One argument in response to this position comes out of the discussion in episode 35 and episode 36 on Hegel's account of self-consciousness. Here is the argument:
Premise 1
Most of the current research and debate in neuroscience about the nature of mind, such as is cited by the Churchlands and eliminative materialists, is limited to discussion of the relation between the brain and "consciousness." This includes questions about how the idea of agency that we normally attribute to minds arises.
Premise 2
There is a meaningful distinction to be made between consciousness and self-consciousness. By consciousness I refer to sense-perception and the understanding that natural organisms develop about their environment. By self-consciousness I refer to the normative concept of agency and responsibility that we have acquired through communicative practices, such as asking each other for and giving normative reasons for our actions and our beliefs. The strong claim here is that we only acquire this sense of our own agency by it being recognized. After we acquire this sense its origin tends to elude us because it is disguised in our having learning to adopt the position of another toward ourselves in thought (i.e., after one has learned to recognize and take oneself to be an agent).
Conclusion
Thus we may infer that current research programs in neuroscience and philosophy of mind and consciousness will not be able to answer the questions about human selfhood and agency that they claim they will be able to answer, since they are looking only at natural consciousness (i.e., sense-perception and environmental understanding) but not self-consciousness and how it originates outside the natural organism in normative relations between human beings.
In light of this argument, check out this video of Patricia Churchland making her case. Glimpse the soul-less abyss of an eliminativist future in her eyes ; )
- Tom McDonald
Hi, Tom,
I’m not sure how the term “normative” helps you here. One can give a descriptive, psychological account of a process by which we grasp something normative. This won’t explain the conceptual content of the thing, but that’s rarely the case for psychological analysis: an account of how we grasp numbers doesn’t explain what a number ultimately is.
If you mean that socially, people interact with us which gives us “norms” that we then follow, then that’s not what ethicists mean by “normative,” so using that term just seems to confuse things, for me at least… is there some author that you have in mind here with this use of the term? It seems like you’re slurring two things together here, but maybe I’m not following you.
Descriptive psychologists (and I don’t think this point has anything specifically to do with eliminative materialists as opposed to any other sort of psychologist) do try to give accounts of what’s going on in us when we’re self-conscious, and this is one of the most interesting areas in psychology for me. You’re definitely on the mark when you say that Hegel says we also have to pay attention to the sociological to give a full account of the situation, but this is different than the argument against eliminativism, which is all about preserving the first-person point of view that eliminativism wants to discount. Hegel of course (as a phenomenologist) is all for the first-person point of view as well, but his basic finding about the need for interpersonal reaction to achieve selfhood (what you’ve presented in this post) doesn’t itself rely on a first-person account; even a behaviorist/functionalist can talk about human interactions and how that results in an apparent enrichment in our ability to model situations, i.e. that “I” can now appear as an element in my models, which gives me more flexibility in how I react to things, i.e. more intelligence.
Mark,
I think Hegel would disagree with Husserl that the first-person point of view is originary or prior or ‘first philosophy’ in the sense that everything else we claim to know has to be founded on it. For Hegel the first-person point of view is historically generated when one encounters the fact that there is an other representation of the world with which yours conflicts or differs. Self-consciousness just is that identity-in-differing.
I think this is what Hegel means by “negation of negation”: grasping the “not” in its temporal actuality rather than thinking of not-being or “~” as a sheer nullity to be ignored as formal logic would have us do. Hegel follows Kant. Kant finds that all our representations have to be accompanied by the “I think” because we do “not” know for certain that they align perfectly with the world ‘in itself’. Hegel just recognizes that this ‘gap’ or differing between world and thought in Kantian philosophy exhausts the actuality of subjectivity and reason. Hegel’s negation of negation is the ultimate affirmation of the freedom of thought.
By normative I mean the regulation of most of our behaviors bodily and cognitive by social and linguistic standards which have evolved and which can also be negotiated and potentially changed if and when we become more critical, self-reflective, and free in our cognition.
A good example of such a normative regulation is keeping a promise made. This is a norm most people would continue to uphold as something society needs. But there is nothing ‘natural’ about it.
Could you clarify what you mean by not “natural?”
By natural I mean patterns that follow natural regularities, repetitions, those behaviors to which we do not attribute self-consciousness because they don’t appear to us – as those who reason about them – to require a self-consciousness or agency that is the author of the behaviors. This would refer to pretty much everything natural science studies, e.g., the movement of the planets, or the patterns of diabetes or cancer. By non-natural I just mean all those behaviors — especially the peculiar and unusual sorts of behaviors, the sort that stand out — in human history and our everyday lives to which it just makes the most sense to assign self-grasping agency or authorship as being behind the behavior. Keeping a promise may not seem like a great example, but if I made a promise to you to pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, would you expect me to pay as reliably as you expect the sun to rise in the morning?
Perhaps, but then wouldn’t I be surprised if you have never broken a promise before and all of the sudden, for the first time you did, and I never got reimbursed for the burger?
From my perspective, you behavior in not upholding the promise would certainly appear unatural.
I definitely do not mean by normative what formalistic ethicists mean by the term: prescribing ideals that would be nice if people followed them. Instead, what I mean by normative is the already-existing regulation of your behavior by historical and institutional establishment. For example, that you speak and write in the English language is normatively established in the sense that I mean.
Another way to put it: norms are actual social forces that are the glue or ‘substance’ that holds society together. When everyone expects you to speak English, there is the actual presence of normative force that I’m talking about.
Also, self-consciousness as I’m referring to it in the post is not necessarily something desirable in itself. Most people don’t want to be self-conscious. After a society reaches a point where the force of particular norms is no longer contested, i.e., when a society nears a far-reaching consensus, it should not be surprising that most people will want to get rid of the difference from the norm felt by being self-conscious.
One more note! – part of what I believe is entailed by the argument in the post is that people will not be able to get rid of the difference-from-the-norm that is felt in self-consciousness even if they desire to get rid of it as the Churchlands do.
I do apologize that I should have clarified that I mean norms in both the philosophical and sociological meanings of the term. However, I do not believe philosophy can grasp the substantive sense of normative prescriptiveness without the sociological account that understands norms as forces which are already actual.
Note that the sociological meaning of norm implies a centrality to which the individual can only more-or-less conform, i.e., the individual can only approximate to a norm, like the ideal of speaking “proper English” for example, but can never coincide exactly with it. What is proper English?
It is precisely in that differing-from-the-norm that we should locate what Hegel means by self-consciousness and spirit as “identity-in-difference”.
Norms in sociology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norms_(sociology)
Norms in philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(philosophy)
Hey Tom,
Interesting post (I’m a big fan of both Churchland and Hegel).
I’m a bit concerned about this though:
“There is a meaningful distinction to be made between consciousness and self-consciousness.”
You have that in the premise section, but that seems to be the very point of issue. Wouldin’t an Eliminative Materialist argue against that very premise?
Also, Philosophy Bites did a recent interview with Churchland (at least I think, I don’t listen to them in order).
Finally, what do you think the Hegalian argument against allowing that animals are also self-concious would be?
I get the materialism, but why “eliminationist?” What advantage are they positing?
Feeling way out of my depth here, but I’m not clear how understanding something “scientifically” will lead to its elimination. Presumably, our metaphor systems (“everyday concepts such as the beliefs, feelings”) evolved because they were, within their context, the most efficient way to … well, I’m not sure exactly what.
So, if we do understand the meat-function of these metaphorical constructs, how does that render them obsolete? It’s not as if our symbol systems are “tricks” covering up the “real” function of the brain. As a materialist, I agree that all “mind” is very likely reducible to physicality. That doesn’t mean that “mind” is some useless chimera for the weak (“you can’t handle the truth!”) It’s like saying, “Computers are ‘really’ myriad electronic firings, the operating system is a hoax perpetrated on us all.”
Okay, I told you I felt out of my depth.
I know this discussion was started aeons ago but if I may add my 2 cents worth here it is my sense that Churchland and others are barking up the wrong tree here. What on earth I wonder do they hope to discover by looking at brain cells. Lets say one day they were able to find and exact match between brain cell behavior and reported consciousness experience (which is highly unlikely anyway). All it would be like would be kind of like looking into a mirror. It would still say nothing about actual conscious experience.
The Churchlands are eliminativist because (if I remember correctly) they want to get rid of mental talk from the language of explanation. I ask you “why did you do that?” You say “because I had some desire, and the belief that the action would satisfy the desire.”
This, they say is “folk psychology,” and I share some of their skepticism: we posit desires and beliefs are these things that exist in us over time, even when we’re not thinking about them. What’s the phenomenological support about that? If someone asks me if I believe something, and I stop and reflect, and say “yes,” then am I really looking inside myself and checking on something that’s really, objectively there, this enduring belief, and enunciating it, or does the act of my reflecting in some way create the belief? So the eliminative materialist would ultimately like us to understand what goes in the brain in such a case and alter our language to more adequately reflect that. In the current situation, if it does turn out that there’s this illusion of something persistent over time, then we’re relying on bad evidence if, e.g. someone asks “is this the man that killed your wife?” We need a good model for memory to determine whether I’ll be able to answer that correctly, and this ordinary talk of “belief” (in this case a belief about something I witnessed) is, on this account, just going to be misleading.
Hi Mark,
Even if the belief is not “really there”, surely something must explain the persistence of the belief? I voted for a Democratic candidate in the last election, and in all the elections prior. I can remember why I did so each time, and feel comfortable with those decisions. To the extent I feel differently on a particular political or aesthetic or value judgement, I can remember having once felt differently. And, I more or less remember why those feelings may have changed. So, I can’t _really_ be making up my beliefs anew each time, can I? (Or, at least, I would perceive the change in my beliefs, wouldn’t I?) Otherwise, wouldn’t I expect my objective behavior based on those beliefs (e.g., voting) to change more frequently?
In other words, you don’t need a better model of memory with respect to your beliefs than you would with respect to remembering your first car, would you?
Folk notions are scientifically uninformed, common-sense views toward a certain domain. So, folk psychology gives us a rule of thumb on how to understand and predict the behavior of ourselves and others. When used by the folk, it assumes a dualism between physical acts and mental states which have causal relationships with one another (e.g., “If Mark desires milk, and he knows there’s milk in the refrigerator, then Mark will go to the refrigerator to get the milk.”).
Churchland, then, sees folk psychology as a THEORY of human behavior and psychology, which posits the existence of the abstract entities of propositional attitudes (belief, desire, et cetera). He dislikes folk psychological theory as well as the notions that come along with it, so he wants to show that it’s first, an inadequate theory (because it lacks the scope that we’d want a scientifically rigorous, all-encompassing theory of human behavior and psychology to have, has been fruitless for at least 2,500 years, and isn’t conservative toward the well-established theories of neuroscience, et cetera), and second, that it’s been proven wrong empirically (in folk psychology our concept of memory is that it’s some unified thing, but we’ve found there’s not a single process or function of the brain that corresponds to memory, and it seems as though there’s nothing that corresponds to what we mean when we talk about “the will,” and so on). For these reasons, he wants to eliminate folk psychological theory as well as strip its postulates (the propositional attitudes) of their ontological status, i.e., he wants us to stop talking about belief and desire as if they’re something that actually exists and refers to something in our brain.
So it seems as though his argument is something like this:
Propositional attitudes are postulated by the theory of folk psychology.
Folk psychological theory is inadequate and wrong.
Therefore, strip its postulates of their ontological status.
@ TS: Seeking a “scientifically rigorous, all-encompassing theory of human behavior and psychology”, as you say Churchland does, strikes me as itself disturbing. Natural science assumes a concept of ‘nature’ as the subsumption of particular individual entities under mechanical laws. So the theorist is going to posit the mechanical laws that are supposedly behind his own positing of the laws? Hegel has been accused of totalizing overreach in his theoretical ambition, but at least he paves the way to his mountaintop accounting for historical contingency, freedom, and subjectivity which speak to the concrete individual reader, not mere mechanical laws that would erase the content and relevance of the actual individual thought.
Tom,
I think you give an uncharitable account of natural science, keeping it locked inside the boundary of Enlightenment era beliefs about it.
The project of natural science is to give as simplistic a theory as possible that accounts for and can predict verifiable phenomena. Unless one doubts that human behavior and psychology is mechanistic, or predicated upon underlying patterns which are themselves mechanistic, the project of natural science hardly seems overreaching or presumptuous.
Hegel himself admits that inorder to being talking about anything one must first assume it to be intelligble. Is science taking any steps less modest than that?
Be uber-Rorytian, dump philosophy AND language: embrace affective neuroscience ala Panksepp then Sohms (60 min mark) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU-MU60opXI&feature=related
The concluding comments in Stanford’s article makes two striking points. For eliminative materialism to get off the ground, we have to assume that scientific psychology will turn out a certain way, that it will show that folk psychology is wrong at some point in the future. And despite the fact that it pivots on a promise not yet fulfilled, the consequences of the collapse of common sense notions would be, according to Jerry Fodor, “the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of the our species”. Fodor is being too hyperbolic for my tastes, but E.M. does seem to be quite speculative and fairly drastic at the same time.
And I was under the impression that our thought categories are socially constructed, which is to say they are products of social evolution and not the products of organic tissues. I mean, brains are just the wrong the place to look for beliefs. That’s like trying to find the plot of a novel in the circuits of your Kindle. Sometimes the best stuff is between the lines or the associations conjured. I mean, thinking and believing happens in a very rich and complex context including the whole history of evolution and the existence of oxygen. Sure, the brain is a huge deal and an absolute necessity but I’m extremely skeptical about the notion that consciousness can be equated to brain states. At the very least, it’s going to involve the whole organism. You don’t have to be a Freudian to know that the stomach and the loins exert a powerful influence on the mind, for example. …And then there are so many different kinds of consciousness. I mean, it seems very unlikely that things are as simple as E.M. or any brain-mind identity theory would have it.
Wholly agree with you David. And quite frankly I cannot imagine what form this new understanding that our previous ideas were of the “folk” variety (whats wrong with folk anyway?!) would take. I am not trained in philosophy but I would have thought that Churchlands statement “The mind is the brain” is about as illogical as one could philosophically possibly get.
@ David: Jerry Fodor may seem to be going over the edge there, but that’s his style. He’s a witty and funny guy, which are wonderful and rare traits in his line of work. His criticisms of Steven Pinker and Darwinian psychology in cognitive science are absolute gems and a enjoyable reads – just look up Fodor v. Pinker. I’m not crazy about his own functionalism, but I admire how he defends ‘folk psychology’ against the ridiculously overreaching scientism of the Churchlands and Pinker.
A few problems with eliminative materialism:
1. Human beings only know things through observing correlations. Even the observation that “correlation is not always causation” just means that if two things correlate it is not necessarily the case that one can adjust one of the variables and the other one will predictably change. So even “correlation is not always causation” is an observation that rests on observing correlations. This is why I consider myself an instrumentalist. Science is a useful tool. Indeed all concepts are tools. The right question is not “what is real?” but “what works?”.
2. There is no possible Universe except one of unending pure randomness (at least as far as we’re able to sense) where we wouldn’t be able to notice correlations and hence derive “causality” descriptions. So the “deeper reality” of it could well be that things we think are cause-and-effect are not. The effect could be the cause, or they could cause each other in a cycle, or they are both caused at least sometimes by common variables. So causality could be an illusion just as well. As an instrumentalist who sees “reality” as a conceptual tool I will always be open to the “deeper reality” not being as it appears and will adjust my views of “reality” when doing so will improve how the tool of the concept of “reality” works.
3. Even if we assume everything is material things like “beliefs”, “thoughts”, “feelings”, “agency” still exist as what ever physical patterns match those concepts for practical human purposes. Those concepts are then no more illusions than “chair”, “table”, “house”, just that it is easier for people to recognize concepts like “chair” and tell what the details are and what it looks like. “Belief”, “thought”, “feeling”, etc… may have fuzzier definitions but the concepts are still useful and our use of the concepts in understanding our actions, our selves, and our lives is the best evidence of their utility. Using these concepts makes life more enjoyable and helps guide action in such a way as to be optimal in comparison to not using them.
4. Even if they are physical that doesn’t mean they are simple. Assuming that the neurological patterns humans can most easily notice given our minds and our machinery right now can tell us things with good precision is not necessarily a sound assumption even if everything is physical, because we can’t notice every variation in the physics of the brain. It could then well be that some neurological pattern correlates with some behavior, thought, desire, feeling, etc… 70% of the time but then not 30% of the time because of yet tinier differences we are unable to observe. I suspect there will always be some things we can’t observe. And I hope so. Everyone or even one person or a few people knowing everything there is to know about everything would be fraught with problems. One person or a few and you’d have the most tightly controlled dictatorship ever. Everyone and you’d have the war of all against all. Fortunately a number of quantum mechanical laws prove that we will never be able to observe everything because true randomness exists and observing some things prevents observation of other things.