Morality and mind: The ideal and the rational

Abstract

The questions of consciousness, ideality, and hypothesis-building activity of the brain are considered. Searle’s position is criticized due to the fact that Searle while acknowledging the subjectiveness of the consciousness and asserting non-reductionist understanding of the phenomenon and impossibility to reduce it to neuro-dynamic interactions, nevertheless cannot explain the reverse effect of consciousness on behavior regulation related to brain activity. This failure is caused by the fact that Searle does not take into account the role of phenomenal experience in which rational images are always combined with a specific emotions presentation and it’s just through emotions that those images are marked as more significant or less significant. At the same time, we show a positive role of John Searle’s concept of rationality, the value of the introduced notions of “institutional fact” and “gap”. However, unlike Searle, we believe that the so called “gap” is filled with historically conditioned contents related to sustainable ideological views, system of social values.