A trailblazing philosopher’s exploration of the latest brain science—and its ethical and practical implications. What happens when we accept that everything we feel and think stems not from an immaterial spirit but from electrical and chemical activity in our brains? In this thoughtprovoking narrative—drawn from professional expertise as well as personal life experiences—trailblazing neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland grounds the philosophy of mind in the essential ingredients of biology. She reflects with humor on how she came to harmonize science and philosophy, the mind and the brain, abstract ideals and daily life. Offering lucid explanations of the neural workings that underlie identity, she reveals how the latest research into consciousness, memory, and free will can help us reexamine enduring philosophical, ethical, and spiritual questions: What shapes our personalities? How do we account for neardeath experiences? How do we make decisions? And why do we feel empathy for others? Recent scientific discoveries also provide insights into a fascinating range of realworld dilemmas—for example, whether an adolescent can be held responsible for his actions and whether a patient in a coma can be considered a self. Churchland appreciates that the brainbased understanding of the mind can unnerve even our greatest thinkers. At a conference she attended, a prominent philosopher cried out, “I hate the brain; I hate the brain” But as Churchland shows, he need not feel this way. Accepting that our brains are the basis of who we are liberates us from the shackles of superstition. It allows us to take ourselves seriously as a product of evolved mechanisms, past experiences, and social influences. And it gives us hope that we can fix some grievous conditions, and when we cannot, we can at least understand them with compassion. 16 illustrations
[...]... the split-brain results, available for all to see: if the brain s hemispheres are disconnected, mental states are disconnected Those results were a powerful support for the hypothesis that mental states are in fact states of the physical brain itself, not states of a nonphysical soul Descartes s notion of the soul did not work out very well with physics either The problem is this: if a nonphysical soul... book is structured around the issues that tend to give us pause as we contemplate what understanding the brain might signify Given some leeway, each issue acts rather like the center of a force field, drawing in to itself its own particular assortment of data, stories, and reflections Special sensitivity halos our sense of self, our sense of control, our take on moral values, consciousness, sleep,... am using the words nonconscious and unconscious interchangeably in this context See Chapter 8 for a fuller discussion of the scope of nonconscious brain functions.) So Helmholtz rightly realized that the brain has to be doing lots of processing that is nonconscious and that to understand such processing, paying attention to conscious activities is not enough Moreover, if conscious and nonconscious processing... body inhales ether or why souls hallucinate when the body ingests LSD In practice, however, there is no science of the soul Apart from flimsy contrasts with the body (such as “the soul is not physical,” “the soul has no mass or charge,” “the soul has no temperature”), there has been no advance since Descartes s 350-year-old hypothesis The odd thing is that dualists, even deeply convinced dualists, are... whose hemispheres had been surgically separated as a last resort for the control of debilitating epileptic seizures These subjects became known as the split-brain patients Careful experiments showed that when the nerve bundle connecting the brain s two hemispheres is surgically cut, the patient s two hemispheres become somewhat independent cognitively Lower structures, such as those in the thalamus... sounds or sights? The answer is not yet known There are many strategies for making progress in answering that question, however, some of which converge So there is progress, if no fully detailed account of mechanism (For more on this, see Chapter 9.) For example, much research has gone into trying to understand exactly what happens when a person is put under anesthesia and loses conscious awareness... seems likely His vision of Jesus during his emergence from coma was probably no different from a dream of Jesus or a fantasy of Jesus One fairly reliable way to assess the prospects of a patient in coma after severe anoxia, such as in drowning, is to image the brain twice, separated by several days If the brain is severely damaged, substantial shrinkage will be observed in the images over the course... simple causal relationships, such as between a splash in the stream and the presence of trout, or more complex ones, such as between the phases of the moon and the rise and fall of the tides or between something unobservable with the naked eye, such as a virus, and a disease such as smallpox This latter kind of causal knowledge requires a cultural context that accumulates layers upon layers of causal knowledge,... example, is visible, but these bundles are composed of thousands of neurons In the cortex, a cubic millimeter of tissue contains tens of thousands of neurons, a billion connectivity sites (synapses), and about 4 kilometers of connections Neurons cannot be seen as individual cells without a light microscope, a device not extensively used in research until about 1650 Even then, special chemical stains had to... our self-view It is owed to uncertainty about what exactly will change and how My take on the roster of sensitive issues is that although much is still unknown about the nervous system and how it works, what is known begins to free us from the leaden shackles of ignorance It makes us less vulnerable to flimflam and to false trails It grounds us in what makes sense rather than in the futility of wishful . in to itself its own particular assortment of data, stories, and reflections. Special sensitivity halos our sense of self, our sense of control, our take on moral values, consciousness, sleep,. last 60 or so years, we have seen the control of diseases such as polio and whooping cough, the taming of other diseases such as diabetes and epilepsy, the prevention of conditions such as spina. chromosomes, XX, and also a male sex chromosome, Y. Thus, instead of the usual two sex chromosomes, he had three sex chromosomes: XXY. His relief, when the diagnosis finally came, was intense.