Head to head
Eliminative Materialism vs Spinoza’s One Reality
Churchland’s Eliminative Materialism and Spinoza’s One Reality: Embodied Mind and Graded 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, Spinoza’s One Reality to Neutral Monism.
- On meaning and purpose, Eliminative Materialism says “Humanistic only” and Spinoza’s One Reality says “Cosmic/Ultimate”.
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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.
Spinoza’s One RealityBaruch Spinoza holds that there is only one substance, God or Nature, known to us under two attributes, thought and extension. A human mind is the idea of an actually existing human body: one and the same thing as the body, conceived under thought. Because every body has a corresponding idea, mind runs through all of nature, and consciousness varies by degree with the complexity and power of the body.
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.
Spinoza’s One RealityThe mind is the idea of the body, the same individual conceived under the attribute of thought rather than extension. Spinoza does not single out phenomenal consciousness as a category; his interpreters read consciousness as higher-order awareness, cognitive access, power or complexity of thinking, or affective awareness.
Big questions
Eliminative MaterialismNo position
Spinoza’s One RealityConditionalSince every body has a corresponding mind whose richness tracks the body's complexity and power, a sufficiently complex artificial body would have a correspondingly rich mind; whether that mind would be conscious in the human sense is contested.
Eliminative MaterialismNoSince the mind is the brain, nothing mental survives the brain’s death.
Spinoza’s One RealityNo position
Eliminative MaterialismHumanistic onlyPatricia Churchland urges us to see ourselves as organisms in nature, understood by scientific methods, with no cosmic purpose.
Spinoza’s One RealityCosmic/UltimateMinds are modes of God or Nature, and freedom lies in understanding the causal order of Nature through more adequate ideas.
Nature of mind
Ontology
Eliminative MaterialismPhysicalism (eliminative)
Spinoza’s One RealitySubstance monism (dual-attribute)
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.
Spinoza’s One RealityMind and body neither interact nor merely correlate; they are one thing under two descriptions. ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (Ethics 2p7), so thought is explained only through thought and extension only through extension.
Fundamental or emergent
Eliminative MaterialismNeither
Spinoza’s One RealityPrimitive
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.
Spinoza’s One RealitySpinoza has no explicit theory of phenomenal character. Interpreters reconstruct it from his accounts of sensation, imagination and affect, where an affect is both a change in the body's power of acting and the idea of that change.
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.
Spinoza’s One RealityPsychophysical identity under parallel attributes: whatever happens in the body as extension happens in the mind as an idea, so no causal bridge between them is needed.
Where it is
Eliminative MaterialismIn the brain.
Spinoza’s One RealityMentality is everywhere in nature, since all individuals are ‘animate’ in some degree (2p13s). Whether this means every physical thing has phenomenal experience is contested, and Spinoza does not treat God or Nature as one human-like conscious subject.
What it does
Eliminative MaterialismBehavior is caused by neural processes; neuroscience is expected to explain it better than folk psychology does.
Spinoza’s One RealityMind never causes bodily motion and body never causes thought. Affects make ideas matter to behavior by increasing, decreasing or fixing the mind's striving, and freedom comes from forming more adequate ideas of the causes acting on us.
Evidence and criticism
Testability
Eliminative MaterialismConceptually testable
Spinoza’s One RealitySpeculative
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.
Spinoza’s One RealityNot stated
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.
Spinoza’s One RealityThe identity formula says mind and body are one thing but not what makes the thought side felt. The ideas-of-ideas reading makes every idea conscious, which Bennett called absurdly excessive, and LeBuffe notes that a mind's overall power and the power of its ideas can diverge, giving odd verdicts on degrees.
Sources
Key sources
Eliminative Materialism
- Neurophilosophy, Patricia Churchland (1986)
- Churchland’s Eliminative Materialism (Landscape of Consciousness), Patricia Churchland
Spinoza’s One Reality
- Ethics, Baruch Spinoza (E. Curley, Ed. and Trans., The Collected Works of Spinoza) (1677)
- Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, E. Curley (1969)
- A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, J. Bennett (1984)