Your beliefs and desires might not actually exist.
In short: We treat our inner lives as certainties, but some philosophers argue that 'beliefs' and 'desires' are just useful fictions. They suggest that as neuroscience matures, these common-sense concepts will be discarded entirely, much like how science replaced the idea of phlogiston or the luminiferous ether.
Eliminative materialism, or eliminativism, is the radical position that the majority of mental states described by 'folk psychology'—our everyday way of explaining behavior—do not exist. Unlike reductive materialism, which seeks to map a belief to a specific neural circuit, eliminativism argues that no such neural basis will ever be found because these concepts are poorly defined. Paul and Patricia Churchland, among other supporters, contend that folk psychology remains a static framework which has lacked major progress over 2,500 years, even as neuroscience moves forward quickly.
The theory draws parallels to how science has historically discarded superseded concepts. Just as modern biology eliminated 'élan vital' and modern physics rejected the 'luminiferous ether,' eliminativists argue that neuroscience will eventually replace folk psychology with more efficient descriptions of cognition. They point out that folk psychology has already failed to explain phenomena like dreaming, learning processes, and mental disorders, which are now being addressed by brain science. In this view, our internal vocabulary—words like 'intend' or 'love'—are merely linguistic artifacts of an inadequate natural language.
The field is not a monolith; different thinkers target different mental entities. The Churchlands are primarily eliminativists about propositional attitudes (beliefs and desires) but remain reductionists about qualia (subjective sensations). Conversely, Daniel Dennett is often viewed as an eliminativist regarding qualia. Some, like Jacy Reese Anthis, argue that the 'hard problem' of consciousness dissolves when we realize that the vagueness of our definitions means there is no actual fact of the matter regarding phenomenological experience. Critics, however, argue the position is self-refuting, as it assumes the existence of the very beliefs it seeks to eliminate.
Ultimately, eliminativism is as much a prediction as it is a philosophy. It bets that as we gain a more precise understanding of the brain, our current way of describing the mind will be revealed as a mythological framework. Like the ancients ascribing 'anger' to the sea, we may be ascribing 'desire' to biological processes, waiting for a more accurate scientific account to render our current descriptions obsolete.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Eliminative materialism
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