Anonymous asked: Edward Feser wrote a blog piece entitled 'Eliminativism without Truth.What do you think of this critique of eliminative materialism? I think Feser has pretty much destroyed it

Based on this series of posts, Feser seems to be motivated by little more than a semantic commitment to what counts as “real”.

He’s not the first person I’ve read who doesn’t get it. The problem is marketing. “Eliminativism” has pretty awful connotations, doesn’t it? It sounds like something Stalin tried.

A better word might be Other-izing. It’s not that mental states like beliefs and thoughts have been eliminated, annihilated, never to be seen again. Rather, they’re just not metaphysical objects anymore. They’re something other than metaphysical.

Supervenience is an even better word. It’s uncontroversial that the macroeconomy supervenes on the aggregate decisions of all the individuals in the market. That doesn’t mean every predictive model of the economy has to be micro-founded. But it does mean that we should be suspicious of theories that treat the aggregate as a kind of sui generis substance, metaphysically separate from its component parts. Further, recognition of this fact helps prevents category mistaken claims or the fallacy of composition.

Similarly, does Feser disagree that mental states are macro-phenomenon which supervene to neural computation and configurations of matter over a timeline of efficient causes? That’s the substantive issue at stake.

In Part 1, Feser distinguishes between “real” intentionality and “as if” intentionality without ever actually explaining the difference. Materialists have very detailed schematics of their “as if intentionality.” All Feser has to do is point out what’s lacking. Instead he just hand waves by demanding that elusive substance known as “intrinsic”.

Maybe an example comparing the two views would be helpful. Take a mental state like having a memory.

A believer in mental materialism would predict that:

After experiencing a memory, the memory must continue to persist in an inactive state of some material description if it is to be called upon again down the road.

Is a dormant memory still a mental state; is it intrinsic or derived or neither? If inactive memories count, do inactive beliefs count? What does a belief look like without the believing, a memory without remembering, in Feser’s view?

Depending on the properties of the substrate and the method of storage, memories should become less reliable overtime, damaged or forgotten (eliminated? deleted?) as the substrate deteriorates.

As a memory fades or becomes compressed, is the mental state correspondingly less real; is the memory intrinsically worse or is its worse-ness derived from cellular damage and age?

Memory’s physical contingency implies it has location and takes up space, which suggests the possibility of more than one type of memory based on material efficiency trade-offs.

How does an intrinsic view of memory explain the disunity between working memory and sensory memory? Is procedural memory of a skill or activity (aka muscle memory) part of a mental state or is it actually intrinsic to the muscle? How does an intrinsic view of memory explain the supervenience of long term memory onto other systems of memory, like declarative and episodic memory? Is memory necessarily self-contained, or is an intrinsic theory able to explain the ways memory systems interact with other systems, like language, vision and olfaction?

It’s not possible to look into the brain and see a memory. In fact, to the naked eye, the brain looks like a homogeneous kludge of grey and white matter. If you’ve ever looked at a computer’s hard drive, it looks like a homogeneous substance as well. While it’s easy to take the brain/computer metaphor too far, in this case it’s instructive. If our brain is at all like a computer, the homogeneity of the substance belies a deeper heterogeneity of the integrated circuitry.

In the case of computer memory, it’s possible to build a circuit that stores or “maintains” a bit of information using two NOR gates and feedback (an S-R latch). I don’t have a computer science background so I won’t risk botching the details. But as far as the metaphysics is concerned, it’s enough to know that the final state of system is determined by the electrical properties of the gates.

Needless to say, human memory is way more elaborate than a single storage element. Like computers, human memory has a more permanent, longer term storage (like a hard drive) as well as shorter term, working systems (like RAM or virtual memory). Our daily capacity to remember stuff is also pretty finite, benefiting from a night sleep to give our brains a chance to de-frag, as it were, via synaptic pruning.

Now, as long as we have our metaphysical caps on, it’s arguably incoherent to point at an S-R latch and say “look, there is memory!” Quantitatively, a logic gate is nothing more than the physical parts that compose the circuit, be it computer parts or networks of neurons. “Memory” as such is an abstraction. It is a function we ascribe to the system given its particular use in a larger system.

In fact all computation is abstract. Programmers are even taught to think in abstraction, i.e. semantically, before diving into the details of how to write their program. No one thinks out a computer science problem at the scale of physics. Instead, one takes off their metaphysical cap and puts on their higher-abstraction cap whenever it is more useful.

This suggests computation is something other than its metaphysical reality. Computation is a higher level of description of processes that ultimately supervene to purely physical phenomenon. Understanding this is important, as physical reality imposes truly intrinsic limits on computation. Even human information processing must obey the limits imposed by thermodynamics.

Feser’s incoherence thesis is based on the premise that we must do all our discourse as metaphysicians – that materialists are, in everyday life, committed to translating words like “belief,” “intention” and “memory” to their neural correlates. This is like insisting meteorologists are incoherent because they don’t describe weather patterns in terms of elementary particles. We know metaphysically that a cloud is simply a macro-view of the dynamic physics of swirling atoms, but building weather models that way is intractable. Instead, sophisticated meteorologists use abstract methods from statistical physics. Perhaps abstract concepts and ideas are a form of mental statistics.

If scientists are ever going to understand how the mind works they will have to be willing to set aside the abstract phenomenon like belief and intention that come to us naturally from the alluring sensations of phenomenology. I for one don’t care if you continue to call a memory “real” as long as you understand that it is not the same sort of “real” as the physical processes that underlie it.