Paul Churchland

[Togo]

I've been trying to read some Paul Churchland recently, and I must admit I'm struggling to see his work as anything other than ignoring some fairly obvious points. It seems like there are great big holes in what he is saying. What am I missing?

I'm probably being overly harsh in ignoring Chalmers on the hard problem of consciousness (Churchland appears to only ever consider the easy questions), and I'm almost certainly put off by his grasp of psychology, which although impressive for a non-expert, doesn't seem to blend well with the points he's actually making.

Can anyone recommend some good, well-written Churchland that might give me a more nuanced view? Or some good commentaries/discussions of his arguments? Or am I looking for substance that really isn't there?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Churchland simply takes materialism to its logical consequence. IIRC, he readily admits that he doesn't know exactly how the mechanisms of neuroscience will eventually lead to an understanding of beliefs and desires and all that - and that's probably one of the big holes you're talking about - because our current levels of understanding of how the brain works limit any theories of this to mere speculation and I don't recall him doing much in the way of speculating about those details.

What he's saying is that the so-called "folk psychology" which is currently used to talk about this stuff won't be a part of any final models about how they work once we do advance our understanding of neuroscience to a level where we learn about these mechanisms. It's basically a neuroscience equivalent of saying that creationism doesn't have anything of value to add to the study of evolution and astrology doesn't have anything of value to add to astronomy research. Just like "folk biology" and "folk physics" were found to be astoundingly wrong when our scientific understanding of those fields advanced to the point where we could look at the mechanisms involved in them, the odds that these folk theories then went and managed to get things right about the far more complex workings of the brain aren't worth considering.

 

[Togo]

Churchland simply takes materialism to its logical consequence. IIRC, he readily admits that he doesn't know exactly how the mechanisms of neuroscience will eventually lead to an understanding of beliefs and desires and all that - and that's probably one of the big holes you're talking about -

Nah, I'm ok with that. Our limit of understanding is our limit of understanding, and I don't see that counts against any particular position or argument.

I'm more concerned about arguments to the effect that because we can draw parallels between neural structure (the processing of definitions of colour) and our own subjective experience, the so-called 'hard problem', that is that we have a subjective experience at all, somehow goes away. He gives a lot of extraneous detail on the science, and then claims the problem solved. I don't see that any of the details he gives actually contribute to the conclusion he's reaching.

Of course I'm giving details of a particular Churchland argument which I can't provide for you because it's not an online source, which may not be very helpful

What he's saying is that the so-called "folk psychology" which is currently used to talk about this stuff won't be a part of any final models about how they work once we do advance our understanding of neuroscience to a level where we learn about these mechanisms. It's basically a neuroscience equivalent of saying that creationism doesn't have anything of value to add to the study of evolution and astrology doesn't have anything of value to add to astronomy research. Just like "folk biology" and "folk physics" were found to be astoundingly wrong when our scientific understanding of those fields advanced to the point where we could look at the mechanisms involved in them, the odds that these folk theories then went and managed to get things right about the far more complex workings of the brain aren't worth considering.

Yes, except that he is saying that our conception of how and why people behave the way they do will ultimately prove irrelevant. Given my background in the science of how people behave, this seems a remarkable claim, and yet, at the same time, a totally unsupported one.

I wasn't expecting to entirely agree with him, but I was expecting some kind of argument to support it. At the very least I was expecting an argument supporting eliminative materialism (that we should dispense entirely with mental concepts) over reductive materialism (mental concepts ultimately reduce to physical phenomenon, but are still useful and valuable as higher level descriptions). Am I missing something?

Maybe in a different work?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Ya, his work does seem to be predicated on an assumption with a massive flaw. Maybe someone with a better understanding of Churchland can correct me if I'm wrong about this.

He's saying that other "folk" attempts at science, such as creationism and astrology, have been found to be so fundamentally flawed when we actually gained scientific knowledge of the subject matter that the "folk" attempts at a vastly more complex subject (in his view) such as the workings of the brain would almost certainly be equally flawed and would turn out to be equally irrelevant.

What that misses is that we have a far better capability to validate our "folk" attempts at describing how the brain works than we did at validating such things as the evolutionary process or what's happening out in the universe. The mental concepts that he wants to get rid of with eliminative materialism are actually there. We have desires and we have beliefs, regardless of what leads to them. Saying that these concepts will become irrelevant is similar to saying that concepts such as tables and chairs became irrelevant once we discovered molecules. Understanding how molecules bind together and all that to build things at the macro level is useful and all, but it doesn't factor in to discussions about what things you should sit on.

Similarly, reductive materialism is a better way of taking the ideas introduced by eliminative materialism and dumping the inherent flaws.