The Feb 12th edition of The New Yorker had an extensive article on neurophilosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, perhaps the best known proponents of eliminative materialism. A PDF is now available at this location.
What is eliminative materialism?
Think of some evanescent emotion — apprehension mixed with conceit, say. Then think, That feeling and that mass of wet tissue — same thing. Or think of the way a door shutting sounds to you, which is private, inaccessible to anyone else, and couldn’t exist without you conscious and listening; that and the firing of cells in your brain, which any neuroscientist ran readily detect without your cooperation — same thing.
Same thing?
The terms don’t match, they don’t make sense together, any more than it makes sense to ask how many words you can fit in a truck.
According to the Churchlands,
It is not enough to imagine that the brain houses the mind (in some obscure cavity, perhaps tiny intracellular pockets), or gives rise to the mind (the way a television produres an image), or generates the mind (a generator producing current): to imagine any of those things is to retain the idea that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. The trick is to remove the verb that separates them. The problem is not one of knowledge; the problem is our obdurate, antediluvian minds that cannot grasp what we believe to be true.
Apparently the Churchlands’ obdurate, antediluvian minds can grasp what they believe to be true. But I will give them this: here is what Pat said when she encountered patients who were blind but didn’t know it:
That really kicked the slats out of the idea that you can learn very much about the nature of the mind or the nature of the brain by asking what’s imaginable. It’s not imaginable to me that I could be blind and not know it, but it really happens. So its being unimaginable doesn’t tell me shit!
If I can’t imagine how the brain can be the mind, I am reprimanded — and rightly so — for my lack of imagination. But if the Churchlands can’t imagine how a nonmaterial mind can interact with a material brain, I have to take their word for it that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial mind. Hmmm.
By the way, Newton couldn’t imagine how one body can act on another at a distance through empty space, nor can contemporary physicists — they just found a way to elminate action at a distance. They haven’t found a way to eliminate what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”, though. Eliminated aspects of reality have their way of reappearing in a more virulent form.
Already Paul feels pain differenty than he used to; when he cuts himself shaving now he feels not “pain” but something more complicated — first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then, a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers. The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile’s complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine.
By paying attention not only to what some (e.g., Crick) call the neural correlates of consciousness but also to the corresponding differences in the qualitative content of consciousness, Paul has developed an enriched, more differentiated experience. Whereas this tells me that neuroscience has some interesting applications, it makes eliminative materialism seem even more preposterous.
Here is what Pat said on returning from a frustrating faculty meeting:
Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.
And they really think this eliminates the how it feels of having serotonin levels hitting bottom or having a brain awash in glucocorticoids or having blood vessels full of adrenaline…?
