Churchland’s Eliminative Materialism

Eliminative Materialism is the maximalist physicalist position that our common-sense view of the mind is misleading and that consciousness is a kind of illusion generated by the brain—a contingent, evolutionary, inner adaptation that enhanced fitness and reproductive success. This deflationary view of consciousness is associated with philosophers Patricia Churchland (1986), Paul Churchland (1981), Daniel Dennett (1992), Keith Frankish (2022), and others, though their views are often distorted and caricatured.

Defining Eliminative Materialism

Paul Churchland defines “eliminative materialism” forcefully as “the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.”

Our third-person understanding and even our first-person introspection, Churchland says, “may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces.” He applauds “the principled displacement of folk psychology … [as] one of the most intriguing theoretical displacements we can currently imagine” (Churchland, 1981).

Patricia Churchland's path-setting 1986 book, Neurophilosophy, places the mind-body problem within the wider context of the philosophy of science and argues for a complete reductionist account of consciousness founded on neurobiology (Churchland, 1986). Indeed, “neurophilosophy” is the proffered name of a new discipline that is to be guided by Churchland's “unified theory of the mind-brain,” for which her “guiding aim” is to develop “a very general framework” (Stent, 1987).

She founds her approach on two principles: the progress of neuroscience in addressing mental states, and the recognition by many philosophers that philosophy is no longer “an a priori discipline in which philosophers can discover the a priori principles that neuroscientific theories had better honor on peril of being found wrong.”

That there remain philosophers who persist in arguing that the mind goes beyond the brain—they reject reductionism “as unlikely—and not merely unlikely, but as flatly preposterous”—Churchland attributes to persistent traditions of folk myths. To discover our true nature, she implores, “we must see ourselves as organisms in Nature, to be understood by scientific methods and means” (Churchland, 1986). She rejects the anti-reductionist weapon of “emergence” as being “of little explanatory value” (Stent, 1987).

Illusionism and Its Critics

Dennett argues that qualia—the qualitative features of phenomenal consciousness—which he notes (with a smile) compel philosophers to develop outlandish theories, are illusory and incoherent. To neuroscientist Michael Graziano, it's not that consciousness doesn't exist or that we are fooled into thinking we have it when we don't. Instead, eliminative materialism likens consciousness to the illusion created for the user of a human-computer interface such that the metaphysical properties we attribute to ourselves are wrong^[1] (Graziano, 2014, 2019a, 2019c).

In spite of the word “illusion” (see below), its proponents do not actually deny the reality of the things that compose what Wilfrid Sellars famously called “the manifest image”—thoughts, intentions, appearances, experiences—which he distinguished from “the scientific image” (Sellars, 1962).

The things we see and hear and interact with are, according to Dennett, “not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real patterns” (Dennett, 2017). The underlying reality, however—what exists in itself and not just apparently for us or for other creatures—is truly represented only by the scientific image, which must be expressed ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology.

Picking up on analogies in Dennett's work, as he puts it, Keith Frankish proposed the term “illusionism,” which has been adopted for the view that consciousness does not involve awareness of special “phenomenal” properties and that belief in such properties is due to an introspective illusion.

Frankish concludes: “Considered as a set of functional processes—a hugely complex informational and reactive engagement with the world—it is perfectly real. Considered as an internal realm of phenomenal properties or what-it-is-likenesses, it is illusory” (Frankish, 2022).

Although what we see and hear, for all the world, seems precisely what really exists, ringing in our ears and stars in our eyes undermine our realist folk psychology. (Personally, I have my own unambiguous proof. With my normal left eye, I see a light bulb as a single point of light; with my right eye, afflicted with advanced keratoconus, I see about 100 points of skewed, smeared light.)

Another approach claiming that there is no phenomenal consciousness draws on arguments from Buddhist philosophy of mind to show that the sense that there is this kind of consciousness is an instance of cognitive illusion. As articulated by Jay Garfield, “there is nothing 'that it is like' to be me. To believe in phenomenal consciousness or 'what-it's-like-ness' or 'for-me-ness' is to succumb to a pernicious form of the Myth of the Given.” He argues that “there are no good arguments for the existence of such a kind of consciousness” (Garfield, 2016).

The fact that some deny the existence of experience, says philosopher Galen Strawson, should make us “feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the power of human credulity.” This particular denial, he says with a flourish, “is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy” (Strawson, 2009).

While dismissing eliminative materialism and illusionism might at first seem obviously right, a prima facie case, I'd not so quickly jump to that conclusion: it could self-limit the awareness of subtleties and the nature of boundaries in the hunt for consciousness.

Footnote

[1]. Ironically, Donald Hoffman appeals to the same analogy of a human-computer user interface to argue for the view diametrically opposite to that of Dennett and Graziano. Hoffman argues for Idealism, that not only is consciousness real, it is the only thing that is real fundamentally (Idealism; Hoffman).