Why Eliminativist Materialism is Almost Certainly False
Eliminativist materialism is the position espoused by Paul
and Patricia Churchland, and Daniel Dennett (though Dennett doesn't go as far as the Churchlands). Eliminativists hold that, since
Materialism is true, one should accept the following: there is not really such
a thing as a mind separate from a brain, there will never be a science of the mind,
and the mind ought to be “reduced” to the brain (for the purposes of science). Here
are four reasons why this is false (with a specific focus on eliminativism about consciousness):
1.
As Bertie Russell argued in his “Analysis of
Matter”, and as Noam Chomsky has argued vociferously since, there has not really
been a coherent concept of ‘matter’ since Isaac Newton. By defining humanity’s
first cosmic force – gravity – with his magnificent equations, Newton proved
that God’s universe is not simply some simple Dualist structure, with a mechanical,
intelligible matter-half and a more mysterious, intangible mental-half – instead,
it includes occult forces. He thus showed
that the “mechanical philosophy” was false, and that the cosmos was a far more
ontologically ambiguous mess than anyone had previously realised.
Newton himself saw this philosophical implication,
and was highly disturbed by it (his only palliation was the beautiful mathematical
intelligibility of this new occult force). As Chomsky notes, David Hume was
another one to recognise the philosophical significance of Newton’s findings. Hume’s
own statement on the matter sums up Newton’s meteor-strike perfectly: “While
Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he
showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, so
agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity of men; and thereby restored her
ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will
remain.”
The weirder physics that emerged from the late 19th
Century onwards, culminating in quantum mechanics (though not via a natural
progression), made the traditional notion of matter even more untenable, if not
outright absurd. Here is how the
Wikipedia page on “Materialism” summarises these developments in our
understanding of reality:
“One challenge to the traditional concept of matter
as tangible "stuff" came with the rise of field
physics in the 19th century. Relativity shows that matter and energy
(including the spatially distributed energy of fields) are interchangeable.
This enables the ontological view that energy is prima materia and matter is
one of its forms. On the other hand, the Standard Model of Particle physics
uses quantum field theory to describe all
interactions. On this view it could be said that fields are prima materia and
the energy is a property of the field.
According to the dominant cosmological model, the Lambda-CDM
model, less than 5% of the universe's energy density is made up of the
"matter" described by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and the
majority of the universe is composed of dark
matter and dark energy - with little agreement amongst
scientists about what these are made of.[22]
With the advent of quantum physics, some scientists
believed the concept of matter had merely changed, while others believed the
conventional position could no longer be maintained. For instance Werner
Heisenberg said "The ontology of materialism rested upon the
illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around
us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is
impossible... atoms are not things."”
As Chomsky says, the ‘Material’ and the ‘Physical’ have
by now come to mean simply “all that which exists according to our best scientific theories" (in other words, they are methdological). It
is this deflation of the words’ meaning that explains Galen Strawson’s wonderful
(and, I suspect, misunderstood) argument that even consciousness is physical, and yet no less real for this (i.e. that
consciousness is both physical and phenomenal, and yet that we can just say that it's "physical" (because physical can mean phenomenal)). Incidentally, I think Strawson’s
essay on this is superb, and well worth reading.
Now, of course, the reason why people are still able
to use the concept of ‘matter’ in a philosophical sense – the reason why the ‘mind-body’
problem is still understood as a meaningful dilemma – is that there does remain
a powerful, intuitive distinction between the
mental/phenomenal/experiential/ontologically subjective, and everything else. Certainly,
it seems undeniable that there is a profound difference between a slimy,
furrowed hunk of grey matter and qualia.
Nevertheless, in order to pronounce, as it were, a priori, that there is not really such a thing as the mental, that consciousness is a nonsensical,
scientifically intractable notion, and that we should only talk about things on the bio-chemical-physical level of abstraction, one surely needs a solid, well-defined
conception of what ‘matter’ actually is. But there is not this solid,
well-defined conception. Ergo…
2.
As John Searle is forever pointing out, there is
an important (and yet constantly confused) difference between ontological subjectivity/objectivity,
and epistemic subjectivity/objectivity:
just because a phenomenon is ontologically
subjective (like consciousness) that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to have
an epistemically objective science of
that phenomenon. One only comes to this conclusion if one confuses the two
senses, which is nothing more than a category error.
3.
As Searle also points out, there is no way of
denying the existence of consciousness without saying something like “consciousness
is an illusion”, and yet this statement simply makes no sense. Consciousness can’t be an illusion, since the notion
of an illusion only makes sense relative to subjective perception, and
consciousness is fundamentally subjective (ontologically). We say that rainbows
are an illusion precisely because their appearance in our subjective
observation of reality is created by a kind of mistake in our subjective
observation (unlike a tree, a rainbow doesn’t have a fixed, mind-independent
reality (all creatures can perceive and interact with trees in some form or
another, whereas a rainbow is a temporary spectacle created by the interaction
of light and water droplets in air, and only certain creatures are able to see
this temporary spectacle)). Since consciousness is inherently subjective, no
sense can be made of the claim that it’s an “illusion”. As Thomas Nagel says,
“an illusion to whom”? God? The universe? What
does any of this mean?
Ultimately, therefore, if you want to ‘deny’
consciousness, you have to just say it isn’t real. But what does that mean?
4.
Epistemologically speaking, there is actually no
more insane claim than that consciousness doesn’t exist. To make this claim
violates an entire philosophical tradition, and hundreds of years of scholarship.
As Descartes showed, consciousness is the one thing a philosophical sceptic
cannot possibly doubt. One cannot doubt that one is doubting. I
THINK THEREFORE I AM, JE PENSE DONC JE SUIS, COGITO ERGO SUM. Clearly,
Dennett, Churchland and their ilk go for some version of Quine’s view that
epistemology and ontology ought to be based on science, and thus don’t regard a
priori, philosophical scepticism as important – but that is itself a position
based on a priori, philosophical reasoning. They are still making a
philosophical claim, and the claim they are making has as much going for it as Thales’
idea that everything is water.
All in all, I just think those
that doubt the existence of consciousness and qualia (in less lofty and
mystically-loaded terms, we can just say “self-awareness” and “experience”) are
mentally ill. You cannot fucking tell me that I’m not aware of existing. I am
aware that I exist. I am absolutely 100% sure that I am aware that I exist. I
cannot doubt that there is some thought going on in my head right now, and that
I know that there is. I simply cannot. I am real and I know that I am real. I
can see, hear, smell, taste, feel – and when I do do these things, I know that
I am doing them. So, to stoop to a base ad hominem slur, Dennett and the
Churchlands are actually fucking crazy.
