Why Eliminative Materialism Cannot Be a Good Theory of the Mind – Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

In a recent podcast neurosurgeon Michael Egnor talked with Robert J. Marks about the mind and its relationship to the brain and about different theories as to how the mind works. One of the theories they discussed was eliminative materialism, the idea that there is no mind, really; its just the brain buzzing.

Here is a partial transcript with some notes:

01:55 | What defines a good theory of the mind?

Robert J. Marks (right): What constitutes a good theory of the mind and the way the mind relates to the body and the brain?

Michael Egnor: Well, its a great question and a very important question. It was actually a question that Aristotle. (384322 B.C.E.) asked. In his work De Anima, he asked, what would a good explanation for the soul consist of?

Robert J. Marks: You mentioned the idea of a soul. Is this the mind, according to Aristotle?

Michael Egnor: Yes. What we call the mind is more of a subset of what the classical philosophers called the soul. They saw the soul as that which makes a living body alivewhat we would call the mind but also the physiological functions, the heartbeat, and all the physiology that goes along with it. And actually, I think thats a more sensible and comprehensive view of the human being. So what we think of as the mind is just several of the powers of the soul.

[Aristotle], in other words, didnt separate what we would call the mind so sharply from what we would call ordinary physiology, breathing, heartbeat, and the like. He thought of it all as an integrated whole.

Robert J. Marks: I see. So could you be more specific about what constitutes a good theory of the mind and the way the mind relates to the body?

Michael Egnor: Well, the very first thing we need is a theory that makes sense. And by that, I mean at least a theory that is not internally self-refuting. A good example of a self-refuting theory of the mind is eliminative materialism. [ ] It is the viewpoint that the only thing that exists is the brain. There is no mind, that what we have come to think of as our mind is just the physical processes going on inside our brain.

03:51 | The self-refuting theory of eliminative materialism

Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind.

That is different from another theory of the mind called identity theory that was held in the twentieth century but has been pretty much discarded:

Identity theory is a family of views on the relationship between mind and body. Type Identity theories hold that at least some types (or kinds, or classes) of mental states are, as a matter of contingent fact, literally identical with some types (or kinds, or classes) of brain states. The earliest advocates of Type IdentityU.T. Place, Herbert Feigl, and J.J.C. Smart, respectivelyeach proposed their own version of the theory in the late 1950s to early 60s. But it was not until David Armstrong made the radical claim that all mental states (including intentional ones) are identical with physical states, that philosophers of mind divided themselves into camps over the issue.

Its been discarded because its logical nonsense. Every attribute of the mind, reason, emotion, perception, all of those things are completely different from matter, That is, one describes matter as extensions in space; one describes perceptions and reason and emotions in completely different ways. Theres no overlap between them so mental states cant be the same thing as physical states. They actually dont share any properties in common. Theyre clearly related to one another in important ways but theyre not the same thing.

Eliminative materialists go one step further. They actually say that there are no mental states, that there is only the brain. Which is kind of an odd thing to say because what eliminative materialists are saying is that their ideas are mindless.

How can you have a proposition that the mind doesnt exist? That means propositions dont exist and that means that you dont have a proposition.

Robert J. Marks: So thats the self-refuting you were talking about

Michael Egnor (above left): Yes, its crazy, and Aristotle made that point: The very first thing, if you are going to explain the soul (or the mind), is that what you say has to make sense.

Theres a neuroscientist named Bennett and a philosopher named Hacker who have written extensively on this and topic of neurophilosophy and have written some very good things. And their motto is that the precondition of truth is sense. That is, that you cant pretend to have a scientific truth or a philosophical truth or any kind of truth if the statement that you are making about it doesnt even make sense. Eliminative materialism is self-refuting: If its true, then its false.

Note: M.R. (Max) Bennett and P.M.S. (Peter) Hacker are the authors of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003):

In this provocative work, a distinguished philosopher and a leading neuroscientist outline the conceptual problems at the heart of cognitive neuroscience. Writing from a scientifically and philosophically informed perspective, the authors provide a critical overview of the conceptual difficulties encountered in many current neuroscientific and psychological theories, including those of Blakemore, Crick, Damasio, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Kandel, Kosslyn, LeDoux, Penrose and Weiskrantz. They propose that conceptual confusions about how the brain relates to the mind affect the intelligibility of research carried out by neuroscientists, in terms of the questions they choose to address, the description and interpretation of results and the conclusions they draw. The book forms both a critique of the practice of cognitive neuroscience and a conceptual handbook for students and researchers.

So the first thing is that your theory has to make sense. And I think there are various theories that do make sense in varying degrees.

The second criterion is that the theory needs to offer a reasonably good explanation for the mind and for the body and it has to fit the evidence. And you very much want the theory to be consistent with the results of neuroscience obviously. Neuroscience is a beautiful and powerful field. Neuroscience has, I think, been philosophically misguided in substantial ways but we have to take the experimental evidence, the data, quite seriously and try to understand it in a way that makes sense.

Next: Why the mind cannot just emerge from the brain

Is the mind an emergent property of the brain? Or is there something else going on? Robert J. Marks discusses the different theories of the mind including materialism, panpsychism, and dualism with Dr. Michael Egnor.