John Searle - Existence Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

View all John Searle Quotes

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

John Searle

Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

John Searle

Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions.

John Searle

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

John Searle

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

John Searle