I was sitting on the steps, eating chocolate with S, the Derrida thesis-maker whom I've already introduced, and Tome, a worldly Heideggerian with a broad northern accent.S mentioned "those crazy Churchlands", a sister-brother/father-daughter/wife-husband team who write articles on the virtues of eliminative materialism and the evils of folk psychology. I think we happened to turn our rheumy eyes onto this topic because we'd been discussing the relation of continental philosophy to science.
Tome rather liked the sound of the Churchland stuff. Their view - or what I can gather is their view from the first two lines of one of their articles - is that all action-explanation requirements can be fulfilled by neuroscience alone, thus eliminating (geddit?) the need for explanations involving beliefs or desires.
One problem I suggested might be that, whilst a desire, for example, is directed at an object outside of ourselves, a full description of our physical and neural constitution cannot account for objects external to us.
Tome thought this didn't matter, because any micro-physical description of a human would necessarily involve the fact that we are constantly interacting physically with things around us; that we are part of an holistic physical system whose activities fall under strict laws of nature.
Something of a phenomenological response to this might be that a detailed analysis of the process of light passing through the retina and transmitting 'signals' to the brain does not in any way explain what it is like to see: to see a table as a table, or to recognise an old friend in the distance. Can we make sense of aspect perception using only a physical explanatory schema?
It is reasonably plausible to claim that a belief that a person holds is in their mind, but what does it mean to say a belief is in their brain? What form could it take?
And does eliminative materialism require of us that we describe mental characteristics such as emotions etc in the language of neuroscience? If so, there is the further question of what it means to say that a feeling of hatred, for example, just is a certain kind of synapse flashing in the brain.
At this point the discussion lost momentum, so we all walked to the supermarket.
1 comment:
Arrrr...you are talking my language.
Well, you're from these scepter'd isles presumably, so you must be. Or is it my mind playing tricks with me? Are you writing in Japanese or Chinese yet my brain is translating the icongraphy into English without nme being awre of it? Oh, I don't know it's all too complicated.
But there is a simple way to envisage and clarify a starting point as Alan Watt did in various books including Nature,Man,and Woman where he wrote of figure-and-ground.
I can't revise it now - I've got weeds to hoe and potatoes to dig up, but it starts on p. 54 of the Wildhouse paperback.
The psychologists including Richard Gregory who seemed obsessed with visual illusions knew what they were about. But few saw the significance of the work.
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