BY SEAN WALSH
The Devil’s science? The philosophers who believe there are no beliefs.
Paul Feyerabend did not think consciousness is a thing.
“Is our basic conception of human cognition and agency yet another myth, moderately useful in the past perhaps, yet false at edge or core?” – Paul M. Churchland
Paul Feyerabend
Eliminative materialists are the philosophers who claim that consciousness does not exist. This seems very strange1. If there is no consciousness, then just who is it that is making the claim that it does not exist? And how can the theory be asserted? And who could understand it, assuming there is something to understand?
This eccentric movement in the philosophy of mind was founded by the ironist Richard Rorty and (separately) the iconoclast Paul Feyerabend. It is not clear if they really meant it.
The ostentatiously irreligious Daniel Dennett and the devoutly scientistic Paul and Patricia Churchland later proposed it as a possible implication of theoretical advances within the disciplines of cognitive science. They most certainly did and do mean it.
The Churchlands are still alive and so presumably are conscious, even if they continue to imply that they are not.
Rorty and Feyerabend are dead and so most definitely not conscious, or if they are then that will have come as a surprise to them, given the contours of their shared eschatological assumptions.
Dennett, arguably, ceased thinking after the publication of his excellent Content and Consciousness in 1986 although he did not technically expire until 2024, which was a sad loss for amateur sailing, if not for philosophy (he was a keen yachtsman).
Eliminative materialism (eliminativism) seems crazy but then so do many of the conjectures and speculations that thrive in the rambunctious culture of academic philosophy.
We are not talking about normal people, but participants in a culture in which common sense is usually the implausible outlier. “McTaggart claims that time does not exist; Moore replies that he’s not long had his breakfast” is how Iris Murdoch puts it. In the Cambridge of the time, it was Moore, defender of the idea that all might be just as it seems, who presented as the radical.
What does it mean to say that consciousness “does not exist”? We should talk about consciousness is, or is taken to be, by the people who want to repurpose it and pass it off as some sort of controlled illusion.
Consciousness, let us assume for now, is the collection of thoughts, feelings, decisions, anxieties, and longings which make up the mind, and self-consciousness is what happens when that collection knows its own distinctiveness via an internal commentary on itself.
How can anyone say these things do not exist when they are so familiar and such obvious objects of introspection?
The eliminativist replies that these objects, occurrent thoughts, feelings and intentions, are sense data which like all data are mediated through a theoretical framework, in this case the common sense or “folk” psychology that you and I work with when we tell other people and ourselves what we are thinking, intending, or feeling.
And, he continues, if that theory is wrong -if the sciences of the brain come to show that talk of beliefs and pains etc is crude and rudimentary- then it can be replaced by a better theory which radically redescribes the character of our mental lives.
This is how the primitive theory or myth of consciousness could be replaced or eliminated by “better” theories ordered to the assumptions and prejudices of the brain and behavioural sciences – if such extremist materialism is allowed to execute this coup against the language and ontology of the human soul.
It is true that in science when theories are adapted, updated or replaced the entities quantified within them – the things they talk about- are also liable to be spoken of differently or in some cases never spoken of again. We no longer, most of us, think that thunder is the shouted discontent of the gods, meteorology being on balance a better theory of the weather than its more honestly pagan precursors.
It is true also that there are sciences of the brain. But are there sciences of the mind or soul?
I suspect not. And to even talk of consciousness over soul, as is the modern and therefore secular style guide, is an unnecessary reductionistic retreat from the truths described by scholastic phenomenology, in which the divine likeness of human persons is sustained in the proper calibration of intellect, will and spirit.
When we talk about our inner lives, we are not applying a proto-scientific “theory” in which there is a logical space between observation and explanation. We cannot be wrong about being in pain, although we can be mistaken about its cause. Theorising about thinking is logically different from theorising within thought.
The eliminativists are correct that human interiority can be reconceptualised but wrong in suggesting that this is the business of the neurosciences. The deconstruction and reconstruction of thought is best done in co-operation with grace and is what we mean by metanoia – the conversion of the whole person – body, soul (which is the animating principle of the body), intellect, will and heart- to the divine life. What is eliminated in this process was not worth having in the first place.
The irony, and Rorty would consent to the description I hope, is that the eliminative materialists work within their own theoretical framework, one which has been bequeathed to them by the arch-dualist Descartes. They err in a way common to post-Enlightenment discussions of the mind: by isolating it from the body and then dispensing with it if philosophically convenient.
It is, then, a bit rich for Churchland, as quoted above, to suggest that the “basic” accounts of cognition are scientific reliquary or “mythical” when his approach is arrested in the simplifications and crudities of the architect of village rationalism.
And in any case, myths are usually truths too deep to be constrained by mere propositionality. Try doing science without them.
Look closely enough and you will find the devil’s signature on all systems of thought which desacralise the human person via eradication of the divine image held therein. Materialist theories of the soul are paradigmatic in this regard. In its absurdity, eliminativism is just more brazen than the rest.
1 David Chalmers has written of philosophical zombies but even he doesn’t think they should get tenure.
