Eliminating Eliminativism

What a strange hobby.

What. This?

Yes. Why do you bother?

I don't know. It's as if every morning I wake up and ask myself, WTF?!, and take it from there. Wrestling with the demon of absurdity, I suppose. Trying to make sense of the cosmos. 

What if it can't be done?

Then we have a kind of infinite mismatch between the powers of the intellect to know reality and the capacity of reality to be known. This would be the opposite of the hungry ghosts of Buddhism, who have pinholes for mouths, making it impossible for them to swallow anything substantial. In this case, our ghostly intellects would have ginormous mouths but with nothing real to eat. 

Why do we have such outsized intellects if there's nothing to know and no point in knowing it? How did the intellect so overshoot the paltry demand of natural selection, which is simply to reproduce? It's like bringing a nuclear weapon to a knife fight. 

Besides, the one has nothing to do with the other, because, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, sex and truth just don't mix well. And yet, a reductive Darwinian would have to say that our epistemophila -- our innate thirst for truth -- is just a side effect of that minimal demand to launch one's genes into the next generation.

It's a literal intellectual suicide, one which clearly troubled Darwin, for surely he didn't think the theory of natural selection was just a way to get his genes into the next generation. Rather, he promulgated it because he thought it was true. In the words of Spilbury, "So far as the scientist is inspired by the love of knowledge, he appears to live outside the domain of scientific materialism."

But as Darwin wrote in a letter, "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there were any convictions in such a mind?"

It's a valid concern: what reason is there for believing a randomly evolved monkey can know anything about its origins, much less the origins of the universe? Again, the gap between the requirements of natural selection and the capacities of the intellect is practically infinite, but how? Spilsbury is not buying the conventional scientistic explanation:

I find it impossible to to share this faith that supra-human achievements can be encompassed by sub-human means and sub-rational mechanisms....  

Supposing we take reductive natural selection seriously, there is no reason to take ourselves seriously, because we are reduced to survival machines as opposed to truth-loving spirits.

What would be the opposite of reductionism? Holism? Whatever we call it, Schuon says that it is grounded in

principles that by their nature elude empirical investigations but not pure intellection, intellectual intuition being rooted in the very substance of the human spirit, without which homo would not be sapiens.

So, these nonlocal and timeless principles are not to be found in the horizontal, material, empirical world, but rather, are intuited via an intellect that is ultimately of the same substance as that which it intuits. Which is not so strange if we are indeed the image and likeness -- or prolongation and reverberation -- of the First Principle. 

Back to Hart, much of the book's dialogue comes down to an argument between a rigid reductionist and a loosey-nousey transcendental holist, neither one convincing the other, at least so far. Which is not surprising, for reasons Nicolás made plain in the previous post:

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

It seems that there is a surface structure to thought that is rooted in a deeper structure of principle, and unless an argument penetrates to the latter, it will be inefficacious.

For example, Hart's materialist claims that

there's no actual mystery to consciousness to begin with, and only our own bad habits of language make us imagine there is.

Clean up your language and the mystery of consciousness is solved? Clean it up by what standard? Presumably the standard of immanence, empiricism, and materiality, so this is a circular argument, or an assumption -- a principle -- masquerading as a conclusion. Besides, language (which we will discuss in a future post) itself is a mystery, so you're just passing the buck from a riddle to an enigma. 

For the reductionist, what we experience as mental properties are just the other side of material properties reducible to the latter: a "brain-state" and a "mental state" are "simply one and the same thing."

But one of these things is nothing like the other.

If your first principle of the mind is that it is just an epiphenomenon of neurology -- that subjects are just objects in disguise -- then there's no recovering from that. It's an intellectual kill shot. For if mental states are just a side effect of neurology, so too is your statement, and if so, why should we believe it? In such a paradigm there can be no such thing as truth, rather, only brain states. I didn't say it. You did.

Hart's holist argues that the reductionist view "is sheer empty assertion. It answers no questions. It's just yet another restatement of the problem of mind." Surely there is correlation between the two -- brain and mind -- but why assume an identity? 

Hart's reductionist proposes an "eliminativism" whereby our commonsense view of the mind 

must be totally eliminated in favor of a more scientific, wholly impersonal neuroscientific theory, entirely purged of such mythical entities as the personal subject, intentional states, and the like...

First of all, how does this "must" get into a world of pure is? Why must we do or think anything? 

In response, our holist rightly asks, "how can such a view be stated without contradiction?" For "how can one take seriously the belief that there's no such thing as belief?" Is this not just "a kind of cognitive suicide?" 

Can sufficient knowledge of the brain really eliminate the mind? If so, who is the knower of this sublime knowledge?

"By that logic, taken to its end, none of the real sciences other than physics would be sciences at all." That is to say, psychology would be reducible to a neurobiology, further reducible to electrochemistry and on down to "a complete physics."

Eliminativism reminds me of a cap and ball Colt, which can get you into trouble but it can't get you out. It paints you into an intellectual corner from which escape is impossible, for surely matter cannot know it is material, let alone that everything is material. That's a rather grandiose claim. It may sound modestly "reductive" but is actually insanely expansive.

Humility. We must remember humility:

[M]an ought to show humility in relation to his own Heart-Intellect, the immanent divine spark; the proud man sins against his own immortal essence as well as against God and man (Schuon).

Eliminativism must be at antipodes to genuine humility, so much so that "when the theory doesn't adequately account for the phenomenon," it is the latter that is eliminated. Nevertheless,

For all its intrinsic absurdity, eliminativism is the only truly consistent physicalism. Or rather, precisely because of its absurdity (Hart). 

It's easy enough to eliminate eliminativism, but is there something positive -- and rigorous -- we can put in its place? Yes, I think so, but that's the end of this chapter.

The image symbolizes the core philosophical struggle explored in your essay, particularly the tension between the human intellect's capacity and the vast, potentially unknowable nature of reality. 

The Large, Glowing Brain/Head: This represents the outsized human intellect and our innate drive for knowledge, truth, and understanding, as you discuss with "epistemophila" and "pure intellection." Its luminosity suggests consciousness, thought, and the light of inquiry. 

The Small Human Figure: This signifies humanity, the individual seeker, grappling with profound questions. Its smaller scale in contrast to the brain and cosmos emphasizes our individual perspective within the grand scheme of existence. 

The Vast, Dark Cosmos: This embodies the immense and potentially incomprehensible nature of reality, the "cosmos" you mention trying to make sense of. Its darkness and indistinctness suggest the limits of our empirical knowledge and the "infinite mismatch" between intellect and what can be known. 

The Faint Line/Thread of Light: This is perhaps the most crucial symbolic element, representing the connection or disjunction between the intellect and reality. 

If interpreted as reaching from the figure/brain to the cosmos, it symbolizes our attempt to grasp, understand, and find truth within the universe. 

If interpreted as a tenuous, perhaps broken, line, it could represent the "horrid doubt" of whether our convictions are trustworthy or if our intellects truly connect with ultimate reality. 

The Overall Composition: The juxtaposition of the contained, bright intellect against the unbounded, dark cosmos visually represents the essay's central conflict: the human mind's insatiable quest for meaning in a universe that may or may not yield its secrets to us. It hints at the "intellectual suicide" of reductionism versus the possibility of a deeper, intuitive connection to fundamental principles.