On Eliminative Materialism

June 25, 2020 timothywstanley@me.com

If you chop my head off, my career as a moral agent will come to an abrupt end. And frontal lobe injury may turn an upright citizen into a psychopath. This demonstrates only that my brain is a necessary condition of my conscience not that my conscience is identical with brain activity. To put this another way, while it is necessary to have a brain in some kind of working order to live a morally upright human life, it does not follow that living such a life is just being a brain in some kind of working order. To insist on this distinction is not to claim that conscience is 'a theological entity thoughtfully parked in us by a divine being' but rather to make the more modest point that people are not reducible to what can be seen by brain scanners and the like. Looking for the theatre of our lives – society – and the nature, origin and even validity, of our moral discourse by peering into the brain is like trying to hear the whispering of the woods by applying a stethoscope to an individual acorn. As social beings, we transcend our individual brains which, being material objects, are confined to their own boundaries. Eliminative materialism cannot accommodate this transcendence. Without propositional attitudes, Churchland’s brain would be able to interact causally with other brains but would hardly inhabit social spaces in the way that people do: it would be windowless.

Raymond Tallis, “Conscience by Patricia Churchland Book Review,” the-tls.co.uk/articles/conscience-patricia-churchland-book-review/