His starting point is that our subjective feelings - desires intentions beliefs - are located inside our heads

His starting point is that our subjective feelings - desires, intentions, beliefs - are located inside our heads. But are they? The neurophysiological processes that give rise to subjective consciousness certainly reside in our individual brains. But our subjective feelings depend, paradoxically, on the fact that we are social beings, that we live in a community of others similar to ourselves. In some sense, then, our subjective feelings lie not simply in our heads, but outside them too, in the relations with our fellow humans.

To understand mind, therefore, requires a much greater rejection of traditional concepts and categories than even Searle allows for.All this suggests that truly to understand mind, language and society we need to develop a methodology that we do not yet possess. In the meantime John Searle remains both one of the best guides to the debate as it exists now, and one of the most pugnacious defenders of the Enlightenment tradition.. The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen When did you first read it?I came across it in 1976. The composer John Ireland was heavily influenced by Machen and at the time I was recording his piano trios. Turning pages was a guy called Christopher Palmer, a great orchestrator and arranger He was a real John Ireland enthusiast, and read a lot.

He told me I had to read .Why did it strike you so much?It is almost certainly Machen's finest book, his masterpiece It's obviously autobiographical The hero is a young boy, Lucien Taylor He grows up in Wales, as did Machen. Basically, things happen in the book that I can relate to very strongly Firstly, he loves the countryside, as do I. The descriptions of places, places that are still unchanged today, are some of the finest descriptions of the countryside that I have ever read.Then Lucien meets this girl and they have an affair, and it's so beautifully written He finally comes to London and tries to make it as a writer. A very important theme in the book is that soon after that he hears that this girl has married somebody else. Yet he protects his image of her, whatever else she has done; it's how he remembers her He doesn't want to let it go. I can relate to a lot of that.The occult is not as big a feature here as it is in Machen's other works, but you get a very strong sense that the girl has almost been sent to him by this old, witchlike woman who lives in a cottage. In the end, Lucien dies a very sad death through drugs and despair.