Show-Me the Argument

A Review of John Searle’s Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (Columbia University Press, 2006) by Patrick Todd

John Searle’s enjoyable and eminently readable Freedom and Neurobiology is a short book—a primer, one might say—consisting in a brief introduction to Searle’s work and two rather tangentially related chapters. The first chapter, “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology” (from which the book derives its title) is the more substantial of the two, and suggests what a solution to the “problem of free will” might look like. Chapter two, “Social Ontology and Political Power,” discusses how human beings, as social creatures, create the institutional structures (such as money and government) that allow for political power. It takes an odd set of circumstances to produce a book addressing such noticeably unrelated topics, and, anticipating the reader’s bewilderment, Searle clues us in to the book’s “unusual publication history” in the introduction. In 2001 Searle agreed to allow an editor to publish several lectures given at the Sorbonne, supposing they’d appear independently in a journal or something similar. Searle remained unaware of the publication of an independent monograph until, as he says, “a boxful of books arrived at my home in Berkley,” a fact that allows Searle to deliver what’s surely the book’s wittiest line: “It is the first time in my life that I published a book I did not know I had written.”

Searle spends the first third of the book situating the lectures within a thoroughly naturalistic philosophical context. Searle assumes that the “overriding philosophical question for contemporary philosophy” is as follows: “How do we fit in?” More specifically:

we have a conception of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, institutional, political, speech-act performing, ethical, and free will possessing agents. How can we square this self-conception … with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?

Insofar as Searle treats the question of whether metaphysical naturalism is true as closed, there’s perhaps room to complain here; many philosophers think it isn’t. But the lectures have this much in common: both explore ways in which we might “fit in” to such a naturalistic universe.

The heart of “Chapter 1: Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology” is as follows. We experience ourselves as free agents; for instance, when we rationally deliberate, we don’t experience the causal antecedents of our deliberations as sufficient to compel some particular action or decision. Rather, we oftentimes experience ourselves as having multiple possible courses of action open to us. The problem of free will is “whether the conscious thought processes in the brain, the processes that constitute the experiences of free will, are realized in a neurobiological system that is totally deterministic,” or whether they correspond to some suitably causally indeterministic neurobiological process. If the former, then free will is an illusion, and if the latter, then it’s perhaps not.

Each hypothesis has its problems. The principal difficulty Searle identifies for the former is that it leads to a “biologically expensive” epiphenomenalism: “it says that our experience of freedom plays no causal or explanatory role in our behavior.” Such experiences don’t matter (causally speaking) since, for some particular decision, “it was fixed by the state of our neurons even though we thought we were going through a conscious process of making up our minds among genuine alternatives.” But, Searle says, such a result conflicts with all we know about evolution. Why would evolution give us such experiences if they didn’t play any functional role in what we do? This is a striking argument.

Before looking at problems with the second hypothesis, I think it is worth pausing for a moment to consider one other difficulty Searle could more explicitly raise against the first hypothesis. Searle thinks that, on the first hypothesis, rational agency is, like free will, an illusion. In point of fact, after giving this lecture in London, Searle was asked if he’d accept the first hypothesis if it were shown to be true. Interestingly, Searle says that the question amounts to asking: “If free, rational decision making were shown not to exist, would you freely and rationally make the decision to accept that it does not exist?” But Searle doesn’t press home the apparent force of his point - supposing he’s right. For if hypothesis one entails that rational decision making doesn’t exist, then supposing it is correct, then no one rationally accepts hypothesis one. The hypothesis thus appears self-defeating.

The problems with the second hypothesis are better known. How does one go from mere indeterminism in the brain to rationality? After all, if quantum indeterminism amounts to randomness, then it’s far from clear how introducing indeterminism into the brain will help solve the problem of free will. Here Searle is merely suggestive: we shouldn’t commit the fallacy of composition by supposing that because randomness exists for individual phenomenon on the micro level that it likewise exists at the system level. Nonetheless, Searle admits that it’s far from clear how such an account would go.

In “Chapter Two: Social Ontology and Political Power,” Searle argues that human beings, as social animals, create institutional structures (e.g. money and government) that “increase our power enormously, and…enable us to regulate and organize our lives within the institutional structures that we have created.” Crucial here, Searle says, is the notion of a “status function.” Being a twenty-dollar bill, for instance, is a status function, not because of its physical structure, but because of the collective acceptance of the bill’s function. Likewise, political power depends on collective acceptance. If all this sounds a bit abstract, that’s because it is. In reading the second chapter, it is never clear just what concrete philosophical problems were in need of a solution. This is, I think, the book’s greatest weakness.

Overall, Freedom and Neurobiology is an enjoyable, worthwhile read. However, if one is looking for an in depth, thorough account of Searle’s treatment of the issues here addressed, then one would do best to consult Searle’s more robust (and less exploratory) works, e.g. Rationality in Action and The Construction of Social Reality. But if one wants an introduction to Searle’s thought and a concise statement of his most recent philosophical conclusions concerning free will and social ontology, Freedom and Neurobiology is an excellent book.