists Searle's claim of irreducibility; non-reductive naturalism finds Searle's position congenial but adds clearer specification of supervenience relations.
Higher-level biological properties are structural; the irreducibility Searle insists on is a feature of structural levels, not a unique status for mind.
Searle's insistence on first-person ontology of consciousness is congenial to phenomenology; the analytic framing of "biological naturalism" is more contentious.
Holds it inconclusive 1
A live position with both supporters and critics. The supervenience-without-reduction structure remains contested.
Related Experiments
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Further reading
- Searle, *The Rediscovery of the Mind* (1992)
- Searle, *Mind* (2004)
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