I think radical behaviorism eliminates mental states. IT feel to me this conversation is kind of needling around in a sidebar. The usual mainline interest in Churchlands is in regards to consciousness. If you asked me many years ago abotu Churchlands, my first response is that Eliminative Materialism asserts that the Hard Problem of Consciousness does not exist precisely because the way in which we talk about the brain functioning is a colelction of wive's tales
and urban myths
So in this sense, Churchlands are in the same "camp" as Daniel Dennett in regarding the HPOC
Let me give two examples of the argument that they are making. So it has been super hard for mathematicians to prove the collatz conjecture. One mathematician on youtube said "Maybe we can't prove it because it is not true!"
Imagine we are in year 1634 or so and we are trying to explain Aristotle's mechanical theory of Impetus scientifically. We keep running into "Hard Problems" (:cough:) precisely because the theory of impetus is actually wrong.
We would not know this until a Mr. ISaac Newton shows up and actually produces teh correct laws of mechanics.
So we people of year 2022 have this "Hard Problem of Consciousness" because we are trying to square neuronal function with qualia and the "Feeling of what it is like to be a bat" and with "the feeling of experience"
Churchland is saying that qualia is a wrong theory the way impetus was a wrong theory.. and once we get past qualia, the HPOC will disappear with it
