Quotes by Patricia Churchland

Patricia Churchland

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.

Brain

Mind

Understanding

Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.

Doe

Mean

World

Being engaged in some way for the good of the community, whatever that community, is a factor in a meaningful life. We long to belong, and belonging and caring anchors our sense of place in the universe.

Atheist

Caring

Meaningful

Brains are not magical; they are causal machines.

Brain

Machines

Early studies of sleep and dreaming were crucially dependent on waking subjects up during sleep to find out whether they are dreaming or not. Using that strategy, it was found that when the eyes are rapidly moving (REM sleep) people are usually dreaming; when the eyes are not moving, there may be some mentation, but little in the way of visually rich dreams.

Dream

Moving

Sleep

Even philosophers who did not mind psychology, claimed the brain was irrelevant because it was the hardware, and we only need to know about the software.

Brain

Mind

Psychology

Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead to the truth about these phenomena, not just to tidy things up a bit.

Analysis

Ends

Philosopher

Given how long philosophers have been at conceptual analysis (I mean the 20th century stuff), and how many have been doing it, what can we say are the two most important concept results of all that effort?

Long

Mean

Two

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.

Humility

Significant

I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem.

Done

Problem

Progress

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Alive

Analysis

Answers

Appreciate

Assumption

Atheist

Brain

Caring

Cells

College

Consciousness

Danger

Data

Decision

Differences

Doe

Done

Dream

Dynamics

Ends

Facts

Feel Good

Foundation

Fun

Function

Giving Up

Half

Hands

Humility

Important

Isolated

Knowing

Levels

Long

Machines

May

Mean

Meaningful

Mind

Missing

Movement

Moving

Neurons

Organization

Oxytocin

Phenomenon

Philosopher

Philosophy

Planets

Plato

The Future Blueprint

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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Quotes by Patricia Churchland

Patricia Churchland

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.

Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.

Being engaged in some way for the good of the community, whatever that community, is a factor in a meaningful life. We long to belong, and belonging and caring anchors our sense of place in the universe.

Brains are not magical; they are causal machines.

Even philosophers who did not mind psychology, claimed the brain was irrelevant because it was the hardware, and we only need to know about the software.

Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead to the truth about these phenomena, not just to tidy things up a bit.

Given how long philosophers have been at conceptual analysis (I mean the 20th century stuff), and how many have been doing it, what can we say are the two most important concept results of all that effort?

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.

I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem.

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