Philosophers can be a little bit arrogant. They’ll swagger into someone else’s discipline and tell them what’s what. Worst of all is when philosophers pretend to do science.

This is the charge that Patricia Churchland levels at the “philosophy” of mind. She argues it’s a pseudo-scientific nonsense of armchair academics, who have no idea how the brain and the mind really work.

Churchland is the first to admit that science doesn’t have all the answers. There are many things about the universe that we simply don’t know…yet. The mind is only one. David Chalmers has called our subjective inner feelings as being a “hard problem” – which means that science will likely never be able to explain it.

For Churchland, this is just another short-sighted predication that has, historically, always turned out wrong. So often people have said things won’t be solved only for them to then be solved later. It used to be that caloric fluid, “vital spirit”, light and sound were seen as impossible problems. Until they weren’t. The philosopher Berkeley thought sound was inaccessible to science because it needed our subjective ears to hear. It turns out science can quite happily explain both sound, and how we hear it.

The same will be true for our “subjective experience”. Neuroscience will find the answers eventually. For instance, the experience of a red rose will one day be shown to be only a “pattern of activations across your opponent process cells in the LGN or V4”. Once we map the brain, and we’re getting there, we’ll be able to form accounts of the “pattern of activation” making up an experience.

The problem is that philosophers have built up a false distinction of our inner life (our thoughts, experiences, feelings) and the outer (the world). But this is just “folk psychology” – a naïve, ignorant, misguided fancy of non-scientists. The distinction is wrong. Churchland believes that this “inner world” is just as open to a future explanation as light and sound is.

So, the “hard problem” might not be that hard at all. Pseudo-scientists speculating on it are wasting their time and university money. Stay in your lane, philosophers, the scientists have got real work to do.