Patricia Churchland Cartesian Dualism

Patricia Churchland is a well-known philosopher who has denounced the notion of Descartes’ method on doubt and Cartesian dualism. She believed that we are just physical objects and that there is nothing amazing about the mind or the soul. Churchland is a elimistist, meaning she eliminates the mind/ soul from the equation of the body. One of her main points is that society cannot hold the science of philosophy at a different stance than the natural sciences. Philosophy needs to have data and empirical data just like biology or physics. According to Churchland, the best way to look at a person is at the neurological standpoint. The only thing that exists is the body, including the brain. She comes from a naturalistic framework where the only thing that exists is something that can be physically proven by science. This means that one cant say anything exists unless it has been specifically proven through the scientific method. Philosophy is called an a prori discipline, meaning that there are truths that can be known
The first is that it is this concept is does not align with biology, chemistry and physics. One would ask evolutionary, where would the soul come from? The second reason is how lesions to the brain can alter a person personality and rationality. A famous example of this is Phineas Gage. He was in a work related accident where he got a railroad spike in lodged in his frontal lobe, after this incident his personality drastically changed. The third reason of her rejection was that computers have shown us that we are not in need of a non-material thing to move a material being. We once thought that only the mind could do complex things like math and solving logical problems but we now know that computers can accomplish these same problems. The last reason she rejects Cartesian dualism is that there is no scientific evidence of the mind or the soul thus we believe that is cannot be