Head to head
Eliminative Materialism vs Sam Harris
Churchland’s Eliminative Materialism and S. Harris’s Mystery of Consciousness, compared field by field from their entries in the Atlas.
At a glance
- Eliminative Materialism belongs to the Materialism family in Kuhn's Landscape of Consciousness, Sam Harris to Challenge.
- They give the same kind of answer on life after death and meaning and purpose.
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The claim
In brief
Eliminative MaterialismPaul and Patricia Churchland hold that common-sense psychology, our everyday talk of beliefs, desires, and experiences, is a radically false theory that a completed neuroscience will displace rather than smoothly reduce. Consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a brain-generated picture shaped by evolution, and our self-understanding, introspection included, will be rebuilt in neuroscientific terms.
Sam HarrisThis perspective, offered as a challenge rather than a prescriptive theory, frames consciousness as an unbridgeable mystery that cannot be solved by purely physical means. Harris argues that physical descriptions are 'mute' regarding subjective experience; the only thing attesting to sentience is consciousness itself, creating a fundamental explanatory gap. He remains pessimistic that science can dispel this mystery.
What consciousness is
Eliminative MaterialismWhat we call consciousness, as folk psychology describes it, does not exist in that form. The real phenomena are neural processes, which only a mature neuroscience will describe correctly.
Sam HarrisConsciousness is identified as subjectivity or sentience, which is fundamentally mysterious and unexplainable by purely physical processes.
Big questions
Eliminative MaterialismNo position
Sam HarrisNoIf consciousness is irreducible subjectivity missing from physical descriptions, then advanced computation (AI, which is purely physical complexity) will fail to generate genuine sentience.
Does consciousness survive death?Both agree
Eliminative MaterialismNoSince the mind is the brain, nothing mental survives the brain’s death.
Sam HarrisNoAs a naturalist, Harris implicitly aligns with the view that consciousness is tied to the physical organism, meaning its termination results in permanent non-existence, despite the mystery of its nature while alive.
Eliminative MaterialismNo position
Sam HarrisNoIf consciousness cannot be explained by purely physical processes, then duplication or uploading of the physical substrate will fail to capture or recreate the essential subjective self.
Does it give life meaning?Both agree
Eliminative MaterialismHumanistic onlyPatricia Churchland urges us to see ourselves as organisms in nature, understood by scientific methods, with no cosmic purpose.
Sam HarrisHumanistic onlyThe mystery does not imply cosmic purpose, but Harris advocates finding personal truths through introspection, aligning with self-discovered (naturalized) spirituality and meaning.
Nature of mind
Ontology
Eliminative MaterialismPhysicalism (eliminative)
Sam HarrisSkeptical/Mysterianism (Justified: The view asserts the philosophical intractability and unbridgeable nature of the mind-body problem, aligning with core tenets of mysterianism, though without adopting a specific alternative ontology.)
Mind and body
Eliminative MaterialismThe mind is the brain. Patricia Churchland calls her program a ‘unified theory of the mind-brain’ and treats claims that mind goes beyond brain as the residue of folk myths.
Sam HarrisUnbridgeable Gap / Non-reductive Correlation (Justified: Harris asserts that while physical processes correlate with consciousness, no analysis of these processes can logically yield a picture of consciousness, leaving an unbridgeable gap.)
Fundamental or emergent
Eliminative MaterialismNeither
Sam HarrisMystery (Justified: Harris declines to fully endorse emergence, stating that while consciousness may be the lawful product of unconscious processing, he does not find that sentence meaningful in explaining sentience.)
Qualia
Eliminative MaterialismQualia as folk psychology and philosophers conceive them are expected to give way to neuroscientific description; the view treats consciousness as a kind of illusion generated by the brain.
Sam HarrisQualia (what it is 'like something' to be) are the phenomenon that physical events are 'mute' about, thus creating the unbridgeable mystery.
How it works
Mechanism
Eliminative MaterialismTheory displacement. Folk psychology will be replaced the way outdated scientific theories were, its principles and ontology discarded rather than mapped onto brain states.
Sam HarrisNone (Justified: The core premise is the failure of all current and foreseeable physical/mechanistic principles to explain subjectivity.)
Where it is
Eliminative MaterialismIn the brain.
Sam HarrisUnknown/Mysterious (Justified: While consciousness correlates with the brain, the theory explicitly rejects confining the explanation of consciousness to physical location or distribution because the physical world yields no evidence of consciousness.)
What it does
Eliminative MaterialismBehavior is caused by neural processes; neuroscience is expected to explain it better than folk psychology does.
Sam HarrisUnknown/Irreducible (Justified: Causal power is not explained by unconscious complexity. The presence of sentience is an ultimate mystery rather than a functional adaptation that can be described reductively.)
Evidence and criticism
Testability
Eliminative MaterialismConceptually testable
Sam HarrisConceptually Untestable (Justified: If the gap is unbridgeable, as Harris claims, the mystery cannot be dispelled by empirical science as currently practiced.)
Tests so far
Eliminative MaterialismThe view stakes its claim on the future course of neuroscience; whether folk categories survive in mature brain science is the long-run test.
Sam HarrisNone (Justified: The framework is a diagnosis of science's failure to address the hard problem and does not propose empirical tests for the mystery itself.)
Criticisms
Eliminative MaterialismCritics say denying subjective experience defies both intuition and direct evidence; Galen Strawson calls the denial of experience ‘the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought’. There is also tension between Patricia Churchland’s talk of reduction to neurobiology and the eliminativist claim that folk psychology will be displaced rather than reduced.
Sam HarrisIt functions primarily as a critique against reductionism and scientific optimism regarding consciousness, classifying the issue as an ultimate mystery, which reductionists reject as pessimism (mysterianism).
Sources
Key sources
Eliminative Materialism
- Neurophilosophy, Patricia Churchland (1986)
- Churchland’s Eliminative Materialism (Landscape of Consciousness), Patricia Churchland
Sam Harris
- The mystery of consciousness (Part I & II), Sam Harris (2011)
- Explorations in Consciousness: Death Psychedelics and Mystical Experience (2023)