{"id":1395,"date":"2015-11-01T15:50:13","date_gmt":"2015-11-01T15:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/?p=1395"},"modified":"2015-11-01T15:52:23","modified_gmt":"2015-11-01T15:52:23","slug":"practical-eliminativist-materialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/1395","title":{"rendered":"Practical eliminativist materialism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Eliminativist materialism is a perspective in the philosophy of mind that, in normal language, says beliefs, desires, consciousness, free will, and other pillars of subjective experience don&#8217;t actually, um, exist.  It&#8217;s right there in the name: the materialisms are the philosophies of mind that are over The Soul and &#8220;eliminativist&#8221; is just what it sounds like.  I&#8217;m actually sympathetic to the view, but reading the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eliminative_materialism\">Wikipedia article<\/a> makes me realize that I&#8217;ve got to refine my position a bit.  Here&#8217;s what I think I believe right now:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>To the extent that experiencing them makes it possible to account for them, there&#8217;s going to exist a way to account for them in terms of neural and biological processes.<\/li>\n<li>I believe that we&#8217;ll probably never really understand that account.  Even if we manage to create artificial entities that satisfy us that they are conscious, we won&#8217;t really know how we did it. <a href=\"http:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/archives\/1172\">This is already happening<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>So, as far as humans are concerned, eliminativist materialism will turn out to be practically true, even if it somehow turns out not to be more true than the other materialisms.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Given all that, I think of eliminativist materialism as possibly right and probably less wrong than any other prominent philosophy of mind.  Call it &#8220;practical eliminativist materialism.&#8221; If you think I&#8217;m full of crap, that&#8217;s totally OK, but unlike you, my stoner musings about the nature of consciousness have been legitimized by society with a doctorate in cognitive science.  Those aren&#8217;t really good for anything else, so I&#8217;m gonna go ahead and keep musing about the nature of consciousness. <\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eliminativist materialism is a perspective in the philosophy of mind that, in normal language, says beliefs, desires, consciousness, free will, and other pillars of subjective experience don&#8217;t actually, um, exist. It&#8217;s right there in the name: the materialisms are the philosophies of mind that are over The Soul and &#8220;eliminativist&#8221; is just what it sounds &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/1395\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Practical eliminativist materialism<\/span><\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1395"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1400,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions\/1400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}