Patricia Churchland Quotes
It is surely important that the differences between coma, deep sleep, being under anesthesia, on the one hand, and being alert on the other, all involve changes in the brain.
Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.
It seems that the brain has a "small world" architecture - or at least the cortex does. Everything can connect to everything else in a few synaptic steps.
Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive.
It seems probable that humans have been on the planet, with much the same brain, for about 250,000 years.
If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out.
In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen.
Suppression of impulses that would put you in danger is obviously an important neurobiological function.
I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem.
When that theory is isolated from known facts, it is likely not to be productive.
When philosophers try to understand consciousness, much of what they claim is not conceptual analysis at all, though it may be shopped under that description.
Even philosophers who did not mind psychology, claimed the brain was irrelevant because it was the hardware, and we only need to know about the software.
The neuroscience of consciousness is not going to stop in its tracks because some philosophers guesses that project cannot be productive.
Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.
Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths.
