The consciousness of John Searle

I met John at an IBM conference a bit over a year ago in California. Here’s David Papineau of Kinds College in London on John.

Money quote:

Quantum mechanics tells us that the probabilities of physical effects are always fixed by prior physical circumstances. If Searle’s suggestion is right, then this principle breaks down inside the human brain, at those points where conscious minds exert an independent influence on events. This implication is not incoherent, but it seems highly unlikely. Serious physicists are unlikely to start looking for violations of quantum mechanics inside the human skull. With free will, as with consciousness, it seems that Searle’s affinity for common sense has left him in a philosophically unstable position.

Jim