ABSTRACT
John Searle reports that in a heated correspondence following a series of articles he wrote about consciousness for the New York Review of Books ‘the intensity of feeling bordered on the religious and the political, with more passion from adherents of computational theory than from adherents of traditional religious doctrines of the soul. The problem for human and cultural development is not dissenting points of view, but failure even to attempt to understand other views, to discredit them, and to rule them out of the type of academic debate regarded as correct in particular institutions. Consciousness is rooted in an inner imagery which relates to past experience, past as well as current perceptions from within and without, and which, to anticipate a later step, becomes self-generating. Hence the mind/cultural reciprocity proceeds, and shapes consciousness as surely as do our material brains.
