I don't think EM is claiming there is no mind. They claim that our current understanding of mental states isn't true--or is at least trivially generalized under a "common sense" understanding of the them. EM is adherent to the purely scientific image of the human being. EM says that whatever the mental is, it's either reducible or identical to some biological level or determinant (in which case we keep searching for a biological basis) or it is not. And if it's not then, remaining loyal to a presumed materialist account of reality, it doesn't exist, nor can it ever exist.

Also it's pretty crazy, yes. I think the privacy of thought and qualia are real thorns in the side of EM. I also agree with Nagel that the first person dimension of consciousness, a hidden sanctuary of thought and experience only accessible by the one who bears it, really destroys EM.

Last edited by RomanJoe (4/13/2018 3:55 pm)

Thanks for the responses, very clarifying! It’s interesting, in isolation I don’t always find EM THAT crazy. I think I get caught up in dinstinguishing between eliminating and identifying within their framework. But when we step back and look at a full picture of the EM world, it seems like nonsense. It’d be interesting to have a running list of all the concepts, ideas, or terms EMs can’t help themselves to when they rid their philosophy of intentionality. Even something as simple as an attention span must go out the window. I wonder, how many naturalists are actual in the EM camp? Is this widely considered the most bankrupt philosophy of mind?

Gator wrote:

Thanks for the responses, very clarifying! It’s interesting, in isolation I don’t always find EM THAT crazy. I think I get caught up in dinstinguishing between eliminating and identifying within their framework. But when we step back and look at a full picture of the EM world, it seems like nonsense. It’d be interesting to have a running list of all the concepts, ideas, or terms EMs can’t help themselves to when they rid their philosophy of intentionality. Even something as simple as an attention span must go out the window. I wonder, how many naturalists are actual in the EM camp? Is this widely considered the most bankrupt philosophy of mind?

 
I believe eliminativists are a small radical minority. There are a lot of reductive materialists which still argue (unsuccessfully, in my view) that consciousness, intentionality and reason may be reducible, but I think most of them wouldn't accept eliminativism as an option. Property dualism has been growing in popularity amon naturalists recently, panpsychism, etc.

So I think most philosophers would readily admit that eliminativism is crazy. However, I'd also wager that most naturalists would still find eliminativism more reasonable than, say, Cartesian dualism. And that's mostly because of irrational prejudice; robust dualist models seem to suggest immortality or that some sort of God creates souls ex nihilo -- in fact, one of Paul Churchland's arguments against dualism is that if our minds are immaterial, then presumably they'd have to have been created (contra emergentism), but atheism is of course true, so dualism must be false. It'll probably take us some 150 years or so to get rid of scientistic irrationalism and all the damage it has done to philosophy. BUT, until then, at least philosophers are definitely starting to see that reductionism doesn't work.

I think future discussions will revolve around competing dualist models. Hard materialism has really no hope; it is way past its expiration date. It does not work, it doesn't account for the data.

Last edited by Miguel (4/13/2018 9:14 pm)

Greg wrote:

Miguel wrote:

It does, indeed, eliminate mind if you believe the mind is not reducible to the brain.

​Elimination is distinct from reduction. A reductive theory does not deny the existence of what it reduces.

Gator wrote:

It seems as though EM theorists play a philosophical game of Hokey Pokey, dipping their limbs into intentional language only to jump back out claiming the concept doesn't even exist. Whats to tstop the EM from simply asserting "words have no meaning" to any response given to them? I mean is EM literally claiming there is no mind, and therefore nothing to philosophize about in a sense? Are they actually claiming consciousness is an illusion? So if I have a mental image of Paris that I am directly aware of, does the proponent of EM simply claim "no you don't" but in more technical jargon?

​I haven't sifted through the literature in a few years, but the core argument is basically: Folk psychology is a theory; beliefs, desires, etc. are posited to explain behavior. In fact they do so rather well, but far from perfectly. A scientific theory of the mind would explain behavior better, and the theory of folk psychology would have been succeeded. It should be regarded as any other succeeded theory, like Newtonian physics; that is to say, we should not believe that the entities it posits exist.

That is Churchland's original argument, which he makes in connection with intentional attitudes. But one might address a similar argument against states of phenomenal consciousness. Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature​ considers the possibility of an alien species, the Antipodeans, like us except that they quickly developed neuroscience and have always used neuroscientific descriptions in everyday contexts in the parallels to which we would use mentalistic descriptions.

​In both of those cases, mental language is understood as a useful but dispensable theory. I think both could be understood otherwise than as attributing illusions​ to those who use mentalistic vocabulary (though both Churchland and Rorty at some points, I think, use that language; at least in an early article, Rorty casts eliminative materialism as a kind of identity theory which takes "identity" statements like "witches were really just women" as its model, where what is reduced does not in fact exist). Dennett's "Quining Qualia" is a different sort of argument, the central thrust of which might be adopted as a way of denying a particular philosophical conception of consciousness (in terms of qualia) without denying that ascriptions of consciousness can be true (it's been even longer since I've read this, so I am hedging). (Edit: I took a look at Dennett's paper, and his target is not just a philosopher's conception but a pretheoretical conception.)

​My own estimate of the philosophy profession's opinion of eliminative materialism is that most philosophers think it is wrong and that its proponents are provocateurs whose arguments in some way are not successful. I think that in most philosophy departments the opinion of Cartesian dualism is probably lower, though.

​Feser's argument against eliminative materialism is retorsive. Eliminative materialists argue that there are no beliefs, but in arguing for eliminative materialism, they must assert its truth, among other things, and it is constitutive of assertion that it is an expression of belief. That is to say that the assertion of "there are no beliefs" is performatively inconsistent in the same way that "there are no assertions" is. The argument depends, I think, on the validity of retorsive argument generally, which was discussed in a recent thread. I would note that this argument only obviously works against the elimination of beliefs, or at least of intentional states bearing some constitutive relation to assertion (so it could probably also be made in connection with intention). One would need another strategy to defend phenomenal consciousness.

​I'd think that an eliminativist would probably respond to that sort of argument by questioning the method of retorsion. Someone running Churchland's argument could say something about how intentional language is a ladder which can be thrown away once you have superseded it, perhaps suggesting that what he is showing is that intentional idiom also leads to performative inconsistencies, for if one adopts it, then one will be confronted by rational considerations to give it up. Whereas Rorty (in the ​Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature​ phase) would probably deny that what would be said in the successor idiom "gives reasons," "expresses belief," etc. at all. That's perhaps another way of imagining the ​tu quoque​argument  I just imagined on behalf of Churchland. Rorty would think that a language with intentional expressions will simply confront problems it cannot resolve, and those who speak it might therefore give it up. They'll talk differently, but they won't be trying to give arguments to those who still speak in intentional terms. Their model for theory succession is Kuhnian; they are thinking that trying to convince a committed intentionalist of eliminativism is as hopeless as trying to convince a committed Newtonian of Einstein's theory. In fact​, most scientists will give up Newtonian theory when confronted with the new data. Those who don't can't necessarily be rationally compelled, but they will die out. Their parallel idea is that, if neuroscience were sufficiently advanced, one could just stop using intentional terms, and also terms like "truth". (Eliminativist argument of the sort made by Paul Churchland in philosophy journals is​, on this view, really not where the action would lie.)

​There are other ways of arguing against eliminative materialism. Some philosophers (Philip Kitcher, for instance) simply argue that folk psychology is a defensible theory. Others argue that it is not even a theory (John Haldane argues this in his response to Churchland; Davidson's anomalous monism takes this position as well).

Thanks for the insights. For the record I’m hylemorphist so I’m not convinced by any materialist theories of mind. However I would have more respect for EM if they didn’t completely burn the bridge of intentionality. I realize this isn’t a possibility on materialism (in my opinion), however when talking of a new theory of mind that is strictly materialistic, I don’t see how that’s coherent. It’s one thing to say “love doesn’t really exist, it’s just my brain recognizing a suitable mate and releasing the proper chemicals to ensure I attach myself to this person which has been produced through natural selection”. It’s quite another to rid oneself of intentionality even in a scientific description of something. It seems as though EMs posit their stance as something as my “love” example, but that example and scheme is riddled with intentionality the EM can’t help themselves to. Would they not simply have to say “it’s all chemistry and fermions and bosons smacking into each other” so prediction, description, or modeling isn’t even real. It seems as though it would be a picture of the world and mind built on chaos and randomness, something to which a model would have no stay.

Miguel wrote:

Greg wrote:

Miguel wrote:

It does, indeed, eliminate mind if you believe the mind is not reducible to the brain.

​Elimination is distinct from reduction. A reductive theory does not deny the existence of what it reduces.

 
I'm aware of that. That's what I said: it does, indeed, eliminate mind if you believe the mind is not reducible to the brain. In other words, eliminativists take the stance that either consciousness/intentionality/etc are reducible to the brain, or they don't exist. A reductivist may try to reduce mind to the brain, but if he becomes convinced that it can't be done, he may instead become a non-reductive naturalist holding e.g. emergentism. An eliminativist, by contrast, will eliminate consciousness/intent. etc if he becomes convinced that it can't be reduced. So, as I said, for them either the mind is reducible to the brain or else it doesn't exist. They eliminate the data and keep the model.

Agreed. Hence what feser and many others say in that most materialist theories of mind collapse in eliminativism. So is the eliminativist a kind of epipenomenalist in a sense?

Last edited by Gator (4/13/2018 11:31 pm)