John Searle on Consciousness and Causality

John R. Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959. About "consciousness" Searle argues for a view he calls biological naturalism, which holds that consciousness is BOTH a real subjective experience and caused by the physical processes of the brain. He often compares subjective activity to digestion - i.e. something that a body endowed with certain organs does. Consciousness, for Searle, is not mysterious nor abstract, but just what brains in environments do.

Searle introduced the technical term the Background in his book, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983). Searle calls the Background the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Searle argues that the concept of a Background is similar to the concepts provided by several other thinkers, including Wittgenstein's private language argument ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background") and Bourdieu's habitus.

And I argue that an apprehension the Background reveals both a deep biological unconsciousness that limits and liberates thought, and a radical sociophysical consistency ("the Great Outdoors") at the heart of subjectivity. Confronting the Background conceptually and phenomenologically gives way to an experience of the auto-affectivity of the body as flesh embedded in a consequential world.

Below is Searle's 2012 talk 'Consciousness and Causality' delivered at this summer's Evolution and Function of Consciousness Summer School held at the University of Montreal as part of Alan Turing Year.
Here Searle presents many of his classical arguments about human subjectivity. Check it out: