nm0140: the er handout i've got a new handout on your handout today last week i 
gave a a sort of supplementary handout for chapters two and three if you didn't 
get that then copies of those handouts are available in the Philosophy 
department office okay that's just to explain what's going on what i've got 
there are the new handouts which i'll give out in just a minute or two secondly 
just before we start apologies for the fact that as you can probably hear i'm 
suffering at the moment and er it's distorting my voice in a variety of ways 
and also er i'm not feeling too good so i hope i survive this lecture can you 
is the is er microphone on 
ss: no 
nm0140: no i thought i thought i couldn't hear anything there it the red light 
is on here er well there we are [laughter] well typical isn't it on a day when 
i'm i'm losing my voice i haven't even got the microphone er well got this 
flight console here maybe i can do something and see what happens 
sf0141: yeah 
sm0142: 
nm0140: 
if i'm bold if i stand in this one place then it's going to be all right 
sf0143: yes 
nm0140: but as you already as you know i'm could actually even just like to 
wander around all the time i'm going to see if i can actually get the the 
remote mike to work 
sf0144: 
nm0140: oh [laughter] i'll just check whether this has worked i've got a these 
mikes to see if the remote mike is working so right is the is it working now 
ss: no 
nm0140: no okay no one more try shh no no okay i'm going to abandon it and just 
speak loudly okay what we're going to do in the er the rest of these lectures 
today tomorrow and next week is to look at the chapters three four five and six 
we're going to spend one lecture on each of those chapters as i said at the 
very beginning we spent relatively more time on the earlier chapters because 
they contained a lot of er material in them and a lot of the kind of basis of 
what s-, Searle er Searle's arguments for 
the later chapters are going to be what i'm going to do for these chapters 
three four five and six is to distribute to you notes quite specific notes on 
the content of those chapters and then in the lectures what i want to do is to 
try and get over to you what the point of the chapter is so there's going to be 
kind of more detailed summation in the handouts than there actually is er in 
the lecture so you'll need the handouts to fill out some of the s-, points the 
handouts form a kind of commentary on the text er whereas the lectures are 
going to try and get what the main point of it all is of each of those chapters 
okay so what i'm going to do now is to hand out er the notes on chapter three 
and tomorrow i'll hand out notes on chapter four next Wednesday on chapter five 
next Thursday on chapter six again just to repeat as always if there are 
previous handouts that you need then you can obtain those from the Philosophy 
department office okay you'll recall that Searle 
says that there are two claims which are typical of strong A-I strong 
artificial intelligence one of those claims is that computers put very very 
briefly that computers can think or that put it slightly less briefly a 
suitably programmed digital computer may at some time at in the future be said 
to be able to think there are of course people in A-I who think that the very 
strongest claim is true that computers already can think an example of such a 
person is the Professor of Cybernetics at this university Kevin Warwick who 
holds rather a controversial opinion and one of those is that already you can 
say that computers can think er the other claim second claim okay first claim 
computers can think the second claim is that a digital computer provides the 
suitable model for thinking about the human brain or put it more briefly the 
human brain is like a digital computer okay that's the second claim that second 
claim that a human brain is like a 
digital computer is the claim which is discussed in chapter three on cognitive 
science okay Searle starts off by observing that we seem to have available to 
us two different ways of being able to explain human behaviour the first way of 
explaining human behaviour was the sort of way of explaining human behaviour 
that i was talking about last week when i said that as far as human beings are 
concerned we can explain human behaviour in terms of the purposes the ambitions 
the drives the wishes that people have those provide a sort of general 
background which makes it sensible to say er why somebody is doing something 
why is somebody doing something somebody somebody who's doing something 
absolutely bizarre you know they're standing on one leg like this and you see 
them and say why are they doing that and you say oh well one thing might you 
know they're being a street performer of some sort okay so that will be one way 
of explaining human behaviour now 
there's another way of explaining human behaviour which might be open to us and 
that is a scientific explanation of human behaviour and in particular as it's a 
scientific explanation of human behaviour i mean science can explain all sorts 
of things er it can explain chemical reactions it can explain er you know the 
er way one billiard ball hits another billiard ball with mechanics and physics 
and so on but if we're explaining human behaviour there might be a sort of 
scientific explanation which addresses itself to explaining human behaviour why 
is somebody doing that well we produce an explanation in terms of science and 
that might be in terms of for example neurophysiology in terms of what's going 
on in a person's brain well the first sort of explanation by and large is 
concerned with explaining what's in the person's mind what their motive what 
their intention what their desires wishes purposes are the second sort of 
explanation in terms of 
what's going on in their brain in the in the stuff in here in terms of their 
neurophysiology that first common thing for psychology the sort of explanation 
that we deploy all the time in everyday life in talking about other people is 
often talked about in the literature the literature of er psychology the 
literature of philosophy the literature of popular science is often referred to 
as folk psychology and what all the folk psychology come across it says all 
that folk psychology means is simply common sense approach okay now there's a 
problem Searle says i've taken his statement of the problem from page twenty-
two of the book the problem is there's a sort of gap between these two sorts of 
explanation he says the first of these sorts of explanation works well enough 
in practice we explain other people's behaviour in terms of their desires their 
motivations their wishes their intentions and that seems to work in a certain 
sort of way 
but it isn't scientific and the second sort of explanation is certainly 
scientific but we've no idea how to make it work in practice in other words if 
you do see somebody standing on a leg like this and you say why are they doing 
that then it's actually very very difficult to produce a neuroph-, 
neurophysiological explanation which satisfactorily explains why they're doing 
that and Searle says we've got no idea how to bring together these two sorts of 
explanations integrate them we've no idea how to integrate or unify common 
sense explanations with neuroscientific ones he says just to con-, continue 
that quotation at the bottom of the slide since we've no idea how to integrate 
or unify common sense explanations with the explanations of science pure 
scientific ones we are tempted to think that there's a gap between the mind and 
the brain now chapter three is concerned with attempts that people have made to 
fill this gap the gap between common sense 
explanations and scientific explanations okay this appearance of a gap has led 
philosophers and others and psychologists and a whole series of er o-, other 
sorts of scientists into thinking that the gap needs filling and that what we 
need when you fill a gap you use an intermediate level explanation you fill the 
gap by producing another level of explanation intermediate between common sense 
psychology and neuroscience an explanation which will explain how common sense 
psychological phenomena derive from goings on in the central nervous system 
okay and he he says in a another place not in Minds Brains and Science but in a 
review he wrote he talked about filling this gap and he says couldn't there be 
a third possibility between common sense psychology and neuroscience a science 
of human beings that was not introspective common sense psychology but was not 
neurophysiology either this has been the great dream of the human sciences in 
the twentieth 
century okay that's the background now Searle says that in the twentieth 
century there's been a whole series of attempts to try and fill the gap and he 
says look all of these attempts have been failures none of them have 
satisfactorily managed to fill the gap and he surveys what some of these 
attempts have been and we can just look briefly at some of those previous gap-
filling efforts for example behaviourism behaviourism a highly influential 
psychological theory particularly just post-Second World War er surrounding in 
particular one figure B F Skinner and Skinner's behaviourist psychology was 
extremely influential as a way of trying to explain human behaviour then there 
was Gagne's theory again very influential actually in the fifties and sixties 
er cybernetics became extremely influential from about the fifties and sixties 
onwards through the works of people like Stafford Beer and others information 
theory highly influential particularly as 
computer science developed structuralism became extremely influential through 
work in in linguistics and more recently we've seen sociobiology and a part of 
sociobiology evolutionary biology the work of people like Richard Dawkins say 
in particular The Selfish Gene and other books like that attempts to try and 
produce explanations of human behaviour which in some way or other fill the gap 
between the everyday explanations and the more as it were basic level 
biochemical neurophysiological explanations Searle claims that all of these 
attempts have failed which of course is a bold a bold claim since although some 
of them seem to have withered and died many of them still live in one form or 
another and there are plenty of people who still stake their reputation in one 
way or another on some of these theories now i er observe what is the on the 
rest of this slide is something which isn't in er [cough] it isn't in Searle's 
chapter but i'm just observing something about these sorts of modes of 
explanation very often when people try to produce large scale explanations of 
human behaviour large scale theories of which all of these are examples which 
large scale explanations of human behaviour are often based on some sort of 
reductionist idea a reductionist view of human behaviour and what i mean by a 
reductionist view of human behaviour is trying to explain all human behaviour 
by means of a single explanation a single motive a single explanation and i'll 
ju-, just two examples so that you have in mind the sort of thing that i'm 
getting at here Thomas Hobbes the extremely influential English moral and 
political philosopher who wrote the great book The Leviathan most famous i 
suppose for saying that if there were no human society then human life would be 
solitary poor nasty brutish and short his most famous sentence his view was 
that all human behaviour every act of every human being was 
selfish okay okay the whole explanation of human behaviour was that it was 
selfish every single human act of every single human being was selfish and so 
you've got one explanation for all human behaviour okay another example would 
be a slightly simplified version of early Freud not necessarily later Freud but 
early Freud where we might say that all human action is motivated by sexual 
desire later Freud brought in a number of other possible principles as well but 
we might produce that as a kind of slightly caricatured version of what Freud 
said now such explanations have a greater appeal because they are so there are 
two reasons why they have great appeal one is that they provide an enormously 
strict explanation for everything one motives great simplicity of explanation 
and secondly they're very appealing because they kind of if we might put it 
deflate the pompous you know to say that all human actions are selfish is in 
one way appealing 
because it enables us to think in some way or other that even the most saintly 
person is motivated by the same base motivation as we are and deflates the 
pompous or in the case of Freud it's attractive because you know even the most 
puritanical uptight person is being motivated by sexual desire and that kind of 
tactic is a you know kind of deflates them in some way or other so there's a 
great appeal because of the simplicity of explanation but at the same time of 
course if you hold such a theory a reductionist view of human behaviour in 
which all human behaviour is explained by just one motive you've got work to do 
because you've got to explain how it is that the most saintly action is really 
selfish or that the most puritanical person is really motivated by sexual 
desire you've got to explain away all the apparent counter-examples to your 
theory and so what such reductionist accounts will do will be to produce an 
enormously elaborate structure of human 
behaviour an enormously elaborate account in which there will be for example in 
Freud repression the ego the id the conscious mind the unconscious mind drives 
and so on a whole enormous kind of hydraulic scheme representing his world in 
order to be to be able to explain why it is that every single action er is 
motivated by sexual desire so combined with great simplicity of explanation is 
a hugely elaborate structure of human behaviour but that's appealing too 
because although the simplicity of explanation appeals to us we also want to 
think that human beings are mysterious and deep and complicated er the 
complicated explanation which is necessary for Hobbes or Freud to produce again 
appeals to us so these reductionist accounts appeal for two quite contradictory 
reasons one is they appeal because of the simplicity of explanation and the 
other is they appeal because of the complexity of theory which goes with it so 
it provides us with 
two things both of which you want to like simplicity and complexity okay th-, 
okay i'm sorry that the quota-, the what i've said at the bottom there is just 
cut off a bit what i what i was saying there is to a-, to attempt to produce a 
simple explanation of human behaviour will actually involve a highly elaborate 
theory for which there will be frequently no empirical evidence er to explain 
apparent counter-examples in other words the rest of that sentence was just 
what i've been saying to you okay now previous attempts having failed there's a 
new attempt in town Searle says and a new attempt to fill the gap is 
cognitivism and it's cognitivism which is then Searle's main target in this 
chapter so what is cognitivism well cognitivism and cognitive science are terms 
which have been used in the last thirty years or so to cover a wide variety of 
different areas and disciplines in philosophy of mind in linguistics in 
psychology in 
computer science cybernetics and in strong artificial intelligence and so on 
these are the term cognitivism cognitive science those terms have been used 
quite widely so what does Searle mean by cognitivism basically the view is as i 
said at the beginning of the lecture the view of cognitivism that he's 
concerned with is that the mind ought to be thought of on the model of a 
computer that's the theory which he thinks is the essence of cognitivism and 
which is his target of attack because that view like the previous gap-filling 
theories is one which Searle thinks is wrong so first important point is that 
Searle is going to be attacking cognitivism so in red there is a summary from 
page forty-three of the book of what Searle thinks cognitivism is but remember 
this is a theory which he's going to be attacking so what it says in red is a 
quotation from Searle but it's the theory which is his target which he's going 
to attack okay please remember that this is 
the direct quotation from Searle these are not thoughts to be attributed to him 
these are thoughts he's going to attack okay so what he's going to attack is 
the idea that thinking is processing information but information processing is 
just symbol manipulation remember in the Chinese room example Searle wants to 
draw a very strong distinction between mere symbol manipulation which is what 
the computer does although man in the Chinese room who doesn't understand 
Chinese does from real thinking okay 
so again thinking is processing information but information processing is just 
symbol manipulation computers do symbol manipu-, manipulation so the best way 
to study thinking or cognition is to study computational symbol manipulation 
programs symbol manipulating programs whether they're in computers or in the 
brains on this view the view he's attacking the task of cognitive science is to 
characterize the brain not at the level of nerve cells the 
neurophysiological level nor at the level of conscious mental states the common 
sense psychology level but rather at the level of its functioning a sort of 
information processing system and that's where the gap gets filled it's alleged 
Searle disagrees with that doesn't mean that he does agree with that okay so 
the cognitivist's big idea is that we can fill the gap between the mind and the 
brain by focusing on an intermediate level the level of information processing 
nm0140: i was just searching for a actually was round here for a minute or two 
i was just searching for a a after slide which i couldn't find what i wanted to 
say was this that throughout history human beings have tried to understand what 
goes on in the human brain in the mind by means of various different models or 
analogies i mean Searle discusses this is in the chapter and it's interesting 
to look at what some of those previous models or analogies have been er for 
instance the the Greeks compared 
the human mind to a catapult which sounds to the class to be rather odd it's 
interesting that that in different societies at different times the model which 
has been used to try and explain the workings of the human mind or human brain 
has often been to do with the lastest technology available and of course the 
catapults had formed a part of military technology for the Greeks later Leibniz 
the great German philosopher er whom Searle quotes from talks about a bit later 
in the chapter as well saw the human mind as being like a mill you know a flour 
mill grinding separating the wheat from the chaff making flour and again that's 
a kind of technological analogy model of the human mind later in the er 
nineteenth century er people compared this compared the human mind to the 
telegraph system remember that the the telegraph system was developed in the 
early to mid- nineteenth century it's quite an early piece a quite remarkable 
piece of technology er 
the telegraph which predated the telephone enabled people to communicate with 
each other over long distances got the first telegraph cable between England 
and America was for example the first telephone cable and er do any of you know 
the book about the telegraph system which calls it the Victorian internet 
system no any of you read that book it's a it's a really extraordinary book 
published about two or three years ago about the early development of the of 
the telegraph and there are extraordinary comparisons between the mid-
nineteenth century telegraph system and the Internet people had their own 
private accounts people communicated with each other privately over the 
telegraph people used various sorts of abbreviation and code and there were 
worries about you know pornography on the telegraph [laughter] things like that 
extraordinary set of er comparisons between the you know late twentieth century 
internet and the 
mid- nineteenth century telegraph system actually you might just see that book 
in the science areas of libraries or book shops you might look at it can't 
remember the exact title but it's i think in the title there's some reference 
to the Victorian internet system okay er then later er for instance in my 
childhood a very common analogy for the human brain was the telephone system 
and that's to say the old-fashioned telephone system not a modern telephone 
system but the old-fashioned telephone system where you have an operator 
sitting you know at a board you know saying oh hello Mrs Baker you want to be 
put through to Mrs Jones okay and that kind of idea you know pulling out plugs 
and then pulling in putting in plugs was used for a long time as an analogy for 
what goes on in the brain for Freud as i already partly indicated as a kind of 
analogy to what goes on in the brain as a kind of hydraulic system Freud in a 
way thought of the human brain er brain as being a 
vast system of pipes that were connected together through which fluids pass and 
if you push the fluid from one part to a-, another it would come to erupt 
somewhere else and er he also Freud sometimes used a kind of electromagnetic er 
analogy for the human brain and now there's the idea of the digital computer as 
the model for the human brain so what i'm pointing out is there's been a 
constant series of attempts to try to explain what goes on in the human brain 
by means of invoking the lastest bit of technology now there are all sorts of 
reasons why people have found cognitivism attractive and Searle lists these in 
the chapter and in the notes that i've handed out i've gone through er some of 
the reasons why cognitivism might be thought to be attractive i'm not going to 
go through those now you can read those in the book itself you can read the 
sort of summary the comment that i've made about those reasons why con-, 
cognitivism might be 
thought attractive er in the handout there are various sorts of pieces of 
psychological evidence which might be thought to support the idea that the 
human brain is information processing what i want to do is to as it were get to 
the very nub of the matter and to consider the sort of claim that cognitivism 
makes and the reason why Searle thinks it to be wrong okay here's one example i 
saw a programme on er television a few years ago now er it was a a science in 
one of a science series called Big Science on B-B-C-two in the early evening it 
was one of those one of those television programmes where they thought it 
necessary in order to present science to have a kind of mode of presentation 
which i found highly irritating so you had for example you know the face of 
somebody on the screen speaking and behind them you had a whole series of kind 
of flashing lights and moving er you know amoeba-like things and streaming 
across underneath there was you know bits of text and 
you know there's all kind of somehow or other the producers it seemed to me 
there was something fundamentally wrong here the producers were thinking you 
know at some level they were thinking look science is so boring we're going to 
have to make this attractive by producing lots of big visual effects and that 
seemed to be a terribly you know patronizing view anyway er sorry about that in 
Big Science there was an Oxford scientist an Oxford psychologist who had just 
discovered something very important he thought he'd discovered how it was that 
cricketers managed to catch cricket balls okay he'd done a lot of research on 
this and er he had filmed a lot of cricketers catching cricket balls and he'd 
used in particular Mark Ramprakash the England cricketer in the news this week 
because he's just transferred from Middlesex to Surrey and er what this 
scientist said i've got the yeah okay nineteen-ninety-four he says this in 
order to catch a ball your mind your 
subconscious mind calculates the second order differential equation of the sort 
A-level students struggle with i think he's got an optimistic view of A-level 
students actually but still [laughter] er a sort of s-, seco-, second order 
differential equation sort of thing that undergraduate maths students struggle 
with anyway er it calculates that the second differential of the tangent of the 
angle of gaze is zero so in other words what you do you know the ball's in the 
air and you're running to catch it and your mind is working out the second 
order differential eca-, equation so that the you know the [laughter] tangent 
of the angle of gaze is zero and then when it's successfully worked out that 
you know it tells you stand there [whoop] like that it shows Dr McLeod said how 
powerful the subconscious mind is and Mark Ramprakash on the programme was 
asked [laughter] how do you how 
do you catch the ball and he said i just try to catch it [laughter] okay now 
look [laughter] this a-, in this quotation in this programme i think we have 
revealed something about the cognitive cognitive science approach but something 
why it seems weird because the sort of claim that Dr McLeod is making is just 
the sort of claim cognitivism is making but what our brains do is complicated 
information processing okay and so when we catch a ball we've gone through a 
complicated process of information processing now what's you might say well 
what's wrong with that i mean who's to say that our unconscious mind doesn't up 
the process now Searle admits in the chapter that he doesn't have a knock-down 
argument against cognitivism he doesn't have an absolutely decisive argument 
against cognitive cognitivism as he thinks he does against the first claim of A-
I he Searle thinks the Chinese room 
argument disposes of the first claim but he admits that he hasn't got such a 
knock-down argument for this and he wants to show us how implausible such a 
claim is now i think actually just by showing that sort of claim to you some of 
you already felt that that was just kind of implausible but let me emphasize 
let me produce a se-, a second example and this example is taken from Searle 
but not i think from the chapter but from er Searle on many other occasions for 
example Searle when he was standing right here er four-and-a-half years ago 
Searle came to a conference at namex University and he gave a lecture just 
where i'm giving the lecture now that he produced this example which i'm now 
going to produce for you he said he had a dog and a dog called Ludwig and he 
says that the dog loves to as many dogs do loves to fetch things catch things 
bring them to him and so on and a game that he often plays with Ludwig is that 
Searle will throw a tennis ball against a wall and then Ludwig will go on and 
catch the tennis ball in its mouth okay 
now think what Ludwig has to do think what Ludwig has to do first of all Searle 
throws the tennis ball against the wall so in order for Ludwig to calculate 
where to go to catch the ball first of all Ludwig must know the angle of 
incidence is equal to the angle of reflection okay going sort of if Searle 
throws the ball like that then the ball's going to go up like that then the dog 
has got to calculate what the initial velocity of Searle throwing the ball is 
and then what the effect of friction of the of air will do and the effect of 
gravity on decreasing the speed of the tennis ball and then what the effect of 
the actual surface of the wall will be the coefficient of friction of the wall 
and various other factors which may slow down the rate of the ball okay and 
then you take into account wind speed and so on and that's not going to be it 
because then Ludwig has got to calculate what amount of energy to release in 
its legs that'll push it you know to it's got to calculate 
all of these things it's a miracle Ludwig ever gets that but he does every time 
okay now one thing that Dr McLeod didn't say but i heard other people talking 
about cognitivism say one thing he didn't say was h-, he didn't say it shows 
how powerful the human mind is he just said subconscious mind if he had said 
human mind then the Ludwig example be would be even more pertinent because of 
course it isn't just Mark Ramprakash that manages to catch a ball dogs do it 
too but anyway is it plausible to suppose that the dog actually calculates all 
of those things what if there were another type of explanation which as it were 
disposes of the need for giving such an explanation i mean we don't have to 
disagree with Dr McLeod's physics it may very well be that in order to 
calculate where a ball is going to land you're going to calculate it [sniff] it 
may be true i'm i take it from him that it is true that the second differential 
of the angle of gaze of the tangent 
of the angle of gaze has to be zero i take that as being true if you're going 
to calculate it but isn't there another way isn't it just that human beings 
like dogs learn how to do things they learn how to do things by trial and error 
dogs and human beings are not very good at catching balls to begin with you 
know watch a three year old trying to catch a ball you know misses it it's fine 
we gradually get better at it now is that because we're getting more 
sophisticated at differential equations or is it because somehow or other our 
body is learning how to do a particular task because we have to come back to a 
point that i've made so many times now in the last few lectures we have bodies 
of a particular sort bodies which are adapted to perform particular sorts of 
tasks those tasks that we've described in mathematical terms but that doesn't 
mean that we have to perform that mathematics in order for our body to perform 
okay any more than you have to suppose 
that even something quite inanimate has to perform a particular task to behave 
as it does the cricket ball the cricket ball you throw the cricket ball in the 
air how does the cricket ball know where to land does it have to calculate the 
second order differential of blah blah blah blah blah no it is just pe-, it's 
just as it were obeying laws of physics doesn't have to calculate and our 
bodies too behave in certain ways which can be explained in certain sorts of 
mathematical terms but that isn't to say that those are the causes of the way 
in which they behave okay an example from the chapter is walking okay here i am 
walking around and every now and then getting slightly unbalanced but i manage 
to correct myself how do i do that okay well we know that there's a way in 
which human beings manage to maintain their balance we know in some sort of 
rough degree of detail or relatively good detail depending on how much we know 
about physiology and unfortunately i know 
rather little about physiolo-, physiology but i know something like this that 
there are these semicircular canals in the ear in which there is some sort of 
fluid and that as we you know tip our head around the place then different 
levels of the fluid in the inner ear will enable them to keep ourselves upright 
and there are people who have various sorts of er malfunction of those 
semicircular canals find it very difficult to maintain their balance as often 
happens in old people Searle discusses that particular example and the point 
that he's making is [cough] that in behaving as we do in a lot of the tasks 
that we perform we are not following rules and therefore it's wrong to suppose 
that there's some sorts of unconscious calculation going on when i when i walk 
along and maintain my balance i'm not following a rule although there are in me 
as it were scientific laws that apply to my behaviour how does the brain 
manage to enable me to keep my balance Searle says the brain just does it he 
says there's no particular answer for how does the brain perform a task it just 
does it in particular he says there's no answer like this this isn't the way it 
goes so the bit in red again is Searle saying what doesn't happen okay the 
brain does it by assuming that gravity is constant assessing how the internal 
fluids are distributed and calculating the angle at which the head is inclined 
to the body then calculating that the body needs to lean over to the right to 
the tune of five degrees in order to remain upright no such calculation takes 
place it simply is the case that as i start to lean over then i adjust myself 
to go back now although many people would agree that the Mark Ramprakash Dr 
McLeod explanation the Dr McLeod explanation of catching a cricket ball seemed 
implausible and it seemed implausible to suggest that a cricketer does go 
through that calculation as to even unconsciously but 
although many people would agree that it does seem implausible to suggest that 
Searle's dog Ludwig goes through a massive series of physical and mathematical 
calculations even if unconsciously and although many people would agree that it 
does seem implausible to say that the brain goes through a series of 
calculations like that nevertheless a number of people find it kind of er 
unsatisfactory when Searle says that the brain just does it that's a phrase 
that he uses quite a lot i've heard him use it again and again how is it that i 
catch a cricket ball well Mark Ramprakash i'm sure in complete ignorance of 
Searle did answer i just try and catch it and it so happens and w-, i don't i 
mean s-, the point here i don't think Searle i don't think Searle is saying 
that there's nothing to be explained in here i think what he's what he's 
pointing out and if if you look in the chapter it's quite clear what he's 
pointing out is that because we are the sorts of 
creatures that we are because we've got the sorts of bodies that we have 
because those bodies have evolved in a certain sort of way they are 
particularly good at performing certain sorts of tasks tasks they learn to 
perform over a period of time children learn to do things and they learn to do 
things by very simple processes of trial and error and all of that all of that 
provides a perfectly satisfactory explanation of how they manage to do it okay 
there are other ways in which their behaviour could be described we can talk 
about the physics of catching a cricket ball and that's a perfectly gi-, 
legitimate area despite it but it doesn't mean that we have to do the physics 
to catch the cricket ball any more than the stars have to perform calculations 
to stay where there are in the sky or planets to perform calculations to move 
around the sun okay that's the point of it chapter four tomorrow