Eliminative materialism

Various arguments have been made for and against eliminative materialism over the last 50 years. The view's history can be traced to David Hume, who rejected the idea of the "self" on the grounds that it was not based on any impression. Most arguments for the view are based on the assumption that people's commonsense view of the mind is actually an implicit theory. It is to be compared and contrasted with other scientific theories in its explanatory success, accuracy, and ability to predict the future. Eliminativists argue that commonsense "folk" psychology has failed and will eventually need to be replaced by explanations derived from neuroscience. These philosophers therefore tend to emphasize the importance of neuroscientific research as well as developments in artificial intelligence. Philosophers who argue against eliminativism may take several approaches. Simulation theorists, like Robert Gordon and Alvin Goldman, argue that folk psychology is not a theory, but depends on internal simulation of others, and therefore is not subject to falsification in the same way that theories are. Jerry Fodor, among others, argues that folk psychology is, in fact, a successful (even indispensable) theory. Another view is that eliminativism assumes the existence of the beliefs and other entities it seeks to "eliminate" and is thus self-refuting. (blue), but that theories that are in principle irreducible will eventually be eliminated (orange). Eliminativism maintains that the commonsense understanding of the mind is mistaken, and that neuroscience will one day reveal that mental states talked about in everyday discourse, using words such as "intend", "believe", "desire", and "love", do not refer to anything real. Because of the inadequacy of natural languages, people mistakenly think that they have such beliefs and desires. Consciousness and folk psychology are separate issues, and it is possible to take an eliminative stance on one but not the other. The term "eliminative materialism" was first introduced by James Cornman in 1968 while describing a version of physicalism endorsed by Rorty. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an important inspiration for eliminativism, particularly with his attack on "private objects" as "grammatical fictions". Quine himself wondered what exactly was so eliminative about eliminative materialism: On the other hand, the same philosophers claimed that commonsense mental states simply do not exist. But critics pointed out that eliminativists could not have it both ways: either mental states exist and will ultimately be explained in terms of lower-level neurophysiological processes, or they do not. Proponents of this view, such as B.F. Skinner, often made parallels to previous superseded scientific theories (such as that of the four humours, the phlogiston theory of combustion, and the vital force theory of life) that have all been successfully eliminated in attempting to establish their thesis about the nature of the mental. In these cases, science has not produced more detailed versions or reductions of these theories, but rejected them altogether as obsolete. Radical behaviorists, such as Skinner, argued that folk psychology is already obsolete and should be replaced by descriptions of histories of reinforcement and punishment. Such views were eventually abandoned. Patricia and Paul Churchland argued that folk psychology will be gradually replaced as neuroscience matures. In addition, because eliminativism is essentially predictive in nature, different theorists can and often do predict which aspects of folk psychology will be eliminated from folk psychological vocabulary. None of these philosophers are eliminativists tout court. Today, the eliminativist view is most closely associated with the Churchlands, who deny the existence of propositional attitudes (a subclass of intentional states), and with Daniel Dennett, who is generally considered an eliminativist about qualia and phenomenal aspects of consciousness. One way to summarize the difference between the Churchlands' view and Dennett's is that the Churchlands are eliminativists about propositional attitudes, but reductionists about qualia, while Dennett is an anti-reductionist about propositional attitudes and an eliminativist about qualia. More recently, Brian Tomasik and Jacy Reese Anthis have made various arguments for eliminativism. Elizabeth Irvine has argued that both science and folk psychology do not treat mental states as having phenomenal properties so the hard problem "may not be a genuine problem for non-philosophers (despite its overwhelming obviousness to philosophers), and questions about consciousness may well 'shatter' into more specific questions about particular capacities." In 2022, Anthis published Consciousness Semanticism: A Precise Eliminativist Theory of Consciousness, which asserts that "formal argumentation from precise semantics" dissolves the hard problem because of the contradiction between precision implied in philosophical theory and the vagueness in its definition, which implies there is no fact of the matter for phenomenological consciousness. ==Arguments for eliminativism==

Problems with folk theories Eliminativists such as Paul and Patricia Churchland argue that folk psychology is a fully developed but non-formalized theory of human behavior. It is used to explain and make predictions about human mental states and behavior. This view is often referred to as the theory of mind or just simply theory-theory, for it theorizes the existence of an unacknowledged theory. As a theory in the scientific sense, eliminativists maintain, folk psychology must be evaluated on the basis of its predictive power and explanatory success as a research program for the investigation of the mind/brain. Such eliminativists have developed different arguments to show that folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory and should be abolished. They argue that folk psychology excludes from its purview or has traditionally been mistaken about many important mental phenomena that can and are being examined and explained by modern neuroscience. Some examples are dreaming, consciousness, mental disorders, learning processes, and memory abilities. Furthermore, they argue, folk psychology's development in the last 2,500 years has not been significant and it is therefore stagnant. The ancient Greeks already had a folk psychology comparable to modern views. But in contrast to this lack of development, neuroscience is rapidly progressing and, in their view, can explain many cognitive processes that folk psychology cannot. Folk psychology retains characteristics of now obsolete theories or legends from the past. Ancient societies tried to explain the physical mysteries of nature by ascribing mental conditions to them in such statements as "the sea is angry". Gradually, these everyday folk psychological explanations were replaced by more efficient scientific descriptions. Today, eliminativists argue, there is no reason not to accept an effective scientific account of cognition. If such an explanation existed, then there would be no need for folk-psychological explanations of behavior, and the latter would be eliminated the same way as the mythological explanations the ancients used. Another line of argument is the meta-induction based on what eliminativists view as the disastrous historical record of folk theories in general. Ancient pre-scientific "theories" of folk biology, folk physics, and folk cosmology have all proven radically wrong. Eliminativists argue the same in the case of folk psychology. There seems no logical basis, to the eliminativist, to make an exception just because folk psychology has lasted longer and is more intuitive or instinctively plausible than other folk theories. The other view is represented by those who subscribe to "a language of thought". They assert that mental states can be multiply realized and that functional characterizations are just higher-level characterizations of what happens at the physical level. It has also been argued against folk psychology that the intentionality of mental states like belief implies that they have semantic qualities. Specifically, their meaning is determined by the things they are about in the external world. This makes it difficult to explain how they can play the causal roles they are supposed to in cognitive processes. In recent years, this latter argument has been fortified by the theory of connectionism. Many connectionist models of the brain have been developed in which the processes of language learning and other forms of representation are highly distributed and parallel. This tends to indicate that such discrete and semantically endowed entities as beliefs and desires are unnecessary. Physics eliminates intentionality The problem of intentionality poses a significant challenge to materialist accounts of cognition. If thoughts are neural processes, we must explain how specific neural networks can be "about" external objects or concepts. We can think about Paris, for instance, but there is no clear mechanism by which neurons can represent a city. Traditional analogies fail to explain this phenomenon. Unlike a photograph, neurons do not physically resemble Paris. Nor can we appeal to conventional symbolism, as we might with a stop sign representing the action of stopping. Such symbols derive their meaning from social agreement and interpretation, which are not applicable to a brain's workings. Attempts to posit a separate neural process that assigns meaning to the "Paris neurons" merely shift the problem without resolving it, as we then need to explain how this secondary process can assign meaning, initiating an infinite regress. The only way to break this regress is to postulate matter with intrinsic meaning, independent of external interpretation. But our current understanding of physics precludes the existence of such matter. The fundamental particles and forces physics describes have no inherent semantic properties that could ground intentionality. This physical limitation presents a formidable obstacle to materialist theories of mind that rely on neural representations. It suggests that intentionality, as commonly understood, may be incompatible with a purely physicalist worldview. This suggests that our folk psychological concepts of intentional states will be eliminated in light of scientific understanding. The disjunction problem arises from the fact that natural selection cannot discriminate between coextensive properties. For example, consider two genes close together on a chromosome. One gene might code for a beneficial trait, while the other codes for a neutral or even harmful trait. Due to their proximity, these genes are often inherited together, a phenomenon known as genetic linkage. Natural selection cannot distinguish between these linked traits; it can only act on their combined effect on the organism's fitness. Only random processes like genetic crossover—where chromosomes exchange genetic material during reproduction—can break these linkages. Until such a break occurs, natural selection remains "blind" to the linked genes' individual effects. Eliminativists argue that if natural selection—the process responsible for shaping our neural architecture—cannot solve the disjunction problem, then our brains cannot store unique, non-disjunctive propositions, as required by folk psychology. Instead, they suggest that neural states contain inherently disjunctive or indeterminate content. This argument leads eliminativists to reject the notion that neural states have specific, determinate informational content corresponding to the discrete, non-disjunctive propositions of folk psychology. This evolutionary argument adds to the eliminativist case that our commonsense understanding of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes is flawed and should be replaced by a neuroscientific account that acknowledges the indeterminate nature of neural representations. ==Arguments against eliminativism==

Intentionality and consciousness are identical Some eliminativists reject intentionality while accepting the existence of qualia. Other eliminativists reject qualia while accepting intentionality. Many philosophers argue that intentionality cannot exist without consciousness and vice versa, and so any philosopher who accepts one while rejecting the other is being inconsistent. They argue that, to be consistent, one must accept both qualia and intentionality or reject them both. Philosophers who argue for such a position include Philip Goff, Terence Horgan, Uriah Kriegal, and John Tienson. The philosopher Keith Frankish accepts the existence of intentionality but holds to illusionism about consciousness because he rejects qualia. Goff notes that beliefs are a kind of propositional thought. Intuitive reservations The thesis of eliminativism seems so obviously wrong to many critics, who find it undeniable that people know immediately and indubitably that they have minds, that argumentation seems unnecessary. This sort of intuition-pumping is illustrated by asking what happens when one asks oneself honestly if one has mental states. Eliminativists object to such a rebuttal of their position by claiming that intuitions often are mistaken. Analogies from the history of science are frequently invoked to buttress this observation: it may appear obvious that the sun travels around the earth, for example, but this was nevertheless proved wrong. Similarly, it may appear obvious that apart from neural events there are also mental conditions, but that could be false. Those who accept this objection say that the arguments for eliminativism are far too weak to establish such a radical claim and that there is thus no reason to accept eliminativism. Georges Rey and Michael Devitt reply to this objection by invoking deflationary semantic theories that avoid analyzing predicates like "x is true" as expressing a real property. They are instead construed as logical devices, so that asserting that a sentence is true is just a quoted way of asserting the sentence itself. To say "'God exists' is true" is just to say "God exists". This way, Rey and Devitt argue, insofar as dispositional replacements of "claims" and deflationary accounts of "true" are coherent, eliminativism is not self-refuting. Correspondence theory of truth Several philosophers, such as the Churchlands and Alex Rosenberg, have developed a theory of structural resemblance or physical isomorphism that could explain how neural states can instantiate truth within the correspondence theory of truth. Neuroscientists use the word "representation" to identify the neural circuits' encoding of inputs from the peripheral nervous system in, for example, the visual cortex. But they use the word without according it any commitment to intentional content. In fact, there is an explicit commitment to describing neural representations in terms of structures of neural axonal discharges that are physically isomorphic to the inputs that cause them. Suppose that this way of understanding representation in the brain is preserved in the long-term course of research providing an understanding of how the brain processes and stores information. Then there will be considerable evidence that the brain is a neural network whose physical structure is identical to the aspects of its environment it tracks and whose representations of these features consist in this physical isomorphism. This isomorphism between brain and world is not a matter of some relationship between reality and a map of reality stored in the brain. Maps require interpretation if they are to be about what they map, and eliminativism and neuroscience share a commitment to explaining the appearance of aboutness by purely physical relationships between informational states in the brain and what they "represent". The brain-to-world relationship must be a matter of physical isomorphism—sameness of form, outline, structure—that does not require interpretation. Criticism The reason naturalism cannot be pragmatic in its epistemology starts with its metaphysics. Science tells us that we are components of the natural realm, indeed latecomers in the 13.8-billion-year-old universe. The universe was not organized around our needs and abilities, and what works for us is just a set of contingent facts that could have been otherwise. Once we have begun discovering things about the universe that work for us, science sets out to explain why they do. It is clear that one explanation for why things work for us that we must rule out as unilluminating, indeed question-begging, is that they work for us because they work for us. If something works for us, enables us to meet our needs and wants, there must be an explanation reflecting facts about us and the world that produce the needs and the means to satisfy them. Simulation theorists doubt that people's understanding of the mental can be explained in terms of a theory at all. Rather they argue that people's understanding of others is based on internal simulations of how they would act and respond in similar situations. Jerry Fodor believes in folk psychology's success as a theory, because it makes for an effective way of communication in everyday life that can be implemented with few words. Such effectiveness could not be achieved with complex neuroscientific terminology. ==Qualia==

Another problem for the eliminativist is the consideration that human beings undergo subjective experiences and hence their conscious mental states have qualia. Since qualia are generally regarded as characteristics of mental states, their existence does not seem compatible with eliminativism. Eliminativists such as Dennett and Rey respond by rejecting qualia. Opponents of eliminativism see this response as problematic, since many claim that existence of qualia is perfectly obvious. Many philosophers consider the "elimination" of qualia implausible, if not incomprehensible. They assert that, for instance, the existence of pain is simply beyond denial. In other words, it does not deny that pain exists, but holds that it exists independently of its effect on behavior. Influenced by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Dennett and Rey have defended eliminativism about qualia even when other aspects of the mental are accepted. Quining qualia Dennett offers philosophical thought experiments to argue that qualia do not exist. First he lists five properties of qualia: • They are "directly" or "immediately" graspable during our conscious experiences. == Illusionism ==

Illusionism is an active program within eliminative materialism to explain phenomenal consciousness as an illusion. It is promoted by the philosophers Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish, and Jay Garfield, and the neuroscientist Michael Graziano. Graziano has advanced the attention schema theory of consciousness and postulates that consciousness is an illusion. According to David Chalmers, proponents argue that once we can explain consciousness as an illusion without the need for a realist view of consciousness, we can construct a debunking argument against realist views of consciousness. This line of argument draws from other debunking arguments like the evolutionary debunking argument in the field of metaethics. Such arguments note that morality is explained by evolution without positing moral realism, so there is a sufficient basis to debunk moral realism. Criticism Illusionists generally hold that once it is explained why people believe and say they are conscious, the hard problem of consciousness will dissolve. Chalmers agrees that a mechanism for these beliefs and reports can and should be identified using the standard methods of physical science, but disagrees that this would support illusionism, saying that the datum illusionism fails to account for is not reports of consciousness but rather first-person consciousness itself. He separates consciousness from beliefs and reports about consciousness, but holds that a fully satisfactory theory of consciousness should explain how the two are "inextricably intertwined" so that their alignment does not require an inexplicable coincidence. ==See also==