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Is Neuroscience Relevant to Philosophy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Patricia Smith Churchland
Patricia Smith Churchland*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA92093, U.S.A.
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Extract

Many questions concerning the nature of the mind have remained intractable since their first systematic discussion by the ancient Greeks. What is the nature of knowledge, and how is it possible to represent the world? What are consciousness and free will? What is the self and how is it that some organisms are more intelligent than others? Since it is now overwhelmingly evident that these are phenomena of the physical brain, it is not surprising that an established empirical and theoretical foundation in this domain has eluded us for so long. For in order to understand what we are and how we work, we must understand the brain and how it works. Yet the brain is exceedingly difficult to study, and research on any significant scale is critically dependent on advanced technology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 16: Canadian Philosophers — Celebrating Twenty Years of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 1990 , pp. 323 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1990

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References

1 See, for example, E. Hildreth and C. Koch, ‘The Analysis of Visual Motion: From Computational Theory to Neuronal Mechanisms,’ Annual Review of Neuroscience 10 (1987) 477-534.

2 See S. Zucker, A. Dobbins, and L. Iverson, ‘Two Stages of Curve Detection Suggests Two Styles of Visual Computation,’ Neural Computation 1 (1989) 68-81.

3 See, for example, D. Schacter, ‘The Psychology of Memory,’ and W. Hirst, ‘The Psychology of Attention,’ both in J. LeDoux and W. Hirst, eds., Mind and Brain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986); on vision, see V. Ramachandran, ‘Perceiving Shape From Shading,’ Scientific American 259 (1988) 76-83.

4 See S. Lehky and T. Sejnowski, ‘Neural Network Model for the Representation of Surface Curvature from Images of Shaded Surfaces,’ in J. Lund, ed., Organizing Principles of Sensory Processing (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988); P.S. Churchland and T. Sejnowski, ‘Neural Representations and Neural Computations,’ in L. Nadel, L. Cooper, P. Culicover and R.M. Harnish, eds., Neural Connection Mental Computations (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1988) 15-48.

5 See M. Posner, S. Petersen, P. Fox, and M. Raichle, ‘Localization of Cognitive Operations in the Human Brain,’ Science 240 (1988) 1627-31.

6 C. Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985)

7 J.A. Fodor, Language of Thought (New York: Crowell 1975)

8 F. Jacob, The Actual and the Possible (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press 1982)

9 For a thumbnail sketch, see T.J. Sejnowski and P.S. Churchland, ‘Brain and Cognition,’ in M. Posner, ed., Foundations of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1989).

10 For a very readable account, see M. Livingstone, ‘Art, Illusion, and the Visual System,’ Scientific American 258 (1988) 78-85; for an excellent and philosophically insightful introduction to the neurophysiology of vision, see D. Hubel, Eye, Brain and Vision (New York: W.H. Freeman 1988).

11 D. Sagi and B. Julez, “'Where” and “What” in Vision,’ Science 228 (1985) 1217-19

12 See A. Damasio, T. Yamada, H. Damasio, J. Corbett and J. McKee, ‘Central Achromatopsia: Behavioral, Anatomica, and Physiologic Aspects,’ Neurology 30 (1980) 1064-71.

13 See C. Lu and D.H. Fender, ‘The Interaction of Color and Luminance in Stereoscopic Vision,’ Investigative Opthamology 11 (1972) 482-90.

14 See J. Zihl and D. Von Cramon, ‘The Contribution of the “Second” Visual System in Directed Visual Attention in Man,’ Brain 102 (1979) 835-56.

15 For example, R. Descartes, Les Passions de L'ame, trans. Haldane and Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1911); R. Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986).

16 For example, J.C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain, Part Two (Berlin: Springer 1977).

17 P.M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1988)

18 See also P.S. Churchland, ‘Reduction and the Neurobiological Basis of Consciousness,’ in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988).

19 See J .A. Hobson, R. Lydic, and H.A. Baghdoyan, ‘Evolving Concepts of Sleep Cycle Generation: From Brain Centers to Neuronal Populations,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1986) 371-448. For a very readable and beautiful introduction, see J.A. Hobson, Sleep (New York: W.H. Freeman 1989).

20 T. Early, E.M. Reiman, M.E. Raichle, and E.L. Spitznagel, ‘Left Globus Pallidus Abnormality in Never-Medicated Patients with Schizophrenia,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 84 (1987) 561-3.

21 The classic work here has been done by Desimone and his colleagues. See for example, H. Spitzer, R. Desimone, and J. Moran, ‘Increased Attention Enhances Both Behavioral and Neuronal Performance,’ Science 240 (1988) 338-40.

22 G. Goldberg, ‘Supplementary Motor Area Structure and Function: Review and Hypotheses,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (1985) 567-615.

23 For review papers, see L.R. Squire, ‘Memory: Neural Organization and Behavior,’ Handbook of Physiology-The Nervous System, J.M. Brookhart and U.B. Mountcastle, eds. (Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Society 1987), 295-371; M. Mishkin, and T. Appenzeller, The Anatomy of Memory,’ Scientific American 256 (1987) 80-9; for a fascinating discussion of a clinical case, see A. Damasio, P. Eslinger, H. Damasio, G. Van Hoesen, S. Cornell, ‘Multimodal Amnesic Syndrome Following Bilateral Temporal and Basal Forebrain Damage,’ Archives of Neurology 42 (1985) 252-9.

24 G. Collingridge and T. Bliss, ‘NMDA Receptor-Their Role in Long-Term Potentiation,’ Trends in Neurosciences 10 (1987) 288-93

25 D.O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (New York: Wiley 1949); for neurophysiological results showing Hebbian connections, see T. Brown, A. Ganong, E. Kariss and C. Keenan, ‘Hebbian Synapses-Computations and Biophysical Mechanisms,’ Annual Review of Neuroscience 11 (1989) 475-511

26 P. Stanton and T. Sejnowski, ‘Associative Long-Term Depression in the Hippocampus Induced by Hebbian Covariance,’ Nature 339 (1989) 215-18

27 Fodor, Language of Thought (New York: Crowell 1975)

28 I explored this question in the last chapter of my Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1986).

29 Representations by Error Propagation,’ in D. Rumelhart and J. McClelland, eds., Parallel Distributed Processing Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1986) 318-62. For a very impressive example of network learning, see T.J. Sejnowski and C.R. Rosenberg, ‘Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text,’ Complex Systems 1 (1987) 145-68. For an example in vision that has been very difficult to approach using symbol-manipulation but which is quite successful using a network architecture, see S.R. Lehky and T.J. Sejnowski, ‘Network Model of Sahpe-from Shading: Neural Function Arises from both Receptive and Projective Fields,’ Nature 333 (1988) 452-4. For some philosophical applications of network models, see P.M. Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1989).

30 A.I. Selverston and M. Moulins, ‘Oscillatory Neural Networks,’ Annual Review of Physiology 47 (1985) 29-48; for a view of the goals and strategies of computational neuroscience, see P.S. Churchland, C. Koch and T.J. Sejnowski, ‘What is Computational Neuroscience?’ in E. Schwartz, ed., Computational Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1990).

31 See my Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1986); also P.M. Churchland, The Neurocomputational Perspective (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1989).

32 See T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1962); P.S. Churchland and T.J. Sejnowski, ‘A Perspective on Cognitive Neuroscience,’ Science 242 (1989) 741-5.