Patricia Churchland Quotes on Mind
Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy (1986) inaugurated the contemporary neurophilosophical program — the rigorous integration of philosophy of mind with the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience — that she has continued to defend across Brain-Wise, Touching a Nerve, and the more recent Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition (2019). The principal thesis is eliminative materialism (developed jointly with her husband Paul Churchland): folk psychology — the framework of beliefs, desires, intentions, and other propositional attitudes through which we ordinarily explain human behavior — is a primitive empirical theory likely to be replaced, as cognitive neuroscience matures, by a more accurate framework whose categories will not preserve the folk-psychological taxonomy. The Conscience book extends the program into moral philosophy through the analysis of the neurochemistry of social bonding.
Quotes
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Attributed to Patricia Churchland:
“Folk psychology is to neuroscience what folk physics is to physics.”
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Attributed to Patricia Churchland:
“There is no philosophy of mind that does not take the brain seriously.”
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Attributed to Patricia Churchland:
“The self is not an illusion, but it is a process of the nervous system, not an inhabitant of it.”
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Attributed to Patricia Churchland:
“Conscience is what it is to care about anything at all.”
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“Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was “the software, not the hardware”, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.”
Introductory message at her homepage at the University of California, San Diego , 2013