This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Minds, Brains and Science, given by John Searle, was originally broadcast in 1984.

For thousands of years, people have been trying to understand their relationship to the rest of the universe.

For a variety of reasons, many philosophers today are reluctant to tackle such big problems.

Nonetheless, the problems remain, and in these lectures I'm going to attack some of them.

At the moment, the biggest problem is this.

We have a certain common-sense picture of ourselves as human beings,

which is very hard to square with our overall scientific

conception of the physical world. We think of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, rational

agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless physical

particles. Now, how can we square these two conceptions?

How, for example, can it be both the case that the world contains nothing but unconscious physical particles,

and yet it also contains consciousness?

How can a mechanical universe contain intentionalistic human beings,

human beings that can represent the world to themselves.

How can an essentially meaningless world contain meanings?

Such problems also spill over into other more contemporary sounding issues.

How shall we interpret recent work in computer science and artificial intelligence, work aimed at making

intelligent machines. Specifically, does the digital computer at last give us the right picture

of the human mind? And why is it that the social sciences in general have not given us insights

into ourselves comparable to those that the natural sciences have given us into the rest

of nature. In this first lecture, I want to plunge right into what many philosophers think of

...