Eliminative materialism

Eliminativists argue that modern belief in the existence of mental phenomena is analogous to ancient belief in obsolete theories as the geocentric model of the universe.

In the philosophy of mind eliminative materialism, or eliminativism, is a radical form of materialism (physicalism).

Approach

Eliminative materialists believe that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain function, and some believe that the concept will eventually be eliminated as neuroscience progresses. In a similar way they argue that popular psychological concepts such as beliefs, desires, and intentions are illusory and therefore do not have a consistent neurological substratum.

The vision of the world according to which everything is matter following physical laws, and in which the brain is the only existing reality in the misnamed "mental phenomena", is usually criticized by supporters of a vision mentalist or dualist, including cases of emergentists who think that the mind is something that "emerges" and is ontologically separated from the body. These criticisms appeal to the reality of the "qualia" and consciousness since they are directly perceived.

Martín López Corredoira, from a materialist position, comes up against these arguments: such perceptions are a pure illusion, a fantasy, dreams about something unreal.

Supporters of this view commonly draw comparisons to earlier scientific theories that have since been eliminated, such as the four humors theory, the theory of medicine, the phlogiston theory of combustion, and the theory of life. 'life force' (from Stahl -stahlianism- and vitalism in general -like that of Hans Driesch-). In these cases, science has not produced more detailed versions of these theories, but has instead rejected them as obsolete. Eliminative materialists argue that folk psychology is heading towards the same scenario. According to Willard Van Orman Quine, it will take tens of years before folk psychology is replaced by real science.

This form of materialism is primarily associated with the philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, although philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, Jonah Barnaby and Lynne Rudder Baker would also consider themselves "eliminative" about many aspects of psychology.

Philosophical arguments against eliminativism

Intuitive bookings

The eliminativism thesis seems so obviously wrong to many critics, arguing that people know immediately and indubitably that they have minds, that argument seems unnecessary. This type of intuition is illustrated by asking what happens when one sincerely wonders if one has mental states. Eliminativists object to such a refutation of their position by stating that intuitions are often wrong. Analogies from the history of science are frequently invoked to support this observation: it may seem obvious that the sun travels around the earth, for example, but despite its seeming obviousness, this view was nonetheless proven wrong. Similarly, it may seem obvious that apart from neural events there are also mental conditions. However, this could also be false.

But even if one accepts the susceptibility to error of people's intuitions, the objection can be rephrased: if the existence of mental conditions seems perfectly obvious and is central to people's worldview, then arguments are greatly needed. strong enough to successfully deny the existence of mental conditions. Furthermore, these arguments, to be consistent, must be formulated in a way that does not assume the existence of entities such as "mental states", "logical arguments" and "ideas"; otherwise they are self-contradictory. Those who accept this objection say that the arguments for eliminativism are too weak to establish such a radical concept; therefore, there is no reason to believe in eliminativism.

Self-rebuttal

Some philosophers, such as Paul Boghossian, have attempted to show that eliminativism is in some sense self-refuting, since the theory itself presupposes the existence of mental phenomena. If eliminativism is true, then the eliminativist must allow an intentional property such as truth, assuming that to assert something one must believe it. Therefore, for eliminativism to assert itself as a thesis, the eliminativist must believe that it is true; if that is the case, then there are beliefs and the eliminativist claim is false.

Georges Rey and Michael Devitt respond to this objection by invoking deflationary semantic theories that avoid analyzing predicates like "x is true" as the expression of a real property. They are instead interpreted as logical devices, such that asserting that a sentence is true is just a cited way of asserting the sentence itself. To say, "God exists, it is true" it is just saying, "God exists." Thus, Rey and Devitt argue, to the extent that dispositional replacements for "claims" and the deflationary accounts of "true" are coherent, eliminativism does not refute itself.

Qualia

Another problem for the eliminativist is the consideration that human beings experience subjective experiences and therefore their conscious mental states have qualia. As qualia are generally considered to be characteristic of mental states, their existence does not appear to be compatible with eliminativism. Eliminativists, such as Daniel Dennett and Georges Rey, respond by rejecting qualia. This is seen as problematic by opponents of qualia. eliminativists, as many claim that the existence of qualia seems perfectly obvious. Many philosophers consider "elimination" of the implausible qualia, if not incomprehensible. They claim that, for example, the existence of pain is simply beyond denial.

Acknowledging that the existence of qualia seems obvious, Dennett nonetheless asserts that "qualia" it is a theoretical term of an obsolete metaphysics derived from Cartesian intuitions. He argues that an accurate analysis shows that the term is ultimately empty and full of contradictions. The eliminativist's claim regarding qualia is that there is no unbiased evidence for such experiences when viewed as more than propositional attitudes. In other words, they do not deny that pain exists, but rather that it exists independently of its effect on behavior.. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Dennett and Rey have defended qualia eliminativism, even when other parts of the mental are accepted.

Efficacy of Folk Psychology

Some philosophers simply argue that folk psychology is a fairly successful theory. 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 is one of the objectors who believes in the success of folk psychology as a theory, since that creates an effective form of communication in everyday life that can be implemented with just a few words. Such effectiveness could never be achieved with complex neuroscientific terminology.

Arguments about the difference between naturalism and physicalism

Noam Chomsky (2000) has pointed out that the “physicalism project” in philosophy of mind is misguided. Chomsky agrees with the project of methodological naturalism, according to which the best way to obtain knowledge is through scientific procedures, so that if we want to obtain knowledge about the mind, then we must rely on the procedures that science uses to study the mind. mind, as one more of his objects of study.

But for Chomsky the project of physicalism is different from the project of naturalism. According to this author, the physicalist project is fundamental to analytical philosophy, in which philosophical and metaphysical argumentation and debate play a central role. However, none of these characteristics is typical of the naturalist project: the latter relies on the procedures of natural science, and in it it is not clear that philosophical or metaphysical argumentation plays a determining role.

In this way, to the extent that both projects are different, for Chomsky the physicalist project is somehow illegitimate. According to this author, the paradox is that even for the physicalists themselves, it seems that the physicalist project is not recommended, since they say they adhere to methodological naturalism (Chomsky, 2000; Stoljar, 2016).

The philosopher Steven Horst (2007), for his part, in his book Beyond Reduction: Philosophy Of Mind And Post-Reductionist Philosophy Of Science, argues that while in much of philosophy of the mind it is assumed that the mind is special or unique because it is apparently irreducible to the physical, the reality is that in the current philosophy of science there is a consensus that intertheoretical reductionism is untenable in science in general. Reductionism in philosophy of science was initially proposed by logical positivists such as Ernest Nagel. According to E. Nagel, the laws of a scientific theory should be deductively derivable from the laws of another more basic theory in combination with “bridge laws” that connect the predicates of both theories (Horst, 2007). It is, therefore, a unificationist project, and generally considers physics as the "basic science" reducing the rest, which would be "special sciences". However, according to Horst (2007), in the philosophy of science after the mid-XX century there is a consensus about that each science has its own methods, concepts and objects of study, and the unificationist and reductionist project has already proven to be a failure. For this author, the philosophy of mind is unique in having lagged behind the assumptions of the philosophy of science of the first half of the century XX. Horst points out that the situation is not that biology, chemistry, and all the other sciences neatly reduce to physics, while the science of the mental has a unique and peculiar "explanatory gap," but that "in the sciences there are gaps explanatory gaps everywhere” (“in the sciences it is explanatory gaps all the way down”) (Horst, 2007, p. 4).

Horst further proposes his theory of cognitive pluralism, which states that we create scientific models of local features of the different objects of study, models that are largely autonomous and not always possible to integrate with each other. The author mentions the possibility of adopting some form of non-reductive physicalism, based on anti-reductionism, according to which the mental supervenes on the physical. However, Horst dismisses this possibility, noting that once reduction has been ruled out, there is no reason to prefer physicalism to its alternatives. Then Horst addresses the term "naturalism", noting that all or almost all philosophers of mind define themselves as "naturalists". However, there is another sense of the term "naturalistic philosophy", one that is used in the broader context of contemporary philosophy of science, and that is incompatible with the sense that philosophers of mind give it. In post-mid-XX century philosophy of science, the idea of external validation by reduction has been widely rejected, And for good reason, Horst notes.

Similarly, the idea that physics is the “basic science”, and that the theories of the other sciences (“special sciences”) should be able to be obtained by performing syllogisms and purely analytical calculations from the postulates of physics (they should be able to be "reduced" to physics) only persists within the philosophy of mind, which has remained stuck in the past. It is not necessary that some theories be reduced to others to be validated; each science has its own particular objects and methods, and works autonomously. This is the "autonomy" of scientific domains. So there is no need for psychology to be reduced to neuroscience or some other supposedly more basic science. In addition, there is no privileged "basic science" that is the criterion to validate other sciences by reducing the second to the first (Horst, 2007).

In contemporary philosophy of science, “naturalism” refers to the philosophy of science according to which each science is validated internally, with its own methods, strategies, and objects of study. In other words, "naturalism" means that a general criterion for all sciences cannot be defined in an a priori, purely philosophical manner, according to which they must be governed in order to obtain legitimate knowledge (Horst, 2007). Horst argues that this is completely incompatible, and in fact contradictory, with the meaning that the physicalist philosophers of mind give to the term "naturalism", since they start from the idea of the need to eliminate from our ontology everything that does not exist. can be reduced.

Scientific arguments against eliminativism

Cognitive Neuroscience

Several neuroscientists and neurobiologists argue that qualia exist and are not eliminable, contradicting the eliminative materialism and physicalism claims of philosophy of mind. Among the neuroscientists who explicitly affirm that qualia do exist and use the term (“qualia” is a philosophical term, not a scientific one) are: Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran and Rodolfo Llinás.

Gerald Edelmann

Gerald Edelman's neurobiological theory divides consciousness into two: primary consciousness, which contains images, is pre-linguistic, limited to the present moment and possessed by animals; and higher-order consciousness, which is present only in humans, includes language, explicit long-term memories, and planning for the future. Qualia are properties of primary consciousness (Edelman, 1992; Edelman 2004). In his book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, Edelman (1992) points out that the solution to the problem of consciousness cannot come from pure philosophical reflection but from the scientific study of certain biological systems and their evolution. Edelman also points out that, unlike the sciences, philosophy is non-modest, that is to say that philosophical theories claim to be applied to the totality of existing reality. On the other hand, he severely criticizes strong computationalism in cognitive science (Edelman, 1992). Edelman further asserts the following:

“One of the alternatives that definitely does not seem feasible is to completely ignore the reality of the qualia, formulate a theory of consciousness that seeks by its own descriptions to transmit to a hypothetical “qualia free” observer which is to feel heat, see green, and so on. In other words, it is an attempt to propose a theory based on a kind of God-vision of consciousness. But no scientific theory of any kind can arise without assuming from the beginning that observers have sensation, as well as perception. To assume something different is to consent to the errors of theories that postulate syntactic formulations in correspondence with objectivist interpretations- theories that ignore the corporation (embodiment) as a source of meaning. There is no scientific observer without qualia. ”

Gerald Edelman, 1992, p. 114.

Edelman also explicitly rejects Cartesian dualism in the explanation of consciousness, and also clearly states his position against behaviorism. This would imply that it is not true that accepting the existence of subjective experiences entails accepting dualism Cartesian as Dennett supposes.

Rodolfo Llinas

Another neuroscientist, Rodolfo Llinás, after citing some authors from the field of philosophy of mind, points out that he uses the word “qualia” to refer to experiences generated by the nervous system such as that of a color, a pain or a musical note.

Similarly to Edelman, Llinás asserts that theories that underestimate qualia lack an adequate evolutionary perspective. Llinás mentions two types of theories about qualia: one that maintains that they are an epiphenomenon of consciousness without causal efficacy, and another that maintains that qualia are only present in higher organisms such as human beings, but that lower organisms such as insects they are biological automata without qualia. Llinás maintains that in reality these two classes of theories are similar to each other. In general, they posit that most brain functions are not involved in qualia, and that qualia in turn are not part of most brain processes. Furthermore, such perspectives hold that, even when there are qualia, they are ephemeral and unreliable, and only in retrospect do subjects form ideas or become aware of them. For example, a person is watching a football match and their wallet is stolen. He doesn't realize it, but after a while, noticing the absence of his wallet, he will remember that he felt a sensation like a touch on his leg.

Llinás, contrary to such approaches, believes that the qualia were essential for the very evolution of the nervous system, and for it to become what it is today in higher organisms. The lower animals had sensations (qualia), and these allowed them to predict their environment and perform appropriate motor movements. Thus, evolution gradually caused certain interior parts of the body to migrate to the periphery and become organs specialized in producing conscious sensations in different modalities, that is, in producing qualia. For Llinás, it is not correct to maintain that qualia do not play a relevant role in the functioning of the nervous system and the mind of human beings. They had an important role in the evolution of such a system, and they also play it today throughout our lives. Llinás also argues that the problem of cognition is, first of all, a problem that must be investigated empirically, and therefore it is not a philosophical problem (Llinás, 2001).

Antonio Damasio

Another neuroscientist who postulates qualia is Antonio Damasio. He calls visual, auditory and other sensory modalities images “qualia”. Damasio points out: "Qualia are the basic sensory qualities found in the blue of the sky or in the timbre of sound produced by a viola, the fundamental components of the images in the filmic metaphor" (Damasio, 2000, p. 25).

Damasio is a neuroscientist who believes that philosophy can make interesting contributions to the study of cognition and consciousness. In his book Feeling What Happens, he mentions that he has read books by Searle, Chalmers, the Churchlands, and other philosophers about consciousness (Damasio, 2000). For him, as for the vast majority of neuroscientists, subjectivity is not taboo: subjective experiences exist and science studies them. Damasio comments in Feel What Happens that, in his opinion, no accumulation of neuroscientific knowledge will allow someone to have the subjective experiences of another person. For this, he proposes to imagine a situation in which we have a much better brain scanner than those available today, which allows us to clearly visualize the different cortical and subcortical areas, and the circuits that participate in a subject's visual processes. The scanner is so good that it provides the reader with details of neuron firing and even brain chemistry and physics. The subject whom the reader examines with the scanner is Damasio himself, who is observing the San Francisco Bay, next to him. As Damasio forms a subjective image, the reader can scan his brain, but none of this allows the reader to see the image Damasio sees. However, observing the San Francisco Bay himself, the reader can get an idea of what Damasio sees. Looking at the scanner, one can learn the brain correlates of Damasio's experience as he watches the bay, but never the experience itself. At the same time, being there with Damasio, one is able to observe the San Francisco Bay and have the visual experience of it, but it is obtained from his personal perspective. One is the reader's experience and the other is Damasio's experience, and they are not the same. Each one is private and proper to an individual subject (Damasio, 2000).

Furthermore, this author adds, to have the San Francisco Bay experience, he doesn't need to know anything about the neurobiology of his own brain and experience, and the fact that he can recall his neurobiological knowledge of how we form images visuals does not add anything to your viewing experience itself. Damasio then discusses Frank Jackson's thought experiment about Mary, the neuroscientist in the neurobiology of chromatic color who grew up in a black and white room. This author agrees that neurobiological and physical knowledge does not provide Mary with the experience of colors. But he disagrees that this proves that neurobiological and scientific knowledge is inadequate to explain color vision. Giving a scientific explanation of something mental is something totally different from having that subjective mental experience. But the neurobiological explanation is an adequate scientific explanation of that experience. Now, Mary might know the neural correlates of experiencing colors, but that would not allow her to experience herself. Damasio adds that the mind and its qualities are real entities and are not illusions, and that he must scientifically study them as such, that is, as subjective, private and personal entities, and adds that

“It does not make sense to argue that subjective experience is not scientifically accessible: like the objective, it requires a sufficient number of observers dedicated to rigorous research according to the same experimental design; and that observations are checked by other researchers and deliver similar results. In addition, knowledge derived from subjective observations – that is, from introspective attire – can inspire objective experiments and, no less important, explanations of subjective experience on the basis of available scientific knowledge. The idea that the nature of the subjective experience can be effectively captured by the study of their behavioral correlates is wrong. Although mind and behavior are biological phenomena, mind is mind and behavior is behavior. They can relate, and the relationship will be more precise as science progresses, but mind and behavior are different in terms of their respective specifications. ”

A. Damascus, 2000, p. 335-336.

Vilayanur Ramachandran

In 1997 the neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran published together with the philosopher William Hirstein an article entitled Three Laws of Qualia. What neurology tells us about the biological functions of consciousness, quality and the self. What these authors propose is to approach qualia from an empirical perspective and not as a logical or philosophical problem.

On page 433, the authors ask how qualia evolved. They then mention that it is possible to take a skeptical point of view and posit that since the objective scientific description of the world is complete without qualia, it is nonsense to ask why qualia evolved or what they are for. But the authors flatly rule out such an option. They mention that, in fact, based on the principle of parsimony of Occam's razor, epiphenomenalism could be accepted and qualia denied since they are not necessary for a description of the functioning of the brain. However, Ramachandran and Hirstein (1997) argue that Occam's razor is not useful for scientific discovery. They exemplify the above with the discovery of relativity in physics, which was not the product of accepting Occam's razor but of rejecting it and asking the question of whether a deeper generalization, not required by currently available data, might be possible. were true and would allow for unexpected predictions. Most scientific discoveries arise, these authors argue, from ontologically promiscuous conjectures that do not stem from current data.

The authors then point out that skepticism might be justified in the philosophical realm, but that science is the wrong place for such skepticism. Skeptical questions that they give as examples are asking if “your red is not my green” or if we can be logically certain that we are not dreaming. Science, these authors assert, deals with what is probably true beyond reasonable doubt, not with what can be known with complete and absolute certainty. At the beginning of page 430 of the same article the authors mention that most neuroscientists and even most psychologists dispute the very existence of the qualia "problem" (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1997).