Neural Substrates of Thought and Behavior
Patricia S. Churchland was on Stephen Colbert's show the other day, flogging her forthcoming book: Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves . Among other things, she told Stephen that his brain was rather like that of a mouse, and that he didn't have a soul. I recall reading her book Neurophilosophy back when I was a student of artificial intelligence. It had a nice discussion of the fundamentals or neuroscience, some confused thoughts on relativity, and the first use of the word "consilience" that I recall. She and her husband Paul Churchland are exponents of a school of philosophy called "eliminative materialism". I have only a slight clue as to what that means, but I am generally sympathetic to the notion that our thoughts and behaviors have neural substrates. They apparently go a bit further and argue that "folk psychology" with its theories of mind, belief, and sensation is an obsolete theory about unreal objects, like the geocent...