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 near-death experiences? How do we make decisions? And why do we feel empathy for others?
Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves
Recent scientific discoveries also provide insights into a fascinating range of real-world 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. How do we account for near-death 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 real-world 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 brain-based understanding of the mind can unnerve even our greatest thinkers.
Touching a Nerve | W. W. Norton & Company
Accepting that our brains are the basis of who we are liberates us from the shackles of superstition. Churchland, however, does not believe that her book was produced by events over which she had no control.
There is a difference, she says, between brains with self-control and brains lacking self-control; indeed, there are brain mechanisms for self-control. Mechanisms do not seem to be the kind of entities that can confer free will.
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And exactly how the self, the control and its targeting are to be found within a buzz of neural activity is not clear, but she is confident that neurotransmitters such as adrenaline and dopamine may be key. Just how little neurophilosophy brings to the party is betrayed in the chapters dealing with morality, aggression and sex, where most of the insights she offers seem to originate from her inner Village Explainer, though she gives them an evolutionary gloss.
There are frequent references to her early life and Lessons Learned Down on the Farm. From this we gain many home, not to say homely, truths.
Book review: Touching a Nerve
Significantly, her insights into human behaviour are not only banal but they seem to owe little to neuroscience. Readers have to wait until the last chapter for a direct treatment of consciousness and the brain. Churchland gives a sketchy summary of some of what is known about the different neural activity that seems to be associated with being conscious of anything at all and being conscious of this and that. She does not say much about the conceptual problems of separating the level from the contents of consciousness — a proper job for a philosopher — but sticks to neuro-journalism.
- Lacan, Language, and Philosophy (SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature).
- Hearing Science;
- Blackbeard: To Live by the Drink, To Die by the Sword.
- Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves - Patricia Churchland - Google Книги.
- Florence and the Butterflies.
Unfortunately this theory, far from solving the problems, simply restates them, as the liberal sprinkling of personifying terms betrays.