Review of "The Rediscovery of the Mind" by John Searle

The following is an earlier version of a paper which appeared in Objectivity, vol. 2, no. 1, under the title "Reality of Mind".

Introduction

Prof. Searle is famous for several attacks on the orthodoxy of modern philosophy of mind and cognitive science. The Rediscovery of the Mind is the latest --- and the best --- installment in Searle's continuing defense of the mind against those who would try to deny it or explain it away.

In reading Searle's previous writings on the subject [1], I have always been bothered by his puzzling failure to make any reference to consciousness. His latest book corrects this omission, in spades; The Rediscovery of the Mind is very explicitly about consciousness, and its main theme is the importance of studying consciousness.

In this review I will discuss the strengths of Searle's book, and some of the important points he makes, as well as the book's weaknesses. Specifically, I believe that Searle could greatly improve his theory by using some of the relevant points from Objectivism. As we'll see below, even though philosophy of mind is an area on which Rand has written very little, Objectivism has some crucial insights that are highly relevant to this area.

I: Searle's criticism of materialism

Searle's bright, forceful, and well-deserved swipes at his colleagues are, as always, a delight to read. I am sometimes struck, in reading such remarks, by how reminiscent their style is of Ayn Rand. Consider, for example, his characterization of eliminative materialism:

The idea is that, contrary to a widely held belief, there really aren't any such things as beliefs. [2]

Or:

If you are tempted to functionalism, I believe you do not need refutation, you need help. [3]

Or his explanation of a common rhetorical technique in modern philosophy of mind, which he dubs "the heroic-age-of-science maneuver":

When an author gets in deep trouble, he or she tries to make an analogy with his or her own claim and some great scientific discovery of the past. Does the view seem silly? Well, the great scientific geniuses of the past seemed silly to their ignorant, dogmatic, and prejudiced contemporaries. Galileo is the favorite historical analogy. .... Other favorites are phlogiston and vital spirits, and again the idea is to bully the reader into supposing that if he or she doubts, for example, that computers are actually thinking, it can only be because the reader believes in something as unscientific as phlogiston or vital spirits. [4]

The more serious substance of Searle's criticism, again, uses a remarkably Rand-like method; his method can accurately be summed up by Rand's dictum: "check your premises". Searle is not satisfied to analyze technical issues on his opponents' terms, and expose their specific errors on these issues (which is what he did in many cases in the past, e.g. in his "Chinese Room" argument); instead, Searle identifies, and challenges, his opponents' basic premises, and the false dichotomies on which their approach to the issues is based.

Searle sees one major false premise at the root of all the problems with modern philosophy of mind; the false premise referred to by Objectivists as the mind-body dichotomy.

Along with the Cartesian tradition we have inherited a vocabulary, and with the vocabulary a certain set of categories, within which we are historically conditioned to think about these problems. .... The vocabulary includes a series of apparent oppositions: "physical" vs. "mental", "body" vs. "mind", "materialism" vs. "mentalism", "matter" vs. "spirit". Implicit in these oppositions is the thesis that the same phenomenon under the same aspects cannot literally satisfy both terms. .... Thus we are supposed to believe that if something is mental, it cannot be physical; that if it is a matter of spirit, it cannot be a matter of matter. [5]

Searle's complete rejection of this dichotomy is stated repeatedly, clearly and forcefully, and serves as the central theme of his book.

If there is one thesis that I would like to get across in this discussion, it is simply this: the fact that a feature is mental does not imply that it is not physical; the fact that a feature is physical does not imply that it is not mental. [6]

* * *

What I want to insist on, ceaselessly, is that one can accept the obvious facts of physics --- for example, that the world is made up entirely of physical particles and fields of force --- without at the same time denying the obvious facts about our own experiences --- for example, that we are all conscious and that our conscious states have quite specific irreducible phenomenological properties. [7]

Searle sees the "mind-body problem" as a pseudo-problem, which appears difficult only because of the prevalent false premise of the mind-body dichotomy.

Searle's view of the "mind-body problem", and of the nature of consciousness, is stated in the opening sentences of his book:

The famous mind-body problem, the source of so much controversy over the past two millenia, has a simple solution. This solution has been available to any educated person since serious work began on the brain nearly a century ago, and, in a sense, we all know it to be true. Here it is: mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain. [8]

The central target of Searle's criticism is what he calls "the Materialist Tradition in the Philosophy of Mind". The first two chapters in Searle's book are a description, and criticism, of materialism in general and of its various forms: behaviourism, type identity theory, token identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism.

Searle's description of the essential theory of materialism, common to all its forms, is:

[materialists] deny the existence of any irreducible mental phenomena in the world. They want to deny that are any irreducible phenomenological properties, such as consciousness. [9]

The form of materialism of which this description is most clearly true is the theory known as "eliminative materialism", the theory which explicitly denies the existence of the mind or of mental states such as beliefs, desires, etc.

In its most sophisticated version, eliminative materialism argues as follows: our commonsense beliefs about the mind constitute a kind of primitive theory, a "folk psychology". But as with any theory, the entities postulated by the theory can only be justified to the extent that the theory is true. Just as the failure of the phlogiston theory of combustion removed any justification for believing in the existence of phlogiston, so .... if it turns out that folk psychology is false, we would be unjustified in believing in the existence of beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, etc. According to the eliminative materialists, it seems very likely that folk psychology will turn out to be false. It seems likely that a "mature cognitive science" will show that .... the entities that we have always supposed to exist, our ordinary mental entities, do not really exist. And therefore, we have at long last a theory of mind that simply eliminates the mind. [10]

Other materialists are less blatant.

Very few people are willing to come right out and say that consciousness does not exist. But it has recently become common for authors to redefine the notion of consciousness so that it no longer refers to actual conscious states, that is, inner, subjective, qualitative, first-person mental states, but rather to publicly observable third-person phenomena. Such authors pretend to think that consciousness exists, but in fact they end up denying its existence. [11]

Searle identifies materialism not as a rejection of dualism, but as a consequence of dualism. Materialists accept the mind-body dichotomy; given this premise, it follows that consciousness and mental phenomena, if they exist, are separate from matter and beyond the realm of natural science. In a desire to accept a world view consistent with science, they are therefore led to deny consciousness, or try to explain it away.

II: The irreducibility of consciousness

Central to Searle's analysis of the mind, and to his criticism of materialism, is his view of consciousness as irreducible.

Searle identifies the meaning of reduction as:

The basic intuition that underlies the concept of reductionism seems to be the idea that certain things might be shown to be nothing but certain other sorts of things. Reductionism, then, leads to a peculiar form of the identity relation that we might as well call the "nothing-but" relation: in general, A's can be reduced to B's, iff A's are nothing but B's. [12]

Searle's central point is that consciousness can't be reduced in this way, i.e. that there is no way, in principle, that consciousness can be analysed as "nothing but" something else.

This is a fundamental issue in Objectivism, and on which Searle's position is very similar to Rand.

Rand identifies consciousness as a philosophical axiom, implicit in all facts and not reducible to any other facts.

Existence exists --- and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. ....

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two --- existence and consciousness --- are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum. [13]

An axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest. [14]

Searle identifies two basic aspects of every perception, which he calls (in terminology which Objectivists would regard as unfortunate) "objective physical reality" and "subjective appearance"; by "subjective appearance" Searle is referring to the conscious experience of perception, and so these two terms correspond to Rand's axioms of existence and consciousness. Searle then notes that reduction involves redefining an aspect of "subjective appearance" in terms of the "objective physical reality" which causes it.

We redefine heat and color in terms of the underlying causes of both the subjective experiences and the other surface effects of the underlying causes. "Real" heat is now defined in terms of the kinetic energy of the molecular movements, and the subjective feel of heat that we get when we touch a hot object is now treated as just a subjective appearance caused by heat, as an effect of heat. It is no longer part of real heat. A similar distinction is made between real color and the subjective experience of color. [15]

Searle's basic argument for the irreducibility of consciousness is that consciousness is subjective experience, and so the above pattern of reduction can't be applied to it.

It is a general feature of such reductions that the phenomenon is defined in terms of the "reality" and not in terms of the "appearance". But we can't make that sort of appearance-reality distinction for consciousness because consciousness consists in the appearances themselves. [16]

As I mentioned, Objectivists would regard the terminology of this argument as unfortunate. The terminology is strongly based on the premise of representationalism, the idea that we are conscious, not of entities in the outside world, but of representations, or appearances, that our mind creates of these entities [17]. However, the substance of Searle's argument does not depend on representationalism. Searle's argument is based on the recognition of our conscious experiences as an irreducible aspect of all perception --- which is equivalent to Rand's point about the axiomatic status of consciousness.

Searle does not (and Rand would not) deny that it is possible to causally explain the existence of the faculty of consciousness; on the contrary, as we see in the quote above from p. 1, he stresses that mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes. But these neurophysiological processes cause mental phenomena, they do not --- and, in principle, can not --- constitute mental phenomena. And it is a self-evident, directly observable fact about mental phenomena that they are active, causally efficacious. The existence of mental phenomena can be causally explained by reference to neurophysiological structures and processes, but specific mental phenomena can't be causally reduced to neurophysiological processes; mental processes have their own causal powers, which can not be analysed as the sum of the causal powers of neurophysiological processes. (On this point, unfortunately, Searle is not at all clear, and at some points he states that such causal reduction is possible. I regard this as the most serious weakness of Searle's book, and I will discuss it at length below.)

Consciousness as intrinsic to the brain

Another central aspect of Searle's analysis of the mind is his distinction between those attributes of an entity which are intrinsic, and those which are "observer-relative".[18] The neurophysiological properties of the brain, and its mental properties, are both intrinsic to the brain.

In contrast, all computational or information-processing descriptions of processes in the brain (except when the computation is done consciously) are completely observer-relative.

To say that something is functioning as a computational process is to say something more than that a pattern of physical events is occuring. It requires the assignment of a computational interpretation by some agent. Analogously, we might discover in nature objects that had the same sort of shape as chairs and that could therefore be used as chairs; but we could not discover objects in nature that were functioning as chairs, except relative to some agents who regarded them or used them as chairs.[19]

Computational interpretations can be --- in some contexts, appropriately --- assigned to brain processes; in the same way, such interpretations can be assigned in some contexts to any other physical process. But such interpretations are not describing facts about the process, independent of an observer; they are describing an observer's way of understanding the process.

Searle's main criticism of the orthodoxy of modern cognitive science is that it is based on treating brain processes as intrinsically computational. Writers such as Dennett or Churchland get the nature of our mental life precisely backwards: computation --- which, at most, is an observer-relative feature of brain processes --- is treated as if it were intrinsic; whereas consciousness and intentionality --- which are intrinsic facts about the brain --- are either denied or treated as if they were observer-relative (as in Dennet's intentional stance").

III: The function of consciousness

I believe Searle's view of consciousness is valid as far as it goes; and it is a refreshing change from more mainstream views. There is, however, a very serious omission in his theory, which is the main weakness of his book: his lack of any discussion of the function served by consciousness.

Searle repeats, in many statements throughout his book (such as the statement quoted above from p. 1), that consciousness is caused by neurophysiological processes. However, he never says that consciousness, in turn, it causes anything.

The closest Searle comes to addressing this issue is in his brief discussion, and rejection, of epiphenomenalism:

The fact that the mental features are supervenient on neuronal features in no way diminishes their causal efficacy. The solidity of the piston is causally supervenient on its molecular structure, but this does not make solidity epiphenomenal; and similarly, the causal supervenience of my present back pain on micro events in my brain does not make the pain epiphenomenal. [20]

However, this is a purely negative discussion, and as such, seems purely terminological. There is no positive discussion of what it is that the back pain --- or some other mental phenomenon --- causes, and whether it causes anything beyond the sum of what its micro-event constituents cause by themselves. And without such a positive discussion, the substance of Searle's view becomes indistinguishable from epiphenomenalism.

Searle explicitly separates consciousness from behaviour. He discusses several thought-experiments, in which a person's brain is replaced by silicon components which cause precisely the same behaviour as his original brain, but without being conscious. [21] Searle's motivation for these thought-experiments is laudable; he is attacking the behaviourist notion that consciousness is reducible to certain types of behaviour. However, he ends up implying much more than a rejection of behaviourism; he implies a total separation of consciousness from behaviour, and, consequently, a view of consciousness as having no physical effects.

Ontology and causation

I believe the basic problem, at the root of this omission, is in Searle's false separation of ontology from causation.

I need first to make explicit the distinctions between ontology, epistemology, and causation. There is a distinction between answers to the questions, What is it? (ontology), How do we find out about it? (epistemology), and What does it do? (causation). For example, in the case of the heart, the ontology is that it is a large piece of muscle tissue in the chest cavity; the epistemology is that we find out about it by using stethescopes, EKGs, and in a pinch we can open up the chest and have a look; and the causation is that the heart pumps blood through the body. [22]

Searle's distinction, in this passage, between ontology and epistemology, is completely valid and very important. However, his separation of ontology and causation is invalid. The heart's capacity to pump blood through our body is an essential aspect of what the heart is.

This is a basic point in which Searle would benefit greatly from the insights of Objectivism. The Objectivist-Aristotelian view of causality is as the law that entities must act according to their identity.

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. [23]

On this view, ontology and causation can't be separated. In contrast, on the Humean view of causality --- as connection of events to events --- ontology and causation are only incidentally related, and so Searle's separation makes sense. This separation is the source of Searle's attempt to explain what consciousness is without any account of what it does.

Darwinism and teleology

A related, more specific, error on Searle's part is his view of teleology, and of its relation to Darwinian evolution.

There is nothing normative or teleological about Darwinian evolution. Indeed, Darwin's major contribution was precisely to remove purpose and teleology from evolution, and substitute for it purely natural forms of selection. Darwin's account shows that the apparent teleology of biological processes is an illusion. .... There is no factual difference about the heart that corresponds to the difference between saying (1) The heart causes the pumping of blood. and saying, (2) The function of the heart is to pump blood. But 2 assigns a normative status to the sheer brute causal facts about the heart, and it does this because of our interest in the relation of this fact to a whole lot of other facts, such as our interest in survival. In short, Darwinian mechanisms and even biological functions themselves are entirely devoid of purpose or teleology. All of the teleological features are entirely in the mind of the observer. [24]

This is a very common misinterpretation of the meaning of Darwinism. Searle accepts it completely, and it plays a central --- and unfortunate --- role in his approach to the nature of consciousness.

Darwin was himself a strong advocate of natural teleology, and explicitly saw his theory of evolution as a vindication of teleology. His approach to teleology, however, was significantly different from the approaches prevalent at the time, in that it did not involve divine design or an internal vital force; with no explicit philosophical defense of Darwin's view of teleology, his theory was widely misunderstood as rejecting teleology. Several recent writers, however, have provided theories of teleology which fit, and allow a full, explicit understanding of, Darwin's form of teleological explanation. [25]

Biological functions share two essential characteristics with conscious purposes: the organ or faculty has value-significance for the organism; and it exists it because of this value-significance. An organism's needs, the requirements of its survival, have the same role for unconscious biological functions as desires have for conscious, purposeful action; they determine what is beneficial, or of value, to the organism. And structures and faculties are naturally selected for their benefit to the organism's survival. The previous instances of a biological faculty in the organism's ancestors have contributed to their survival, thus making it possible for this organism to be born and, consequently, for this faculty to operate in it. A biological organ or faculty's value-significance for the organism --- as manifested in previous instances of the same organ or faculty --- is therefore the cause of its existence. This is the basis for classifying this value-significance as its "final cause", or goal.

Note that this basis is intrinsic to the facts about the organism and its evolution; it does not depend on the observer. To take Searle's example of the heart, there is a factual difference between 1 and 2; 2 states that the heart causes the pumping of blood, that the pumping of blood helps the organism's survival, and that the heart's existence was caused, through natural selection, by the beneficial effects of its capacity to pump blood. It is therefore an intrinsic fact about the heart that its function is to pump blood (rather than, for example, to produce a thumping sound).

Therefore, on a proper understanding of teleology and its relation to Darwinian evolution, the function that any biological faculty serves in the organism's life is a central aspect of its identity. An understanding of consciousness --- as of the heart-beat, digestion, or any other biological faculty --- depends on a thorough understanding of its effects and of its goal. On Searle's view, on the other hand, the existence of consciousness does not serve any goal, except as an attribution made to it by an observer; and, consequently, its effects, if any, are a minor aspect of its nature.

The selectional advantage of consciousness

Searle does devote a brief discussion to the selectional advantage of consciousness. [26] His claim on this point is:

We can make a general claim about the selectional advantage of consciousness: Consciousness gives us much greater powers of discrimination than unconscious mechanisms would have.

This is a valid point. It is quite similar to David Kelley's discussion of the role of consciousness, as a means of discriminating the larger amount of information available to the more complex animals, and of controlling choices among the larger range of actions open to them. [27]There is, however, a significant difference: for Kelley, this is a crucial point regarding the nature of consciousness, central to his discussion; for Searle, it is no more than an afterthought, discussed in a brief section and not integrated to the rest of his theory. Searle clearly regards this as a very minor point about consciousnesse; as his earlier discussion of the silicon-brain thought experiments demonstrates, he sees nothing wrong in principle with the possibility that you could have precisely the same powers of discrimination, and consequently the same behaviour, without consciousness.

The basic reasons for this difference, between Searle and Kelley's approaches to this point, are the two points I discuss above: Kelley accepts the Objectivist-Aristotelian view of causality, as the law of identity applied to action. And he accepts the Objectivist view of natural teleology. The combination of these two implies that the results of consciousness in action, and the goal it serves in the organism's life, are central to understanding its nature.

There is also another reason for this difference between Kelley's and Searle's approaches. While Rand wrote very little about the basic nature of consciousness, she did write a very detailed discussion of one central aspect of the workings of human consciousness --- namely, the conceptual faculty. [28] Her central focus in that entire discussion is the goal which the conceptual faculty serves for man's life: the principle of unit-economy. All her points about the workings of the conceptual faculty are always fully integrated to this idea of the faculty's goal. Her approach in that discussion serves as a model, which other Objectivists, such as Kelley, follow in their discussions of other aspects of consciousness. I believe that this model served an important role in setting Kelley's approach to discussing the basic nature of consciousness. And it is precisely this model which is sorely lacking for Searle.

IV: Free Will

Given the scope of Searle's book, and its stated aim of setting straight the basic problem at the root of modern philosophy of mind, one would naturally expect to find some discussion of free will, and of how Searle's theory relates to the understanding of this issue. It is very remarkable, therefore, that there is no discussion whatever of free will in Searle's book; the subject is simply never mentioned, except in one brief remark [29].

In a previous book [30], Searle has stated that he regards the issue of free will as a basic mystery, which he is unable to solve and which, further, is likely to never be solved. I think it is fair to assume that Searle still holds this view of the issue, and that is why he was not inclined to discuss it.

When reading Minds, Brains and Science, several years ago, I was very puzzled by Searle's statements on the subject of free will. Searle regards consciousness as an irreducible phenomenon which is caused by underlying material processes, which is unique to a certain class of entities, and which is fully a part of the natural world; most modern philosophers of mind greatly resist admitting that such a phenomenon can exist, but Searle has, quite clearly and forcefully, accepted it. Shouldn't it, then, be easy for him to make the next step, and admit that there's another irreducible phenomenon --- namely, free will --- which is caused by some of the same underlying material processes, which is unique to a subset of the same class of entities, and which is also fully a part of the natural world? After reading The Rediscovery of the Mind, I believe I finally understand why Searle is unable to accept free will.

In David Kelley's discussion [31], free will is a natural extension of consciousness, both in its evolutionary function and in its epistemological status. Kelley sees free will as having evolved for a function which is an extension of the function of consciousness --- a means of discriminating the amount of information available to man, and controlling choices among the range of actions open to man, both of which are far larger than can be handled by the consciousness of any other animal. Epistemically, Kelley sees free will, like consciousness, as an evident fact, caused by underlying material processes and irreducible to them; having accepted the existence of consciousness, having accepted that there exists such an irreducible phenomenon, it is natural to accept that there can also exist another such phenomenon, namely free will.

The key point here is that Objectivists see ontology and causation as essentially the same; so every phenomenon that exists in reality necessarily has effects on the relevant entity's (in the case of consciousness, the animal's) actions. Searle, on the other hand, separates ontology and causation. He then thinks of consciousness, basically, as relating only to the realm of ontology; it is a real phenomenon, but it does not cause anything, or, at least, it is possible in principle that it does not cause anything. And this, apparently, is the only kind of irreducible phenomenon which Searle is willing to defend.

Free will, in contrast, clearly relates to the realm of causation; there's just no way to make any sense of a notion of free will that has no effects on man's actions. And in the realm of causation, Searle continues to hold the same dualistic assumption which he attacked so forcefully in the realm of ontology. He can't accept that there could be an irreducible phenomenon which is caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain, is itself a feature of the brain, and has effects on the animal's actions.

V: Conclusion

I have tried in this review to cover the essential issues in Searle's view of consciousness. There are several other specific issues discussed in the book --- e.g., the nature of the unconscious and its relation to consciousness --- which I have not addressed here, and on which Searle makes some very interesting and illuminating points.

Overall, I think Searle's book is a very important contribution to the philosophy of mind. Searle does an excellent job of identifying the false premises at the bottom of most of today's theories in philosophy of mind. And while his positive theory has some essential omissions and weaknesses, as discussed above, it points the discussion to the important --- and generally neglected --- issues.

At the same time, this book is also a good illustration of how modern philosophers --- even (or rather, especially) the best of them, such as Searle --- could greatly benefit from the relevant insights offered by Objectivism.

footnotes

Introduction

[1] e.g., Minds, Brains, and Science

I: Searle's criticism of materialism

[2] The Rediscovery of the Mind, p. 6

[3] p. 9

[4] p. 5. Searle, quite correctly, cites the Churchlands as prime examples of users of "the heroic-age-of-science maneuver". The specific example he cites is Patricia Churchland, "Reply to McGinn", Times Literary Supplement, March 13, 1987.

[5] p. 14. Searle's discussion of the history of thought, in the entire book, deals exclusively with modern philosophy. This is an unfortunate, but very common, approach in contemporary writings on technical philosophy. Searle never mentions any philosopher earlier than Descartes. One consequence of this is that he attributes the mind-body dichotomy to Descartes, ignoring the role of earlier philosophers, most notably Plato and Augustine.

[6] p. 14

[7] p. 28

[8] p. 1

[9] p. 27

[10] p. 46. As a clear example of this argument, Searle cites Paul Churchland, "The Ontological Status of Intentional States: Nailing Folk Psychology to its Perch", Behavioural and Brain Sciences 11, 1988, no. 3: 507--508.

[11] p. 7. The examples Searle cites of this phenomenon are Armostrong's The Nature of Mind, and Dennett's Consciousness Explained.

II: The irreducibility of consciousness

[12] pp. 112--113

[13] Atlas Shrugged, p. 942. Page numbers from Atlas Shrugged refer to the paperback edition.

[14] Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, expanded second edition, p. 55.

[15] p. 119.

[16] pp. 121--122.

[17] For a detailed Objectivist analysis and criticism of representationalism, see David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses.

[18] Central to Rand's philosophy, both in epistemology and in ethics, is her distinction between the intrinsic --- that which is inherent in entities, independently of man; the subjective --- that which is created by man, independent of reality; and the objective --- that which is based on man's active identification and evaluation of the facts of reality. Searle's use of "intrinsic" is almost exactly equivalent to the Objectivist use of this term. His use of "observer-relative" covers, in Objectivist terminology, both the objective and the subjective; he mostly uses it to refer to the objective, though he conflates the two to some extent.

[19] p. 211

III: The function of consciousness

[20] p. 126

[21] pp. 65--70

[22] p. 18

[23] Atlas Shrugged, p. 962.

[24] pp. 51--52

[25] For a discussion and examples of Darwin's endorsement of teleology and the way it's been misunderstood, see James Lennox, "Darwin was a Teleologist", Biology and Philosophy, vol. 8, pp. 409--421, 1993. The fullest, most consistent explanation and defense of the nature of teleology as implied by Darwinian evolution is given by Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger, in The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts. The brief discussion below is based on Binswanger.

[26] pp. 106--108

[27] David Kelley, "The Nature of Free Will", taped lectures.}

[28] Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

IV: Free Will

[29] p. 227

[30] Minds, Brains and Science

[31] David Kelley, "The Nature of Free Will", taped lectures

V: Conclusion

No footnotes.