ABSTRACT
Physicalism or materialism in the philosophy of mind proposes to explain mental phenomena reductively as physical occurrences, primarily in the brain and neurophysiological network. A significant ontological economy is achieved by eliminativism and reductivism in the philosophy of mind. Eliminativists argue that there really is no such thing as mind, that there are at best misleading appearances of consciousness and mental content. The elimination or reduction of mental to physical events is sometimes said to be mediated by environmentally conditioned behaviour or behavioural dispositions in a variation of physicalism known as behaviourism. Functionalism is similar in some ways to behaviourism. It emphasizes the correlation of inputs and outputs of information to and from a computer. It is found in a still more traditional philosophy of mind, often referred to as substance or Cartesian dualism, named after Descartes, the philosopher with whom this way of understanding the mind is most frequently associated.
