[Tyler]

A Review of Searle's Freedom and Neurobiology
     

A robots.net reader sent a link to a Times
Online review of John Searle's new book, Freedom
and Neurobiology.
The review, by David
Papineau, offers some insight into both the book and
Searle:  "Whenever he is faced with a conflict between common sense
and arcane philosophical doctrine, he backs common sense every
time." The problem comes when common sense and reality don't match
up, "When everyday thinking is incoherent, apparently obvious truths
may need to be jettisoned. Sometimes it just isn’t enough to hold fast
to common thinking. In cases like these, Searle’s down-home attitude can
sometimes look like little more than refusal to address the real
questions." In this book Searle takes on free will and, not
surprisingly, takes an opposite view to that of Daniel
C Dennett's in his
book, Freedom
Evolves. Predictably, Searle falls back on the same
explanation for free will that he uses for consciousness, quantum
mechanics. His reasoning seems to be that phenomenon X seems
very mysterious, quantum mechanics seems very mysterious, therefore
quantum mechanics must be the cause of X. That's common sense for you.
   

http://robots.net/article/2452.html