Dualist eliminativism

Eliminativism holds that our standard folk-psychological concepts of mental functioning—say, thoughts, desires, intentions and awareness—have no application or are nonsense. Usually, eliminativism goes hand in hand with physicalism and scientism: the justification for eliminativism is the idea that the truly applicable concepts of mental functioning are going to be the ones of a developed neuroscience, and it is unlikely that these will match up our current folk psychology.

But we can make a case for eliminativism on deeply humanistic grounds independent of neuroscience. We start with the intuition that the human being is very mysterious and complex. Our best ways of capturing the depths of human mental functioning are found neither in philosophy nor in science, but literature. This is very much what we would expect if our standard concepts did not correctly apply to the mind’s functioning, but were only rough approximations. Art flourishes in limitations of medium, and the novelist and poet uses the poor tool of these concepts to express the human heart. Similarly, the face expresses the soul (to tweak Wittgenstein’s famous dictum), and yet what we see in the face is more complex, more mysterious than what we express with our folk psychological vocabulary.

There is thus a shallowness to our folk-psychological vocabulary which simply does not match the wondrous mystery of the human being.

Finally, and here we have some intersection with the more usual arguments for eliminativism, our predictive ability with respect to human behavior is very poor. Just think how rarely we can predict what will be said next in conversation. And even our prediction of our own behavior, even our mental behavior, is quite poor.

The above considerations may be compatible with physicalism, but I think it is reasonable to think that they actually support dualism better. For on physicalism, ultimately human mental function would be explicable in the mechanistic terminology of physics, and my considerations suggest an ineffability to the human being that may be reasonably thought to outpace mechanistic expressions.

But whether or not these considerations in fact support dualism over physicalism, they are clearly compatible with dualism. And so we have a corner of logical space not much explored by (at least Western) philosophers: dualist eliminativism. I do not endorse this view, but in some moods I find it attractive. Though I would like it to come along with some kind of a story about the approximate truth of our ordinary claims about the mind.

Eliminativist relational dualism

Here is a combination of views that, as far as I know, is missing from the literature:

• eliminativism about persons

• multigrade relational dualism.

Let me explain the view. There are no people on earth. There are just particles arranged humanwise. No particle by itself has mental properties and there is no whole having mental properties. But there is irreducibly collective activity mental activity. The humanwise-arranged particles responsible for this post stand in non-physical mental relations, such as collectively being aware of the smoothness of the spacebar and collectively intending to communicate a novel philosophy of mind view. These relations are multigrade in the sense that there is no specific number of particles that are needed to stand in such a relation.

There are about 10²⁸ (give or take an order of magnitude, depending on whether we count just the brain or the whole body) particles jointly responsible for this post, but some particles are always flying off and terminating their participation in the relations and others are joining, which is why the mental relation is multigrade.

The availability of the view shows that arguments, like those of van Inwagen and Merricks, for the existence of complex wholes based on our mental function need more work. As does Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”: perhaps all we can say at the outset is is “There is thinking so there is one or more things that individually or jointly engage in thought.”

The view has the very attractive feature that it is compatible with nihilism about parthood: there need be no part-to-whole relation. This allows for a very nice and simple ideology.

The view is a dualist view, and hence puzzles about phenomenal properties, the unity of consciousness and intentionality can be solved much like in property dualism. (E.g., consciousness is unified by joint possession of a consciousness property.)

But the typical property dualist has two things to explain: why a single entity arises from a bunch of particles arranged a certain way and why that entity gains mental properties. The eliminative relational dualist only needs to explain the latter.

At the same time, some of the difficulties with the more normal kinds of eliminativism about persons (think of Unger and the Churchlands) are neatly solved. The idea of thought without any subject of thought is absurd. But we can draw on reflections in social epistemology to get a model for thought with an irreducibly plural subject of thought.

As I think is often the case with metaphysical views, the main difficulties arise in ethics. There is no particular difficulty about being responsible. The particles that engaged in a joint action are jointly responsible. The problem, however, is with holding responsible. Particles are always leaving and entering the mental relations. Many of those particles that were responsible for the robbery last year are now scattered across the city, and while (at least for last year’s robbery) a bunch of them are still clumped together, it’s impossible to punish them without punishing a plurality of particles that includes a number of particles that had nothing to do with the robbery. And this is nothing compared to the difficulty of punishing cannibalism, since we will end up punishing many victimized particles.

A weakness of eliminative materialism

I was telling my kids about eliminative materialism, the view that there are only material objects, and that there are no minds, persons, beliefs, perceptions, etc. My kids are used to hearing about nutty philosophical views, such as those of Zeno, but they noticed that the standard tool in defending wacky philosophical views is unavailable here. For while Zeno can say that motion is an illusion, eliminative materialists can't say that thought is an illusion. For illusions are among the things the eliminative materialist eliminates. I hadn't noticed this.

Eliminativism about minds

Here is a hypothesis: A mature neuro-science will, as the eliminativists claim, have no room for concepts like "belief", "desire", etc. Suppose this hypothesis proves true. What should we then do? Obviously, it would be absurd to deny that we have beliefs or desires. Instead, we should deny that belief, desire, etc. occur in the neural system, which is what the neuro-science studies, and hold that they occur elsewhere. Since there is no other plausible candidate for the mind in the physical world besides the neural system, we should conclude that belief, desire, etc. occur outside the physical world, i.e., that some form of dualism is true. Moreover, I suspect that a neuro-science that would have no room for beliefs and desires would also have no room for the idea that there are states of the brain on which beliefs and desires supervene. Thus, it would lead us to a non-supervenient dualism.

But this is just an exercise in hypotheticality, since we are in no position to make such specific predictions about future science.