Eliminativism.

I like the way the article describes the progress from one system of thought to another. Raise up a concept and catalog a history of criticism aimed to discredit that theory until at some magical tipping point all is swept before this latest raison d'etre. Natural selection with a touch of scientific rigour. Can anyone play?

I know my best ideas would last about all of a nano second in that Colosseum of philosophical dissection, but its entertaining to think that the mere articulation of an idea, without any further justification or proof could topple long held views on how we think simply by increasing the size and scope of the playing field. Nice work if you can get it!

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
... the philosophical trend, not the tendency for colonial powers to eliminate natives.

eliminativism - The view that, because mental states and properties are items posited by a protoscientific theory (called folk psychology), the science of the future is likely to conclude that entities such as beliefs, desires, and sensations do not exist. The a ...[text shortened]... minative materialism'.

http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/eliminativism.html

Views?

it's like arguing that programs don't exist, only the hardware they run on.

if your computer had no programs you would be staring at a blank screen.

Originally posted by zeeblebot
it's like arguing that programs don't exist, only the hardware they run on.

if your computer had no programs you would be staring at a blank screen.

That's only because we have constructed an analogue between computer software/hardware as somehow being representative of how perceptions thoughts concepts and mental states are hosted in the brain.

But what if every idea thought concept is nothing more than a synaptic neural flow, a consequence of the physical chemical reactions taking place and not somehow a discrete autonomous independent reality that is somehow carried but disconnected from the physical processes of brain chemistry beneath?

We can only believe this to be true by constructing a theoretical model that says it is, but what if every meta cognitive process in the brain, to continue the computer analogy, what if it exists at the level of compiled basic machine language, or even further more basic than that, what if meaning and cognition exists as is at the level of chip architecture?

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
Seems so.

How would you sum up our agreement?

We eliminated eliminativism! We won the thread!

Originally posted by kmax87
That's only because we have constructed an analogue between computer software/hardware as somehow being representative of how perceptions thoughts concepts and mental states are hosted in the brain.

But what if every idea thought concept is nothing more than a synaptic neural flow, a consequence of the physical chemical reactions taking place and not some ...[text shortened]... basic than that, what if meaning and cognition exists as is at the level of chip architecture?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test