John Searle - Problem Quotes

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

John Searle

I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is: consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis—you know all the biological phenomena—and once you accept that, most, if not all about the hard problems of consciousness simply evaporate.

John Searle

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.

John Searle

All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher level, or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water, right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules, it's a condition that the system is in; and just as the jar full of water can go from a liquid to solid, depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules. The famous mind body problem is that simple.

John Searle