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Publishers WeeklyThat the human mind is an entirely material entity has implications both unsettling and rich, according to this fascinating excursion into neuroscience and philosophy. Churchland (Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality), a U.C. San Diego "neurophilosopher" and MacArthur Fellow, presents a tour of cutting-edge brain research that grounds consciousness, personality, thoughts and feelings in neural structures, electrochemical signaling, hormones, and unconscious information processing. She applies these findings to some of philosophy's great moral, ontological, and metaphysical questions, asking how genetic and environmental influences affect violence and criminality, how altruism evolved in our mammalian forebears, how hormones and brain structure might determine sexuality, and how our sense of self and not-self emerges from the brain's internal communications; most subversively, she rejects the existence of the soul and insists that the brain's material mechanisms are the only valid explanations for mental phenomena.
About the Author
I am Professor of Philosophy (emerita) at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Research. As a philosopher, I focus on the interface between traditional philosophical questions (what is knowledge, where do values come from) and new developments in neuroscience and genetics. I call this sort of interfacing "Neurophilosophy" and my 2011 book (Braintrust) links morality with the brain and its evolution. My newest book is Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain (2013) . My husband, Paul Churchland and I work closely together, which is fortunate because at first, most philosophers dismissed our work as "not real philosophy". Mark Churchland, our son, and Anne Churchland, our daughter, are both neuroscientists (at Columbia and Cold Spring Harbor respectively) . Our golden retrievers, Duff and Farley, distribute a lot of fur about and swim whenever they get the chance. It is hard to say how smart they are, but they are excellent models for attachment and bonding.An extended interview can be found on The Science Network: www.tsn.org and on Philosophy Bites http://www.philosophybites.libsyn.comYou can see Pat interviewed on The Colbert Report January 23 2014.
