Book Description
Neurophilosophy is a rich interdisciplinary study of the prospects for a unified cognitive neurobiology. Contemporary research in the empirical neurosciences, and recent research in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science, are used to illuminate fundamental questions concerning the relation between abstract cognitive theory and substantive neuroscience.
Patricia Smith Churchland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. A Bradford Book.
Customer Reviews:
Whether you dispute the premise or not..........2006-11-15
You will find Churchland's arguments compelling. She builds her case methodically and comprehensively. Neurophilosophy presents another dimension to a variety of phenomena. This grounding is valuable because it has you reconsider your usual way of looking at how you look at the world.
a recommended prerequisite..........2006-04-01
I had difficulty with this work when I tackled it a decade ago. I recently took up Richard C. Vitzthum's "Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition" and benefitted tremendously by learning the context in which "Neurophilosophy" developed.
Now that I understand the context, I am returning to this book. It remains relevant. The amount of technical detail gives weight to the intellectual satisfaction it provides.
unfortunately congested and overly-technical.......2004-10-22
i have a full shelf when it comes to philosophy and cog-sci, so when i saw this title i picked it up naturally. however compelled i am to get through it, i haven't finished this book.
the reason i can't finish this book is not because it reads (as someone posted previously) too much like a biology textbook, but because it reads like an [insert obscure foreign language here] instruction manual crossed with a doctoral thesis!
the book is chock full of good stuff, but i can't swim through the cold and unfriendly verbiage. And I read through Wolfram's NKS no problem, which was a pretty annoying writing style to say the least...
fortunately i see that she has come out with another book on the subject, which i trust is more user-friendly.
Out of date now...but motivates modern developments.......2003-05-14
Published over 17 years ago, this book was one of the first examples of the now accelerating trend to make philosophical investigations into the mind/brain problem accountable to modern science. Pure speculation once dominated any discussion of the mind (or the brain) and therefore progress in the field by any measure was non-existent. There are of course still purely philosophical investigations into the mind/body problem, but these will no doubt decay rapidly with time as scientific investigations continue to lay to rest various "impossibility" claims philosophers have made about the physical brain. Indeed, in this century, the rise of machine intelligence will hammer the last nail in the coffin of mind/brain philosophical speculation.
The author of the book is a materialist, and in this book she has given an excellent justification of her position, and expresses at all times fairness to those who disagree with her positions and conclusions. She also expresses a rare intellectual honesty about the scientific evidence supporting her claims, informing the reader at every place in the book where it is not available or weak at best. Without a doubt the author was not happy at the state of philosophy at the time the book was published, holding that it completely omitted neuroscience, and embraced in her words "a novel and sophisticated form of dualism". She explains this was ample reason for her to take the plunge into a more scientific/empirical framework. The book is an excellent example of what can result when a philosopher decides to do this.
The book is divided up into three parts, with the first one emphasizing the biology of nervous systems and neuropsychology, the second part an overview of developments in the philosophy of science, and the third part discussing the ramifications of neurobiology for research in artificial intelligence. Although somewhat out of date due to the advancements in both experimental and theoretical neuroscience since then, it could still be of interest, mainly to philosophers, who are interested in applying their talent for logical thinking and organization to difficult problems in neuroscience. The transition from pure philosophical speculation to the rigors of scientific investigation may at first be difficult for the typical armchair philosopher, but their high degree of intelligence and their restless desire to get at the truth will soften it considerably. And in the decades ahead, one will witness the presence of "industrial philosophers": those who have chosen to leave the "proverbial armchair" and apply their abilities to both understand and give rise to intelligent machines.
An excellent introduction to 'materialism'.......2003-01-19
This book begins with a complete and somewhat dry but useful tour of the history of neuropsychology, complete with major discoveries and the arguments that predated them, showing their conclusions and how it has led to the construction of an in-progress model of human intelligence. This is followed by a summarization of general epistemological arguments from the discipline of philosophy, concluding with a general understanding of how our world functions relative to our own intelligences. In the process, the author argues convincingly for a materialist - or "limited to the physical world only" - understanding of human consciousness and how thoughts are generated, avoiding un-politically-correct conclusions entirely but thoroughly debunking any religious, dualistic or overly idealized conclusions about human individuality. Rough reading at times but an excellent compendium of information.
Average customer rating:
- Neuroscience for philosophers - even for amateurs
- Philosophy meets neuroscience accessibly and controversially
- Not traditional philosophy (thank goodness!)
- Hardly philosophy
- Disappointing
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Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy
Patricia Smith Churchland
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Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain
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ASIN: 026253200X |
Book Description
Progress in the neurosciences is profoundly changing our conception of ourselves. Contrary to time-honored intuition, the mind turns out to be a complex of brain functions. And contrary to the wishful thinking of some philosophers, there is no stemming the revolutionary impact that brain research will have on our understanding of how the mind works.
Brain-Wise is the sequel to Patricia Smith Churchland's Neurophilosophy, the book that launched a subfield. In a clear, conversational manner, this book examines old questions about the nature of the mind within the new framework of the brain sciences. What, it asks, is the neurobiological basis of consciousness, the self, and free choice? How does the brain learn about the external world and about its own introspective world? What can neurophilosophy tell us about the basis and significance of religious and moral experiences?
Drawing on results from research at the neuronal, neurochemical, system, and whole-brain levels, the book gives an up-to-date perspective on the state of neurophilosophy--what we know, what we do not know, and where things may go from here.
Customer Reviews:
Neuroscience for philosophers - even for amateurs.......2007-09-09
While tough sledding in sections for those without a grounding in biology, this volume weds an overview of philosophy from Aristotle to the moderns, to the latest studies in how the brain and its constituent parts actually "work", and discusses in clear language the tentative conclusions that can be currently drawn. Since it discusses metaphysical subjects, those conclusions will meet a priori disagreement, but all readers will have a solid foundation to judge the issues for themselves.
Philosophy meets neuroscience accessibly and controversially.......2006-05-01
This masterly book summarizes a prodigious amount of research about the workings of the brain. Author Patricia Smith Churchland introduces the basics of neuroscience to the realm of philosophy. She says that present scientific knowledge about the brain makes it implausible that there is any such thing as an immaterial mind or soul. A committed materialist (although she does not make the case for materialism), she puts a mass of incomplete scientific evidence before you and says that more scientific evidence will emerge over the next decade or so to complete the picture and solidify the case. She does not do justice to contrary views, which she introduces as straw men, easily knocked down. That said, we find that Churchland provides a valuable, highly readable discussion of the challenges neuroscience presents to philosophy. She makes it clear that any philosophy of consciousness must be informed by knowledge of the brain.
Not traditional philosophy (thank goodness!).......2005-02-20
Philosophical purists will criticize Churchland for refusing to engage the philosophical "tradition" on its own terms, i.e., she refuses to stick her head in the sand and theorize as if neuroscience and psychology didn't exist. Rather, what Churchland has done is invert this traditional philosphical stance : survey the scientific results on topics philosophers have wanted to claim as their own: consciousness, free will, the self, human knowledge, religion, and the like (each gets a chapter in her book). That is, make a conscious effort to bring empirical results to bear on these thorny problems of human existence. While neuropsychology can't provide decisive answers yet, its data provides new ideas, new constraints, and casts doubt on those doctrines (such as the 'unity of the self') previously taken as sacrosanct by the head-in-the-sand philosophical establishment.
Overall, a very clearly written book, with lots of interesting ideas and data. If you want your traditional convoluted philosophical treatise, go somewhere else. If you want to be invigorated with new ideas and data from cutting edge neuroscience, then pick up this book!
Hardly philosophy.......2004-06-24
This book is only one example of the current practice by philosophers of essentially abandoning their craft and worshiping at the altar of science. Philosophy had always tried to go beyond observation of perceived physical reality alone, and deal with questions such as--in the branch of philosophy known as epistemology--how is knowledge of that reality, or of matters like principles of logic and mathematics, acquired.
What is pitiful is that the author of the book tries to subsume even these questions under physical science, thus putting the cart before the horse. She tries to find answers to what constitutes consciousness by studying the brain, forgetting that our knowledge of the brain and other physical occurrences depends itself on their manifestation in consciousness. We first have to know how reality is constructed in our minds, before exploring further physical particulars.
The author of the book, and she is not the only one to do so, goes as far as attempting to define consciousness in terms of the brain, committing the gross fallacy of equivocation. The fallacy consists in giving a name a new meaning and then trying to prove something about the originally named. But something proved about the newly meant does not thereby apply to what was meant before.
A basic endeavor of Professor Churchland is to eventually in some such way equate consciousness with some part of the brain. But although she tirelessly cites and illustrates minute and extensive studies, she fails to indicate what kind of findings so made would establish that identity. In the process, while a number of times branding other authors with circularity--with assuming a fact before proving it--though she does not say where the circularity resides, she indulges in the persistent circularity of arguing for the brain as the self while beforehand assuming that the brain, as the self, learns and so forth, and she names a chapter accordingly (p.321).
Circularity, the act of begging the question, is, to be sure, another fallacy, and the book contains additional lapses of logic. Earlier in the book (p.55) its author suggests that if A implies B then not-A implies not-B. This commits the fundamental fallacy of "denying the antecedent", and the book exhibits other failures in reasoning. Its author, concerning again definition, argues (p.267) that "the indivisible", which was the original meaning of "atom", turned out to be divisible. This is of course a glaring contradiction. The word "atom" was later applied to a physical unit found divisible, but this was merely a redefinition. The book asserts similar nonsense regarding parallel lines. They are in geometry defined as straight lines that never meet, and the book's author claims they meet. She is obviously not only illogical but insufficiently acquainted with geometry, in some of which parallel lines are said not to exist, rather than to, contradictorily, meet. "Half knowledge is worse than no knowledge", as they say, and a similar warning can apply in general when philosophers dabble in science.
By wanting to in the preceding manner downgrade past understandings, the book tries in the main, as do related ones, to forcibly dispense with the presence of consciousness by insistence that it must be material, instead of viewing it, alongside other events connected with matter, as the phenomenon it is, and by which all reality is ascertained.
Disappointing.......2004-01-26
Brain-wise is, to say the least, a less than impressive effort from a philosopher as prominent in philosophy of mind as Churchland is. A short list of complaints includes:
-Churchland collapses the distinction between 'consciousness' in the phenomenal sense ('subjective character of experience') & 'consciousness' in the psychological sense (awareness or self-consciousness)(see Chalmers, 'The Conscious Mind')
-most of her conclusions are simply asserted rather than argued, & when she does make arguments they are startlingly simple-minded
-the book completely overstates the progress of neuroscience, a field still very much in its infancy. She speaks about neuroscience as if she were in complete awe, which is quite unjustified, & she seems to have a bad case of science-envy
-she assumes that all sciences are reducible, which ignores the fact that (as Chomsky argues, although to say he 'argues' this neglects to express the obviousness of his conclusion) we are cognitively limited beings, & that there may simply be aspects of the world that are beyond the reach of our scientific capacities.
-she hauls out the tired vitalist analogy
-she admits the failure of logical supervenience of the phenomenal on the physical, yet fails to see why this counts against materialism (again, see Chalmers)
-the section on religion is just feeble, & includes not one original thought. Most of her 'insights' are along the lines of 'the prospect of [death] ... need not be [unsettling] ... one can live a richly purposeful life of love and work--of family, community, wilderness, music, and so forth--cognizant that it makees sense to make the best of this life'.
Anyway, I suppose someone interested in philosophy of mind should read this, if only because Churchland and her husband are such celebrities in the field. But don't expect much. As an introduction to neuroscience, I am not in a position to judge Brain-wise; my hunch is that if you simply want to become informed as to the latest developments in the field, there are more appropriate books out there. As philosophy, the book is depressingly weak.
Book Description
In Matter and Consciousness, Paul Churchland clearly presents the advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism, reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical issues.
Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism.
Paul M. Churchland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. A Bradford Book.
Customer Reviews:
Extremely accessible introduction.......2007-01-27
"Matter and Consciousness" is a very accessible introduction to basic issues in the philosophy of mind. Paul Churchland divides the book into several sections, with each one serving to give a broad overview of the relevant issues, the main positions and controversies, as well as the major lines of research inquiry that have been developed in the past few decades as ways of approaching the study of brain/mind.
The first problem that Churchland addresses in the book is the ontological one - that is, what is the real nature of mental phenomena and in what relation do they stand to the physical world? He surveys the different types of dualism, including substance dualism, property dualism (a category which subsumes epiphenomenalism, interactionist property dualism and elemental property dualism). He also gives a flavor for the many different species of materialism such as reductive materialism/identity theory, functionalism (which currently serves as the main philosophical position for those involved in the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence) and eliminative materialism. Some really important questions are addressed in this first section, such as the feasibility of reducing mental states to neurobiological states. The history of science offers plenty of examples of successful intertheoretic reductions - for example, the theory of optics being reduced to the theory of electromagnetism. However, different arguments have been made (not just by dualists, but also by materialists) as to why mental states will not be capable of reduction to neurobiological states. For the functionalists this is because there are no universal correspondences between physical and mental states (there are many potential physical states that can instantiate mental states) and for the eliminative materialists, this is because our current folk psychological framework is radically wrong. Instead of intertheoretic reduction, the eliminative position holds that there will instead be a full-scale elimination, with our folk psychological concepts going the way of phlogiston in the physical sciences.
Churchland also focuses on the semantic problem -- where do our mental terms derive their meaning from? He suggests that this problem can be resolved by the network theory of meaning in which the meaning of a term derives from the term's embedded status in a larger theoretical framework. He addresses the epistemological problem (the problem of other minds and the problem of self-consciousness) and the methodological problem. What should be the structure of a science of mind? Churchland reviews several traditional approaches - idealism/phenomenology, methodological behaviorism, the cognitive/computational approach and the methodological materialist approach.
In the next two chapters Churchland offers a cursory overview of the fields of artificial intelligence and neurophysiology. These sections are meant to give the reader a flavor of some of the research projects that have been initiated in these fields and the manner in which they bear on the problems discussed in earlier portions of the book. For example, can intelligence be represented computationally? How can we develop programs that simulate aspects of intelligence? Churchland reviews fundamental concepts such as universal Turing machines in a very readable manner. However, it should be noted that Churchland sometimes seems to conflate consciousness and intelligence -- intelligence need not imply consciousness, though he sometimes seems to use these two terms almost interchangeably.
The last chapter of the book is devoted to some thoughts on the possible distribution of intelligence in the universe at large. Overall this book should serve as a highly readable introduction to some very difficult problems. Given the amount of the material covered, it is to be expected that many issues will be dealt with in a cursory manner. Some of the author's biases are reflected in the work. However, Churchland does a decent job in trying to present the main arguments and he also provides suggested reading lists at the end of the chapters for those who would want more in-depth coverage.
a necessary prerequisite..........2006-04-01
Richard C. Vitzthum discusses this book in his "Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition." He explains the animosity certain kinds of philosophers express towards anyone who insists on physical causation of mental processes. Thus, the negative reviews below are understandable and should be ignored.
Now that I understand the nature of the incessant bickering that occurs among philosophers of various biases, I am ready to take this book up seriously. If an individual, trying desperately to understand the nature of the situation here in the world, must choose eventually between physical causation of thought and non-physical causation of thought, then it seems reasonable to me to choose physical causation.
Throughout history, physical causation has ended up explaining away non-physical, i.e., wishful, fantasies.
Quite horrible..........2006-01-16
As much as I respect Paul Churchland as a philosopher, I can't say this book is very good (he's written much better!)
His coverage of the main positions in the philosophy of mind leaves much to be desired. For one thing, the arguments he uses in favor of dualisms and the objections he brings against it are quite bad. Most dualists would probably cringe at the idea (John Foster, William Vacllicella, W. D. Hart, Richard Swinburne, C. J. Ducasse, David Chalmers, William Hasker) that their position can be so sloppily defended (and refuted). Of course there are a number of differences between these dualists, but that is not the point. It is also true that Churchland's book is intended as an introduction. All the more reason for a bit more balance. Frankly, as a dualist I was no impressed--not to mention unmoved.
Churchland goes from there to arguing later in the same chapter (ch. 2) for eliminative materialism. He uses a very bad argument. He argues that an objection against eliminative materialism which appeals to introspection begs the question. After all, this is the very thing which Churchland is calling into question. So far of course, this is only an assertion, as much in need of justification as he claims the non-eliminative materialist advocate requires. He then claims that introspection is as 'theory-laden' as empirical judgments (I suppose a la Kuhn). But this claim is very weak. For the claim itself rests on a sort of introspection, and requires that Churchland's critics accept the a number of controversial claims (the empirical judgements are theory laden, and that introspection is somehow analogous to empirical judgments). It would also seem that his view of introspection is a bit simplistic (straw man).
But at the very least, the argument is unconvincing.
Pretty good introduction to a vexing problem.......2002-11-03
The mind-body problem, as it is called in Western philosophy, still has the attention of philosophers, despite centuries of debate. It will no doubt occupy more of philosophers time in the upcoming decades due to the resurging interest (and advances) in artificial intelligence. But the goal of most research in A.I. is now geared towards computational algorithms that are able to learn and can discover new knowledge or data patterns. The "hard A.I." problem, that of creating conscious machines, is not top priority it seems.
But philosophers will continue with the analysis of the nature of conscious intelligence, and the author is one of these. Interestingly though, and correctly, he asserts that progress in this analysis has been made, and he notes that philosophy has joined hands with psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, ethology, and evolutionary theory in making this progress. And this will no doubt continue as advances in these fields are made, and the 21st century will see the advent of the "industrial philosopher". Once thought to be a purely academic profession, the ethical considerations behind genetic engineering and the legal rights of thinking machines will require the presence of philosophers in the rank and file of engineers, technicians, and managers. And because of this, these philosophers, and their coworkers will themselves have considerable knowledge outside their own field.
Again, the refreshing feature of this book is that the author believes that philosophy has made considerable process on the nature of mind. This was done, he says, by understanding the mind's self-knowledge, by providing a much clearer idea of the nature of the different theories of mind, and by clarifying the sorts of evidence that must be acquired in order to distinguish between these different theories. Empirical evidence, he states, has enabled the making of these distinctions much more rational and scientific. But he is careful to note that the evidence is still ambigious, and much work still needs to be done before the these ideas can be differentiated with more clarity. He discusses in detail the different theories of dualism and materialism. An entire chapter is devoted to discussing substance dualism, property dualism, philosophical behaviorism, reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. The author asks readers to start anew and throw away their convictions while analyzing these conceptions of mind and matter.
For the author, the mind-body problem cannot be solved without considering three problems: 1. Semantical: The meaning of ordinary common-sense terms for mental states. 2. Epistemological: The problem of other minds and the capacity for introspection. 3. Methodological: The proper methodology to use in constructing a theory of mind. Entire chapters are devoted to these, and after reading them the reader entering the debate on the mind-body problem for the first time will have an over-abundance of food for thought.
An entire chapter is spent on the topic of artificial intelligence. If this book were updated, this chapter would probably have to be considerably expanded, in that many advances have been made in A.I. since this book was first published. Research in A.I. has been rocky, and many promises that were unfullfilled were made in the past about it. But now it seems a more rational and realistic attitude is taken about the claims of A.I. Most everyone involved in it understands that it is an enormously complex problem, and have concentrated their efforts on building intelligent machines from a piece-meal, microscopic approach, i.e. from solving the simplest problems first before tackling the more difficult ones.
A chapter is also devoted to neuroscience. Thanks to imaging technologies and other approaches to mapping the brain, this field has mushroomed in recent years. The author only gives a cursory overview of the brain and the nervous system in this chapter, due no doubt to lack of space. The reverse engineering of the human brain has been pointed to by some researchers in artificial intelligence as being the best hope for building intelligent machines. The dramatic increases in chip technology and bus design have made this belief certainly more feasible. It remains to be seen, via actual empirical research, whether the reverse engineering of the human brain, and then its subsequent implementation in electronic devices, will indeed result in the rise of intelligent machines.
Whatever the future of artificial intelligence and neuroscience, the mind-body problem will no doubt be of interest to philosophers for decades to come. It will be fascinating to see what kinds of conceptual frameworks and methodologies will be employed in attempts to solve this problem. Without doubt some new ideas would be welcome in this regard, as proposals for solutions to the mind-body problem seem to be stuck in a local minimum. But, as the author argues well for, the solution will bring in many areas and possibly some radical ideas, all supported by painstaking experimentation.
The philpsophy is pretty interesting but.........2002-08-31
This book is dated when it comes to AI coverage. Among other things, it talkes briefly about the backpropagation algorithm , invented some 15++ years ago. While this book is about philosophy, it would be nice to have an updated version of this book giving a short overview of how the AI field is borrowing more and more ideas from natural evolution and real neural networks. Backpropagation is a specific (and really usefull ) algorithm, and sparked a new wave of excitement about artificial neural networks in the mid 80s. Still, one problem is that the algorithm, as far as I know, is not biology plausible. More recent criticism agains the algorithm would be really really usefull. A short overview of _recent_ AI progress in language understanding/image understanding among other things, would also improve this book.
Also, the book contains a chapter on neuroscience. I found it pretty hard to follow all the details here, because of the technical term used. But remember,- its not the easiest subject around, and carefull reading through the chapter will help.
The more philosophical part of this book is interesting, but to be honest its not my favorite subject, and I didnt know much about dualism and other philosophical problems before reading this book. Well, as a master degree student in artificial intelligence, I probably should have been more interested in philosophy, and in some areas this book is an eyeopener.
Book Description
If we are to solve the central problems in the philosophy of science, Paul Churchland argues, we must draw heavily on the resources of the emerging sciences of the mind-brain. A Neurocomputationial Perspective illustrates the fertility of the concepts and data drawn from the study of the brain and of artificial networks that model the brain. These concepts bring unexpected coherence to scattered issues in the philosophy of science, new solutions to old philosophical problems, and new possibilities for the enterprise of science itself.
Paul M. Churchland is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California at San Diego.
Customer Reviews:
A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the structure of Science.......2005-09-08
the one that I need for my research.
NC Perspective explores AI like never before.......2001-07-03
If you're interested in a concise and empirically grounded look at how organisms experience themselves and the world, this is a definite. There is also a nice look into the future with Paul speculating what may come from the study of neuroengineering with humans. This book is especially appealing in light of the fact that our population is being exposed to the novel findings in medicine, neuroscience, and all other fields that play a part in the NC perspective. If you're interested in this book, you may also want to check out the movie, "AI."
Book Description
In this collection of essays, Paul Churchland explores the unfolding impact of the several empirical sciences of the mind, especially cognitive neurobiology and computational neuroscience on a variety of traditional issues central to the discipline of philosophy. Representing Churchland's most recent research, they continue his research program, launched over thirty years ago, and which has evolved into the field of neurophilosophy.
Customer Reviews:
State-of-the-art Philosophy.......2007-08-10
Without a doubt, this is truly state-of-the-art philosophy. Paul Churchland tackles such a wide range of issues that it inspires awe at his ability to discourse with such erudition. His eliminative materialist approach is highly effective as he tackles such issues as the anti-reductionist program of the Functionalist school or the ontological irreducibility of semantics endorsed by Fodor. His strategy is to apply the principles of intertheoretic reduction to these issues through the use of research in Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Neurobiology and he does it very very well. Churchland writes with clarity, effiency and eloquence and his ability to use analogies to highlight key issues is impressive.
I'm sure there will be the usual alpha-male status-seeking behavior among the academics that results in snooty nitpicking of his work but he assembles his arguments with such care that I doubt his detractors will be up to the task. There are just too many within and without the academic community who can't accept a materialist theory of mind. It causes too much cognitive discomfort for the Cartesian Dualists to confront their utter lack of their own destiny-controllability. The loss of the homunculus is profoundly frightening to them.
If I were to make a minor suggestion it would be to integrate neurophilosophy with current research in the field of Behavior Analysis to achieve a broad-spectrum approach to cognitive behavior, e.g., the high-sensitivity of the global neuronal system to variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Another suggestion would be to explore the cultural pathologies of the concept of "free will" as it is consistently used as a basis for primitive ideologies that rationalize socially-corrosive forms of vengeance and cruel punishment along with pseudo-socioeconomic theories that never-endingly blame the poor for being poor.
One has to consider whether philosophy has now become obsolete-displaced by the conceptual magnitude of the cognitive sciences that transforms philosophical debates into issues of empirical research.
A Nietzschean "transvaluation of all values" may finally be in order here and Paul Churchland is the one to lead the charge.
From One Neuron to Another.......2007-05-13
Paul Churchland strikes a wonderful balance in writing for the specialists and non-specialists. He explains why serial coded linguaformal models of brain functioning are inadequate and should be replaced by a model that is based upon the following: vector coding, matrix processing, prototype activating and synapse adjusting. Churchland's two chapters on qualia offer the reader an experiencial way to "feel" his abstract explainations.
Book Description
How do groups of neurons interact to enable the organism to see, decide, and move appropriately? What are the principles whereby networks of neurons represent and compute? These are the central questions probed by The Computational Brain. Churchland and Sejnowski address the foundational ideas of the emerging field of computational neuroscience, examine a diverse range of neural network models, and consider future directions of the field. The Computational Brain is the first unified and broadly accessible book to bring together computational concepts and behavioral data within a neurobiological framework.
Computer models constrained by neurobiological data can help reveal how -networks of neurons subserve perception and behavior - bow their physical interactions can yield global results in perception and behavior, and how their physical properties are used to code information and compute solutions. The Computational Brain focuses mainly on three domains: visual perception, learning and memory, and sensorimotor integration. Examples of recent computer models in these domains are discussed in detail, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, and extracting principles applicable to other domains. Churchland and Sejnowski show how both abstract models and neurobiologically realistic models can have useful roles in computational neuroscience, and they predict the coevolution of models and experiments at many levels of organization, from the neuron to the system.
The Computational Brain addresses a broad audience: neuroscientists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers. It is written for both the expert and novice. A basic overview of neuroscience and computational theory is provided, followed by a study of some of the most recent and sophisticated modeling work in the context of relevant neurobiological research. Technical terms are clearly explained in the text, and definitions are provided in an extensive glossary. The appendix contains a précis of neurobiological techniques.
Patricia S. Churchland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute, and a MacArthur Fellow. Terrence J. Sejnowski is Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego, Professor at the Salk Institute, where he is Director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Customer Reviews:
A source of stimulation and frustration.......2007-02-14
There is an argument that this is a book of its time. It is nearly fifteen years since it was put together and a great deal of neural water has flowed under the bridge. The thematic enthusiasm for computationalism that dominates the book has not been convincingly proved in the meantime. If anything, the computational properties of models have been shown to entertain many unpleasant complexity results. Moreover, the localisation of brain functions grounded in naive interpretations of lesion effects has come under greater scrutiny due to detailed MRI results. Given twhat was known at the time, it is unsurprising that the book focuses on the visual system - a focus also found in Christof Koch's recent book. Acknowleding all that and more, it would be hard to find a better condensation of science, computationalism, and philosophical speculation than in this book.
Leaving aside downsides arising from recent discoveries that the authors could not have anticipated, the book can be frustrating to read at times. In particular, there is a tendency to introduce technical concepts and descriptors into accounts without prior definition. For example, very early on in a brief account of monkey vision there is mention of V4, MT, etc. The terms are neither defined nor explained. Strangely, in the introduction to networks, the inner product of two vectors is explained while the outer product is not. Small points but the oversight recurs.
The philosophical content in the book is light, but the assumptions driving the work are among the most contentious. There is no point reaming off a list but the book does not shirk supporing the brain-as-a-computer hypothesis.
All in all a stimulating work, if in need of updating.
Excellent.......2003-09-13
This book can be viewed as one of the first attempts to use results from psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy with the intent of gaining an understanding of how the mind/brain works, but all of this is done within the "computational mind" paradigm. The approach taken by the authors is one of the most honest of those in the literature, for throughout the book they are careful to note just how much evidence there is to support their position(s), and to what extent further work is to done. Philosophically speaking, the authors are clearly in the materialist camp, believing that Cartesian dualism does not cohere with current scientific knowledge. But they state that materialism is not an established fact, allowing the possibility, but not the probability, that dualism may in fact be true. They reject early on though any "arguments from ignorance" in their assertion that just because neuroscience does not have an explanation of consciousness, that such an explanation is impossible. The authors call the failure to be able to think of consciousness in terms of neuronal activity "intuition dissonance", and reject completely its efficacy in establishing the truth of the nature of the mind/brain.
The underlying theme in the book is to explain emergent properties as "high-level" effects that are dependent on "lower-level" phenomena, hence rejecting the thesis that they are "nomologically autonomous", i.e. that such a dependence cannot be done and is outside the domain of science. The science in this book recognizes its historical origins, and it is clear that the authors will not accept explanations of the mind/brain that do not involve scientific experimentation and analysis. Much has been done experimentally in neuroscience since this book was published, especially using the techniques of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A brief discussion of MRI is given in the Appendix of the book, but no doubt if the book were updated there would be a lengthy overview of it. The current experimental situation in neuroscience has led some to predict a total "reverse engineering" of the brain in the upcoming decades. This prediction is an optimistic one, but no doubt detailed knowledge of the brain will continue to accelerate, this being a sign of what the authors call "a remarkable time in the history of science".
The authors devote an entire chapter to the computational modeling of the brain, mostly of course dealing with the mathematics of neural networks. The approach in this chapter though is still at a level that would allow a general audience to follow it. Readers with a background in physics, especially statistical physics, will appreciate more the discussion on Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines. Experimental results are inserted as graphs throughout the book, with detailed explanation. As a whole the discussion of the biology of the brain is purely descriptive, and the line drawings could stand some improvement.
The chapter on neuronal plasticity is the most interesting in the book, the authors viewing the brain as an entity that is continuously undergoing modification. Their stated goal in the chapter is to explain how the "local" property of plasticity can result in the "global" property of learning. Clearly intelligence to the authors is an emergent property, i.e. an object or device may be characterized as intelligent without its components being intelligent. Particularly interesting in this chapter was the discussion of the amnesia of a patient who underwent bilateral resection of mesial temporal lobe structures. The time scales of the patient's memory are striking: he remembered things before the surgery but could not remember things that happened a few minutes or hours ago, but could remember things within a minute in his past. The authors also mention the fascinating work of Antonio Damasio and his collaborators, this research being even more important at the present time. The scientific study of consciousness is just beginning and no doubt this study will give many surprises as it develops throughout the twenty-first century.
a great book.......2002-01-11
This extremely interesting book integrates our vast knowledge of neuroscience with computational models of perception, sensori-motor integration, memory etc.
For students of neuroscience, computer science and psychology this book is extremely important, because it gives you the necessary fundamentals of this field(namely computational neuroscience) so you can get to more advanced levels easily.
Understanding the book will need some background in higher mathematics (differential calculus).
Good summary of empirical and experimental neuroscience.......1996-11-12
This book is an excellent follow-up to "Engine of Reason,
Seat of the Soul". It gets into the details of what's
known about computational neuroscience and the working
of the human brain (and other animals ' brains and nervous
systems. Great summaries of specific "tricks" of brain
processing, e.g., how vison works, etc.
Book Description
"Churchland and Hooker have collected ten papers by prominent philosophers of science which challenge van Fraassen's thesis from a variety of realist perspectives. Together with van Fraassen's extensive reply . . . these articles provide a comprehensive picture of the current debate in philosophy of science between realists and anti-realists."—Jeffrey Bub and David MacCallum, Foundations of Physics Letters
Book Description
A new picture of the mind is emerging, and explanations now exist for what has so long seemed mysterious. This real understanding of how the biological brain works -- of how we work -- has generated a mood of excitement that is shared in a half-dozen intersecting disciplines. Philosopher Paul Churchland, who is widely known as a gifted teacher and expository writer, explains these scientific developments in a simple, authoritative, and pictorial fashion. He not only opens the door into the ongoing research of the neurobiological and connectionist communities but goes further, probing the social and moral dimensions of recent experimental results that assign consciousness to all but the very simplest forms of animals.
In a fast-paced, entertaining narrative, replete with examples and numerous explanatory illustrations, Churchland brings together an exceptionally broad range of intellectual issues. He summarizes new results from neuroscience and recent work with artificial neural networks that together suggest a unified set of answers to questions about how the brain actually works; how it sustains a thinking, feeling, dreaming self; and how it sustains a self-conscious person.
Churchland first explains the science -- the powerful role of vector coding in sensory representation and pattern recognition, artificial neural networks that imitate parts of the brain, recurrent networks, neural representation of the social world, and diagnostic technologies and therapies for the brain in trouble. He then explores the far-reaching consequences of the current neurocomputational understanding of mind for our philosophical convictions, and for our social, moral, legal, medical, and personal lives.
Churchland's wry wit and skillful teaching style are evident throughout. He introduces the remarkable representational power of a single human brain, for instance, via a captivating brain/World-Trade-Tower TV screen analogy. "Who can be watching this pixilated show?" Churchland queries; the answer is a provocative "no one." And he has included a folded stereoscopic viewer, attached to the inside back cover of the book, that readers can use to participate directly in several revealing experiments concerning stereo vision.
A Bradford Book
Customer Reviews:
Good pop-science (philosophy?) book on the topic.......2005-12-11
I've been a fan of the churchlands work for a while and someone got me this book for a gift (probably wouldn't have gotten it otherwise) and I decided to give it a read.
The content in the book is similar to the content of other books (ones published by his wife) such as "Neurophilosophy" but this book is much more accessible to lay philosophers/scientists.
If you have on interest in the philosophy of mind and are not the sort that is wrapped up in archaec metaphysics than this book should be of interest, it gives a decent picture of some of the research that has been done with neuro networks etc.
My only complaint is that the book is rather weak philosophically, but one can read the philosophically implications etc in Paul Churchland's articles (some of which are listed in the bibliography) or in Patricia Churchland's book "Neurophilosophy" which touches on the philosophical issues more (also has much more detail about the brain too).
I only wish I had more time to try and implement and experiment with neuro nets.
Exciting and Eminently Readable.......2002-08-31
I can't evaluate the neurobiology in the book since I'm no scientist, but Churchland's entirely accessible discussions of vector coding, feed-forward and recurrent networks, and the general landscape of contemporary neuroscience were exhilarating to read. They made me want to rush out and buy textbooks on the brain--a pretty impressive achievement, as far as I'm concerned.
Churchland's philosophical perspective, as anyone familiar with his work will expect, is thoroughly naturalistic. He has very little patience with anti-reductive arguments, and the three he discusses (Nagel's, Jackson's, and Searle's) receive straw-man treatments, though like everything else in the book, each treatment is good-natured and fairly humble. Readers already lacking tolerance for Searle will enjoy Churchland's caricature of The Rediscovery of Mind as a Betty Crocker cookbook.
Though his explicit discussion of anti-reductionism is sparse, the rest of Churchland's book serves as a demonstration of how much exciting work can be done if we simply ignore armchair naysaying. So I was more bothered by his lack of engagement with philosophers already on the elimintivist bandwagon. His discussion of Dennett, in particular, was cursory and frustrating. It seems to me that he conflates Dennett's distinct accounts of consciousness and content, needlessly (and in the relevant sense inaccurately) portraying Dennett as being a friend of robust human uniqueness.
But quibbles aside, the book is a fantastic read. Its optimistic view of the possibilities of computational neuroscience is infectious. Anyone without ideological blinders on will come away excited about the future of brain research.
The connectionist dream.......2002-03-14
This book is the hallmark of the connectionist dream -the belief that all aspects of mind, brain and consciousness can be explained by calling up neural network models-. Now the basic premise behind all this I will not contest. The brain is a large parallel distribuited processing network of neurons. But there is another big step from this to the statement that everything the mind is is a vector coding of a neural network. This is far too siplistic. Churchland of course realizes this, but continues to talk of connectionist models like neurosciences messiah.
This is perhaps only one aspect of Churchlands book, however. Overall, the book attempts to reconcile philosophy of mind with neuroscience, and it succeeds to an extent. In many parts the discussion falls into vector coding talk, but in many others it stellarily accounts for deep problems. It is a good introducion to neuroscience, neural networks and philosophy. Churchland does not present his own strong theories, but he does well in staying away from controversy. The best part of the book is in my opinion, the attempt to build a framework of the impacts neuroscience has in social and philosophical domains. This is not done often enough, and if it is, rarely with such lucidity and clarity.
Now I would have ceritanly liked much more speculation when it commes to consciousness, given the Churchland's contribuition to the literature. But he refrains from this and merely describes some other models, like Llinas thalamic oscillations, and is content in stating that it is at leas possible to see what an explanation for consciousness would look like from a neuroscience context.
The book is a grat read, and students of philosophy, neuroscience and cognitive science should enjoy it.
Good Intro to Neural Nets and Its Consequences.......2000-08-25
The book comes in two parts. The part one, which takes up more than a half of the whole book, explains what recurrent neural networks are and how those can be used to explain our own cognitive functions. This is generally a good introduction, I think. His style is casual, and we see certain smugness you normally expect at a college lecture, e.g., introducing certain authorities as his friends and presenting the picture his own daughter and the medial and lateral brain stereographs of his wife (Patricia Churchland). Like other popular science books, however, his description of neural nets is far from precise but let's not expect too much from a book of this kind. Unlike what some of our reviewers below suggested, he minimizes the use of scientific jargons and when he use such jargons he explains what those are. The first part was overall very much enjoyable to read.
You cannot expect it to be a fully philosophical book, though. His new epistemological framework arises from this newest perspective the theory of neural networks has created. To know what neural nets are is immensely important. Let's remind ourselves of a classic work in cognitive science and neurobiology. It's David Marr's _Vision_. There Marr expresses the view that physical (hardware) implementation is quite irrelevant. Now we know this is not true. To understand why this is so one may have to consult the part one.
The problem area is the part two. The chapter 11 was full of hopes and lots of blah-blah-blah's that bore you to hell. What's interesting, and makes you slightly angry, is his explanation of consciousness. Perhaps that is because Churchland's argument seem amazingly simple. But, to think about it, it has to be simple. Otherwise it cannot be a reduction. If you want to argue against reductionism, you need to bring up some form of dualism. In fact, this is what Searle does. Searle's arguments are not directed agains neural networks. His favorate scapegoat is symbolic computation. But this is something researchers have done away with a long ago. I personally think Searle never really understood what neural nets are.
What's not really satisfactory are these: Some will find he never really defeated Nagel and Jackson. I should agree with those who think so. If ever he did, his argument lacked logical clearity or I am very dumb. He is not successful in constructing a model of consciousness, either. The problem is, he thinks he is. Like Newton did, and Euclid earlier, he tries to create a set of descriptive axioms to come to grip with consciousness. But unlike Euclid, Netwon, and Einstein (remember his two postulates), some of his axioms require a first-person perspective. (ref. pp. 213-214) For example, to verify that consciousness disappears in deep sleep, somebody obviously has to go to bed. However imprecise, MEG maybe used to detect conscious activities in a live brain. But there exists no 3rd-person method to verify consciousness is a single unified experience. Churchland has been successful in explaining a lot but I think we still have a long way to go. And his descriptive theory is not adequate.
Plus, there is a misprint in page 230 of the softcover edition. The "o%cial" should be read "official".
Regretfully Disappointed.......2000-06-08
Churchland is a great philosopher who has made many significant contributions to the study of the mind. Unfortunately, most of those contributions lie in his papers, other books, and works co-authored with his wife, Patricia Churchland. "The Engine of Reason..." is aimed for the 'popular science' crowd, and it is a wonderful introduction to vector coding and some introductory neuroscience. But it is surprisingly weak in philosophical arguments. It really reads like a light, scientific textbook, and the bulk of it consists of oversimplified explanations which rely too heavily on scientific findings that aren't thoroughly established yet. He is extremely unfair towards philosophers who aren't eliminative materialists (like Searle, Nagel, etc.), and he spends literally no time refuting their arguments. Instead he bullies the reader into believing that the above writers must hold some antiquated Cartesian view which relies too heavily on intuition. He knows he has science on his side and is rather insulting towards philosophers, making them look like idiotic armchair scientists. While unfortunately philosophers are notorious for that fault, they also ask some pretty good questions and make you think. Churchland does neither in this book. This book is a real good starter for vector coding and neuroscience. But for 'popular science' that's scientific but extremely philosophical, I haven't found anything yet that beats Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. For a good refutation of Searle, Nagel and the rest, read their own works and don't just listen to the brief overview Churchland gives.
Book Description
Paul Churchland has been viewed as a provocative, controversial philosopher of mind and science for over three decades. This collection offers an introduction to his work as well as a critique of some of his most famous philosophical positions, and includes contributions by established as well as promising young philosophers. It is intended to complement the growing literature on Churchland, focusing on his contributions in isolation from those of his wife and philosophical partner, Patricia Churchland, and his contributions to philosophy as distinquished from those he made to cognitive science.
Download Description
For over three decades, Paul Churchland has been a provocative and controversial philosopher of mind and of science. He is most famous as an advocate of 'eliminative materialism', whereby he suggests that our commonsense understanding of our own minds is radically defective and that the science of brain demonstrates this (just as an understanding of physics reveals that our commonsense understanding of a flat and motionless earth is similarly false). This collection offers an introduction to Churchland's work, as well as a critique of some of his most famous philosophical positions. Including contributions by both established and promising young philosophers, it is intended to complement the growing literature on Churchland, focusing on his contributions in isolation from those of his wife and philosophical partner, Patricia Churchland, as well as on his contributions to philosophy as distinguished from those to Cognitive Science.
Book Description
Paul M. and Patricia S. Churchland are towering figures in the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, and consciousness. This collection was prepared in the belief that the most useful and revealing of anyone's writings are often those shorter essays penned in conflict with or criticism of one's professional colleagues. The essays present the Churchlands' critical responses to a variety of philosophical positions advanced by some two dozen philosophical theorists. The book is divided into three parts: part I, Folk Psychology and Eliminative Materialism; part II, Meaning, Qualia, and Emotion: The Several Dimensions of Consciousness; and part III, the Philosophy of Science. V. S. Ramachandran and Rick Grush are coauthors on two of the essays.
Customer Reviews:
I've got to agree with Searle..........2000-10-02
If you are an eliminative materialist then you need help! Not that there aren't some interesting observations in this book - see the chapter with new data on "filling in" - but Churchland's tired example of Maxwell's discovery of electromagnetic waves only demonstrates how subjective the entire world of science really is. A more interesting example might be Maxwell's equations and how they relate to entropy, but I suspect that Churchland's actual knowledge of physics is more on the level of Betty Crocker's knowledge of microwaves...
As for neural nets: go read Perlovsky! I find it odd that Churchland, who loudly proclaims nets as the future of AI, doesn't appear to have read any of Perlovsky's papers; but I suspect he's too busy waving magnets in his living room generating EM waves.
Very good. Almost excellent........2000-05-16
A good collection of essays by recognized leaders in a burgeoning field of philosophy. Some are only useful if what the article is discussing is quite familiar to the reader. This holds in particular for some of the articles on qualia and the article on R. Penrose. It could also be said that the article on Dennett could have been marginally better if the last part, concerning his motivations, were snipped.
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