Eliminativism: An Attempt To Take A Great Weight Off The Mind Essay Example

Eliminative materialism represents perhaps the most radical complex of ideas within the philosophy of mind. The arguments which it holds may seem absurd at the first blush. Eliminativists have 'accelerated' physicalist/materialist views concerning mental states so that the concepts we usually use to describe our experience with (e.g. love, hate, desire) arrive as the aberrations and results of our long-term misconceptions and ignorance (in other words, 'mental states' never actually existed). Eliminativism main thesis is that common sense psychology shows outrageous poverty in descriptive capacity, facing the innovations of nowadays science (in particular, neurobiology). And while the theory of identity and functionalism are focused on the possibilities of reduction, eliminativists claim it is not possible to provide one-to-one match-ups between the concepts of folk psychology and concepts of theoretical neuroscience, and thus, intertheoretic reduction impossibility.
According to Paul Churchland, there is an acute need for a new ontological framework, a paradigm, which would take into account the current scientific shift, for our common sense psychological framework is utterly misleading and tt totally misrepresents our internal activities (perhaps the reason why the theory has faced so decisive resistance: we have no less to cross out our thousand years culture with all the poetry and philosophy talking about (and appealing to) memory, desire, passion etc). Matured neuroscience presents an entirely different worldview that it is impossible to match common sense paradigm with these new, previously unheard, settings (e.g. statement that consciousness may be considered solely as the outcome of neurobiological processes) that have arisen. For the eliminativists, there can be no compromise. In accordance to their theory, the reduction to physicalism (while remaining neutral to folk psychology constellation) would be hypocritical and wasteful as to put "new wine into old wineskins".
Churchland suggests the folk psychology may be regarded as an empirical theory. And like all empirical theories it may be falsifiable (as Churchland insists, folk psychology will be falsified) and its entities are in principle eliminable. The process of elimination is very natural for the development of the scientific disciplines and their conceptual apparatus. In philosophy, some concepts may be abandoned for a long period of time and then be revitalised or fade out forever. Elimination can be avoided if there is a possibility of intertheoretic reduction (the more the concept is open to intertheoretic reduction and circulation over disciplines the more valuable and relevant it is). The Identity theory works with the spectrum of phenomena reducible to physicalism (e.g. one of the first to use reductionist approach, Descartes suggested that the cause of death is not related to the soul but to the damage of the vital parts of the bodies as it happens after some details damage in machine) while eliminativists provide a lot of examples and historical parallels of the phenomena that are not reducible, but eliminated. For instance, the concept of heat ('subtle fluid held in bodies' proved to be a kinetic energy, a form of motion: "caloric" was simply eliminated from accepted ontology), also the phlogiston phenomenon in chemistry and impetus in physics, which was eliminated by new settings of Newton's laws of motion.
There is a lot of obscurity concerning 'mental states': we can be easily confused (e.g. whether we love a person and find them a unique creature, and the next moment we hate them and find them miserable) thus, the concepts of folk psychology bring a lot of uncertainty to the table -- the level of obscurity is that huge that we simply do not want to operate with these concepts within science in total, regarding it as possible source for speculation and charlatanry, incompatible with scientific discourse. According to the eliminativists, the whole spectrum of the problematics (to start with Ancient Greeks) which take under the umbrella these concepts ('mental states') should be eliminated as misleading: figuratively speaking, enough time is wasted, instead, let's move to something more tangible and materialistic, let's analyse brain work, let's incorporate neuroscience concepts into philosophical discourse, perhaps, we will move much faster and easily, taking a great weight off our minds.
Apparently, we also deal with problems of formalisation and the choice of methodological instruments. Is there anything like thoughts converting into sentences (what about animals and children then) or is brain work more like shimmering pixels? How do we formalise our observations? With what theoretical background? We may interpret everything remaining on the folk psychology level, but then we are absolutely out-of-date in our descriptions and -- what is worth -- in our conclusions, excluding the vital up-to-date information how and why our brains operate in this or that way. Eliminativists are confident that it is unreasonable to 'translate' the sensations, thoughts into a sentence-like linguistic-based model.
Churchland claims that we may expect at least, more liberally, a revisionary materialism rather than eliminative. There was a linguistic turn in philosophy once why not neuroscientific turn right now?