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P S Churchland

Publications and source records attributed to P S Churchland.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

Recent work on consciousness: philosophical, theoretical, and empirical.

Broad-spectrum philosophical resistance to physicalist accounts of conscious awareness has condensed around a single and clearly identified line of argument. Philosophical analysis and criticism of that line of argument has also begun to crystallize. The nature of that criticism coheres with certain theoretical ideas from cognitive neuroscience that attempt to address both the existence and the contents of consciousness. Also, experimental evidence has recently begun to emerge that will serve both to constrain and to inspire such theorizing. The present article attempts to summarize the situation.

Awareness↗
PubMed1988

Perspectives on cognitive neuroscience.

How is it that we can perceive, learn and be aware of the world? The development of new techniques for studying large-scale brain activity, together with insights from computational modeling and a better understanding of cognitive processes, have opened the door for collaborative research that could lead to major advances in our understanding of ourselves.

Animals↗
PubMed1988

Computational neuroscience.

The ultimate aim of computational neuroscience is to explain how electrical and chemical signals are used in the brain to represent and process information. This goal is not new, but much has changed in the last decade. More is known now about the brain because of advances in neuroscience, more computing power is available for performing realistic simulations of neural systems, and new insights are available from the study of simplifying models of large networks of neurons. Brain models are being used to connect the microscopic level accessible by molecular and cellular techniques with the systems level accessible by the study of behavior.

Animals↗
PubMed1982

Mind-brain reduction: new light from the philosophy of science.

The discussion of the reduction of mental states to brain states is placed in the broader context of reduction in other scientific disciplines such as chemistry, physics and biology. This is important in achieving a perspective on what sort of business reduction is and in seeing that reductions are primarily transitions between theories and only derivatively relations between phenomena. It also reveals that though reducing theories sometimes absorb the old theory as largely correct, more often the old theory is substantially modified and revised and sometimes it is replaced outright. How much of the old theory survives in the reducing theory depends on its empirical integrity and whether its basic categories are empirically sound. The reduction of psychology to neuroscience is considered in this light and it is suggested that psychology may be substantially revised or even replaced by a reduction to neuroscience.

Brain↗