ニューロフィロソフィーとしての心の唯物論

フォークサイコロジー消去主義と物理主義的還元主義の哲学

抄録

During recent decades, brain physiology or neuroscience have progressed tremendously, hand in hand with computer science and artificial intelligence, providing much more knowledge than ever before about how the human brain works. Depending on this scientific background, a new philosophy of mind called neurophilosophy has emerged.
Neurophilosophy holds that the mind is identical with the brain. But this assertion is different from the mind-brain identity theories of the 1960s or earlier forms of materialism about the mind which simply identified a mental type with a brain type, urging for example that pain is (identical with) C-fiber activation. Neurophilosophy, as a new form of materialism about the mind, asserts that a mental state is (identical with) such and such an activation vector state of a neural network in the brain, described by a mathematical function (matrix) in vector space. On this view, identity/similarity/difference between mental states can be interpreted holistically in terms of the isomorphism/proximity/distance between the neural activation states in the vector state space.
Patricia Churchland and Paul Churchland are currently the leading philosopers of this neurophilosophy. They especially emphasize that folk psychology (the view of the mind implied in common sense and first-person language based on introspection) cannot be correlated exactly and precisely with states of the brain. So they insist that folk psychology should be eliminated and that an exact and scientific account derived from brain science will be preferable. In my paper I introduce the Churchlands' neurophilosophy and examine some of its problems. My conclusion is that their form of materialism about the mind can be supported and accepted as valid. Indeed, I think it will surely contribute to the defeat of narrow rationalism and idealism and to the spread of a scientifically based philosophical perspective on mind and language.