Edward Feser has a good series of posts about eliminativism (toward the end of this list). This is the idea in the philosophy of mind that no one thinks; people only think they think. In other words, the mind and all of conscious experience, from thinking to the senses is an illusion. Three of the most prominent defenders of this idea are Daniel Dennet and Paul and Patricia Churchland. Feser has a great metaphor to describe why this does not work:
"Here I want to focus on the presupposition
of Bakker’s question, and on another kind of fallacious reasoning I’ve called
attention to many times over the years.
The presupposition is that science really has falsified our commonsense understanding
of the rest of the world, and the fallacy behind this presupposition is what I
call the “lump under the rug” fallacy.
Suppose the wood
floors of your house are filthy and that the dirt is pretty evenly spread
throughout the house. Suppose also that there
is a rug in one of the hallways. You
thoroughly sweep out one of the bedrooms and form a nice little pile of dirt at
the doorway. It occurs to you that you
could effectively “get rid” of this pile by sweeping it under the nearby rug in
the hallway, so you do so. The lump
under the rug thereby formed is barely noticeable, so you are pleased. You proceed to sweep the rest of the
bedrooms, the bathroom, the kitchen, etc., and in each case you sweep the
resulting piles under the same rug. When
you’re done, however, the lump under the rug has become quite large and
something of an eyesore. Someone asks
you how you are going to get rid of it.
“Easy!” you answer. “The same way
I got rid of the dirt everywhere else!
After all, the ‘sweep it under the rug’ method has worked everywhere
else in the house. How could this little
rug in the hallway be the one place where it wouldn’t work? What are the odds of that?”
This answer,
of course, is completely absurd. Naturally,
the same method will not work in this case, and it is precisely because it worked everywhere else that it cannot work in
this case. You can get rid of dirt outside the rug by sweeping it under the
rug. You cannot get of the dirt under the rug by sweeping it under the
rug. You will only make a fool of
yourself if you try, especially if
you confidently insist that the method must work here because it has worked so
well elsewhere.
...
Now, the 'Science
has explained everything else, so how could the human mind be the one
exception?' move is, of course, standard scientistic and materialist
shtick. But it is no less fallacious
than our imagined 'lump under the rug' argument.
...
In short,
the scientific method 'explains everything else' in the world in something like
the way the 'sweep it under the rug' method gets rid of dirt -- by taking the
irreducibly qualitative and teleological features of the world, which don’t fit
the quantitative methods of science, and sweeping them under the rug of the
mind. And just as the literal 'sweep it
under the rug' method generates under the rug a bigger and bigger pile of dirt
which cannot in principle be gotten rid of using the 'sweep it under the rug'
method, so too does modern science’s method of treating irreducibly qualitative,
semantic, and teleological features as mere projections of the mind generate in
the mind a bigger and bigger 'pile' of features which cannot be explained using
the same method."
In other words, science presupposes the existence of the mind because scientific reasoning and observation takes place within the mind of the scientist. Thus, for science to eliminate the mind would eliminate science itself.
But one thing that always struck me about the eliminativists was how confident they are. They boldly assert that consciousness is an illusion. I cannot imagine consciousness being an illusion because if there is no one there, how can you fool them? But, for a long time I assumed that the eliminativists had some way of imagining consciousness being an illusion. Then, about a year and a half ago, I was reading about eliminativism and it hit me, "No, they can't imagine it." They can't imagine consciousness being an illusion because no one can.
The eliminativists believe that their position is a counterintuitive truth based on scientific argument, like curved spacetime or quantum mechanics. But it is not like that at all because curved spacetime is at least imaginable, if difficult to understand. Eliminativism is not counter-intuitive, it's anti-intuitive. Imagine a group of people who are convinced that the color red is actually blue. That seems crazy enough, but eliminativism is even worse than that: even if these people could not stop seeing red, they could at least imagine everything red being blue. You cannot even imagine eliminativism being true.
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