Tim Morton drew my attention to this post about the demise of the humanities due to neoliberal economic policies grounded in the supposed truth of neurocomputational eliminativism.
I agree with Morton’s appraisal, that the eliminative materialism that seems to be gaining favor among philosophers (like Ray Brassier) offers little in the way of new theoretical accounts of consciousness or practical approaches to ethics, and so functions only to support conservatism. Eliminativists, of course, argue that “consciousness” is only a word, a meaningless vibration of molecules that makes sense to us because we’ve been duped by our habitual use of folk psychological language. In reality, there is no consciousness, only vectors of neural activation. Philosophers may have traditionally sought out the truth with the help of language, whether prosaic or poetic; but, the eliminativists assure us, human language produces only fictions. There is no such thing as consciousness, just as there is no such thing as a sunrise. Truth can only be found, if at all, in numerical relations derived from the computational activity of synapses.
Whitehead’s entire philosophical adventure is an attempt to avoid the “bifurcation of nature” produced by this sort of scientific materialism. Following his way of thinking nature and culture as different aspects of the same creative process, what is to prevent us from conceiving of neural interaction as semiotic in its own right? Human semiosis may be based in the fictional play of signifiers, and to that extent incapable of finally explaining its own conditions of possibility; but neural semiosis is no less messy and interpretive, no less groundless and playful. Semiosis, so far as I can tell, must go all the way down: meaning is not a human fabrication, but a natural phenomenon.
Eliminativism is the worst kind of reductionism, that motivated by the technoscientific desire to predict and control everything for the sake of a more efficient capitalist market. As I tried to touch on in my last post, there is quite literally a world of difference between a mystery and a problem. Consciousness is not a problem that might be solved through some kind of reverse engineering, but a mystery whose very contradictoriness (it cannot be found since it is that which is seeking, even though this very statement unveils much about its nature) constitutes the worldliness of our lives. Without this mystery, there is no world, no meaning, no aesthetic or ethical value. This is not to say, mind you, that eliminativism is a threat to the meaning of human life. It is itself just another mythos, albeit an alienating and destructive one. It is ironic that, just as biologists are awakening to the current anthropogenic mass extinction event, someone like Brassier, inspired by eliminativism, would embrace a logic of extinction as the only valid form of philosophical reflection (I must thank Adam for pointing this out).
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?