PChurchland

Personal

Bio

Patricia Smith Churchland is a Professor of Philosophy at UCSD.  Her Fields Of Specialization include: 
Philosophy of Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind, 
Philosophy of Science and Environmental Ethics. My research focuses on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy. 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. I explore the impact of scientific developments on our understanding of consciousness, the self, free will, decision making, ethics, learning, and religion and issues concerning the neurobiological basis of  consciousness, the self,  and free will, as well as on more technical questions concerning to what degree the nervous system is hierarchically organized, how the difficult issue of co-ordination and timing is managed by nervous systems, and what are the mechanisms for the perceptual phenomenon of filling-in.The central focus of my research has been the exploration and development of the hypothesis that the mind is the brain.  My first book, Neurophilosophy (1986), argued in detail for a co-evolution of psychology, philosophy and neuroscience to answer questions about how the mind represents, reasons, decides and perceives.  A major unanswered question in Neurophilosophy concerned the theoretical apparatus needed to bridge the gap between lower and higher levels of brain organization. I turned to this task in 1987, and began to collaborate with Terry Sejnowski on the book The Computational Brain (MIT 1992). I have been president of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and won a MacArthur Prize in 1991.

URL

http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/