Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
What is Eliminative Materialism?
Most of us infidels are materialists and physicalists. That is, we believe that mental states are a property of physical brain activity and that there is no separate spiritual plane of existence. IOW, immaterial spirits such as gods and ghosts don't really exist. Or, if they did exist, then they would have to be physical phenomena. In the philosophical literature, this practice of abandoning belief in the immaterial is often called eliminative materialism (EM). The best known proponent of EM is Paul Churchland. He defines EM in a 1984 article:
Churchland has labeled this "common-sense understanding" folk psychology. Folk psychology is the "theory" that mental states are significant phenomena and real.
What is the "curse" of Eliminative Materialism?
Some argue that EM is self-refuting, since one must buy into the reality of beliefs in order to believe that it is true and folk psychology false. Churchland dismisses that argument, and I leave it to readers to look at his short (4 pages) 1984 essay cited above.
My position is that reductionism is useful as a method of explaining why and how things work, but EM goes too far when it seeks to eliminate all meaningful reference to useful concepts. Basically, it claims that mental phenomena, including one's sense of self, are illusions and therefore not real. References to beliefs, free will, emotions, and feelings are illusions that will ultimately be eliminated from our language and be replaced by scientific advances.
At the core of eliminative materialism is that idea that illusions are somehow unreal phenomena, but there is a problem with that point of view. Illusions are always perceptual phenomena, but all of our cognition is built up through bodily sensations--sensory information--that define how we interact with the world. For example, Churchland dwells on the fact that scientific advances have eliminated the idea that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, since we now know that it is the earth itself that moves and causes us to have the illusion that the sun is moving. The problem with his argument is that the sun really does move relative the the ground we stand on, if that ground is taken as the background and the sun as the foreground. It is only when we imagine ourselves from a perspective of a solar body, that the Earth seems to move while the sun remains in the background frame as a point of reference. So the shift in perspective is what eliminates the illusion, and that shift is just a different way of looking at things. There is no objective reality that defines movement, because it is always a relationship between a frame of reference and a body that changes position with respect to that fixed reference point.
I don't want to make this little essay too long, so I'll end just by pointing out that pretty much every experience we have of the world is an illusion from some perspective. It depends on how we choose to frame the perception. When we look at a genuine optical illusion like the Necker cube, we see two overlapping squares whose corners are connected by lines. Depending on which square we choose to "see" as the foreground, we perceive an illusion of the square as leaning in one direction or another. Eliminativism would have us deny the perceptual phenomenon entirely, because we can take yet another perspective in which we are just looking at a bunch of straight lines. Reality is built up in human cognition on the basis of perceptions like that. Just about any physical object one can conceive of consists of a set of associations with how we interact with that object. Illusions are how we make sense of the world. Eliminative Materialism actually denies reality as we know it.
Most of us infidels are materialists and physicalists. That is, we believe that mental states are a property of physical brain activity and that there is no separate spiritual plane of existence. IOW, immaterial spirits such as gods and ghosts don't really exist. Or, if they did exist, then they would have to be physical phenomena. In the philosophical literature, this practice of abandoning belief in the immaterial is often called eliminative materialism (EM). The best known proponent of EM is Paul Churchland. He defines EM in a 1984 article:
Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist.
Churchland has labeled this "common-sense understanding" folk psychology. Folk psychology is the "theory" that mental states are significant phenomena and real.
What is the "curse" of Eliminative Materialism?
Some argue that EM is self-refuting, since one must buy into the reality of beliefs in order to believe that it is true and folk psychology false. Churchland dismisses that argument, and I leave it to readers to look at his short (4 pages) 1984 essay cited above.
My position is that reductionism is useful as a method of explaining why and how things work, but EM goes too far when it seeks to eliminate all meaningful reference to useful concepts. Basically, it claims that mental phenomena, including one's sense of self, are illusions and therefore not real. References to beliefs, free will, emotions, and feelings are illusions that will ultimately be eliminated from our language and be replaced by scientific advances.
At the core of eliminative materialism is that idea that illusions are somehow unreal phenomena, but there is a problem with that point of view. Illusions are always perceptual phenomena, but all of our cognition is built up through bodily sensations--sensory information--that define how we interact with the world. For example, Churchland dwells on the fact that scientific advances have eliminated the idea that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, since we now know that it is the earth itself that moves and causes us to have the illusion that the sun is moving. The problem with his argument is that the sun really does move relative the the ground we stand on, if that ground is taken as the background and the sun as the foreground. It is only when we imagine ourselves from a perspective of a solar body, that the Earth seems to move while the sun remains in the background frame as a point of reference. So the shift in perspective is what eliminates the illusion, and that shift is just a different way of looking at things. There is no objective reality that defines movement, because it is always a relationship between a frame of reference and a body that changes position with respect to that fixed reference point.
I don't want to make this little essay too long, so I'll end just by pointing out that pretty much every experience we have of the world is an illusion from some perspective. It depends on how we choose to frame the perception. When we look at a genuine optical illusion like the Necker cube, we see two overlapping squares whose corners are connected by lines. Depending on which square we choose to "see" as the foreground, we perceive an illusion of the square as leaning in one direction or another. Eliminativism would have us deny the perceptual phenomenon entirely, because we can take yet another perspective in which we are just looking at a bunch of straight lines. Reality is built up in human cognition on the basis of perceptions like that. Just about any physical object one can conceive of consists of a set of associations with how we interact with that object. Illusions are how we make sense of the world. Eliminative Materialism actually denies reality as we know it.
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