"Eliminative materialism" is a funny expression. It has two parts: materialism, and what materialism really means in this context

is that, from all we can tell at this stage, there is only the brain. That mental processes such as remembering and learning, finding something funny, feeling

hungry, feeling dizzy—these states that we're aware of are actually states of the physical brain itself.  So materialism is the idea that all

of what we think of as the mind is something that the brain does. Now, what about the eliminative part? Well, many years ago, my husband Paul

Churchland, had the idea that as neuroscience develops and we discover more about how the physical brain works, some psychological

categories may not fit well with what we're discovering about the brain's nature. Categories such as the will—you might think of

someone as having a weak will or a strong will; you might think of the will as a particular thing in the brain.

Well, almost certainly that's not the case. Almost certainly, many brain areas cooperate and

integrate when decisions and choices are made. There's probably nothing that is the will itself.  In that sense, you could say the notion of

the will could be eliminated, not from everyday speech—we'll probably continue talking about it—but from scientific speech.

It was a prediction about science's development, motivated by noticing things like this: for a long time,

people wondered about fundamental elements. It was widely believed that the fundamental elements—making up everything, the coffee and chocolate

and butter and fire and everything—consisted of earth, air, fire, and water.
But by the 19th century, it was very

clear that those things weren't fundamental, but were composed of many different things. So the notion of an element profoundly changed,

profoundly changed because of Mendeleev's basic ideas. He realized that more fundamental things were oxygen, aluminum, hydrogen, tin,

gold; those were the fundamental elements and so in that sense, earth, air, fire, and water

- you might say - got sort of heaved out or eliminated as the fundamental elements.

So Paul was really motivated by the idea that although our current psychological categories can seem very useful to us, and indeed they are, as science

progresses, we may find the fit between those categories and what we're learning about the brain is not a very good fit. What will happen then? It's hard

Patricia Churchland, What is eliminative materialism?

Patricia Churchland, What is eliminative materialism?

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