May 19 JDN 2460450

There are lots of little variations, but basically all views on the philosophy of mind boil down to four possibilities:

1. Dualism: Mind and body are two separate types of thing
2. Monism: Mind and body are the same type of thing
3. Idealism: Only mind exists; body isn’t real
4. Eliminativism: Only body exists; mind isn’t real

Like most philosophers and cognitive scientists, I am a die-hard monist, specifically a physicalist: The mind and the body are the same type of thing. Indeed, they are parts of the same physical system.

I call it the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, which so many fail to understand at their own peril:

You are your brain.

You are not a product of your brain; you are not an illusion created by your brain; you are not connected to your brain. You are your brain. Your consciousness is generated by the activity of your brain.

Understanding how this works is beyond current human knowledge. I ask only that you understand that it works. Treat it as a brute fact of the universe if you must.

But precisely because understanding this mechanism is so difficult it has been aptly dubbed The Hard Problem, I am at least somewhat sympathetic to dualists, who say that the reason we can’t understand how the mind and brain are the same is that they aren’t, that there is some extra thing, the soul, which somehow makes consciousness and isn’t made of any material substance.

(If you want to get into the weeds a bit more, there are also “property dualists”, who try to bridge the gap between dualism and physicalism, but I think they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. So-called “predicate dualism” is really just physicalism; nobody says that tables or hurricanes are non-physical just because they are multiply-realizable.)

The problem, of course, is that dualism doesn’t actually explain anything. In fact, it adds a bunch of other mysteries that would then need to be explained, because there are clear, direct ways that consciousness interacts with physical matter. Affecting the body affects the mind, and vice-versa.

You don’t need anything as exotic as fMRI or brain injury studies to understand this. All you need to do is take a drug. In fact, all you need to do is get hungry and eat food. Eating food—obviously a physical process—makes you no longer hungry—a change in your conscious state. And the reason you ate food in the first place was because you were hungry—your mental state intervened on your bodily action.

The fact that mind and body are deeply connected is therefore an obvious fact, which should have been apparent to anyone throughout history. It doesn’t require any kind of deep scientific knowledge; all you have to do is pay close enough attention to your ordinary life.

But I can at least understand the temptation to be a dualist. Consciousness is weird and mysterious. It’s tempting to posit some whole new class of substance beyond anything we know in order to explain it.

Then there’s idealism, which theoretically, in principle, could be true—it’s just absurdly, vanishingly unlikely. Technically, all that I experience, qua experience, happens in my mind. So I can’t completely rule out the possibility that everything I think of as physical reality is actually just an illusion, and only my mind exists. It’s just that, well… the whole of my experience points pretty strongly to this not being the case. At the very least, it’s utterly impractical to live your life according to such a remote possibility.

That leaves eliminativism. And this, I confess, is the one I really don’t get.

Idealism, I can’t technically rule out; dualism, I understand the temptation; monism is in fact the truth. But eliminativism? I just can’t grok how anyone can actually believe it.

Then again, I think they sort of admit that.

The weirdest thing about eliminativism is that what they are actually saying is that things like beliefs and knowledge and feelings don’t actually exist.

If you ask an eliminativist if they believe eliminativism is true, they should answer “no”: because their assertion is precisely that nobody believes anything at all.

The more sophisticated eliminativists say that these “folk terms” are rough approximations to deeper concepts that cognitive science will someday understand. That’s not so ridiculous, but it still seems pretty bizarre to me to say that iron doesn’t exist because we now understand that an iron atom has precisely 26 protons. Perhaps indeed we will understand the mechanisms underlying beliefs better than we do now; but why would we need to stop calling them beliefs?

But some eliminativists—particularly behaviorists—seem to think that the these “folk terms” are just stupid, unscientific notions that will be one day discarded the same way that phlogiston and elan vital were discarded. And that I absolutely cannot fathom.

Consciousness isn’t an explanation; it is what we were trying to explain.

You can’t just discardthe phenomenonyou were trying to make sense of! This isn’t giving up on phlogiston; it’s giving up on fire. This isn’t abandoning the notion of elan vital; it’s abandoning the distinction between life and death.

But the more I think about this, the more I wonder:

Maybe eliminativists are right—about themselves?

Maybe the reason they think the rest of us don’t have feelings and beliefs is that they actually don’t. They don’t understand all this talk about the inner light of consciousness, because they just don’t have it.

In other words:

Are eliminativists zombies?

No, not the shambling, “Brains! Brains!” kind of zombie; the philosophical concept of a zombie (sometimes written “p-zombie” to clarify). A zombie is a being that looks human, acts human, is externally indistinguishable from a human, yet has no internal experience. They walk and talk, but they don’t actually think. A zombie acts like us, but lacks the inner light of consciousness.

Of course, what I’d really be saying here is that they are almost indistinguishable, but you can sometimes tell them apart by their babbling about the non-existence of consciousness.

But really, almost indistinguishable makes more sense anyway; if they were literally impossible to tell apart under any conceivable test, it’s difficult to even make sense of what we mean when we say they are different. (I am certainly not the first to point this out, and indeed it’s often used as an argument against the existence of zombies.)

Do I actually think that eliminativists are zombies?

No. I don’t.

But the weird thing is that they seem to, and so I feel some compulsion to let them self-identify that way. It feels wrong to attribute beliefs to someone that they say they don’t actually hold, and eliminativists have said that they don’t hold any beliefs whatsoever.

Yet, somehow, I don’t think they’ll appreciate being called zombies, either.