Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain by Patricia Churchland (PDF)

Description

A trailblazing philosopher’s exploration of the latest brain science―and its ethical and practical implications. What happens when we accept that everything we feel and think stems not from an immaterial spirit but from electrical and chemical activity in our brains? In this thought-provoking narrative―drawn from professional expertise as well as personal life experiences―trailblazing neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland grounds the philosophy of mind in the essential ingredients of biology. She reflects with humor on how she came to harmonize science and philosophy, the mind and the brain, abstract ideals and daily life. Offering lucid explanations of the neural workings that underlie identity, she reveals how the latest research into consciousness, memory, and free will can help us reexamine enduring philosophical, ethical, and spiritual questions: What shapes our personalities? How do we account for near-death experiences? How do we make decisions? And why do we feel empathy for others? Recent scientific discoveries also provide insights into a fascinating range of real-world dilemmas―for example, whether an adolescent can be held responsible for his actions and whether a patient in a coma can be considered a self.Churchland appreciates that the brain-based understanding of the mind can unnerve even our greatest thinkers. At a conference she attended, a prominent philosopher cried out, “I hate the brain; I hate the brain!” But as Churchland shows, he need not feel this way. Accepting that our brains are the basis of who we are liberates us from the shackles of superstition. It allows us to take ourselves seriously as a product of evolved mechanisms, past experiences, and social influences. And it gives us hope that we can fix some grievous conditions, and when we cannot, we can at least understand them with compassion. 16 illustrations

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Marvelous…A trustworthy guide, [Churchland] gives comfort not by simplifying the research but by asking the right questions.” ― Jascha Hoffman, New York Times”Patricia Churchland may be the world’s leading neuro-philosopher today, but she also hails from humble beginnings in rural Canada. And that plainspoken farm girl, that second self, is on full display in this beautiful, unpretentious, enchanting exploration of mind, morals, and the meaning of life.” ― Owen Flanagan, author of The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World”It is hard to conceive of a better guide to this difficult terrain than the MacArthur-award-winning Ms. Churchland…[She] writes with surpassing clarity, elegance, humor and modesty.” ― Abigail Zuger, New York Times”Touching a Nerve is like a refreshing, bracing prairie breeze blowing away the cobwebs and obfuscation of so much philosophy and neuroscience. It is dazzlingly clear, down to earth, and often funny.” ― Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby: What Children”Bold, deeply insightful and biological to the core, with a warm and soothing touch of humanity.” ― Joaquín Fuster, author of The Prefrontal Cortex”Engagingly written, Touching a Nerve takes the reader on a spellbinding journey into the workings of the human brain and the relevance of neuroscience to our daily lives. It will interest anyone who thinks that good philosophy needs be grounded in good science or who is simply curious about how understanding the brain can help us make sense of the human condition. A terrific read!” ― David Livingstone Smith, author of Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others”Churchland creates a compelling narrative to further the idea of the self as brain… Through her examples, we can all come to understand our actions and intentions more clearly.” ― Moheb Costandi, Scientific American About the Author Patricia Churchland is the author of Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves. She is professor emerita of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The primary purpose of Churchland’s book [Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain], if we are to accept the title and initial chapters, is to show that our being, consciousness and experience are totally explained by processes occurring within the brain. This is to say that the brain generates all experience – normal experience of the world, spiritual experience, near death experience, etc. All is just matter and processes therein. This is all spoken of as an unquestionable certainty. Yet Churchland has, in actuality, nothing but an hypothesis. Yes, there is evidence, there are discoveries and findings, there are theories, but there is nothing that in any way proves this hypothesis. There is in fact a large list of problems, problems for which she has no solution, fails to address, or worse, of which she seems utterly unaware, problems whose ultimate solution, I will guarantee, will completely shatter her theoretical paradigm. Chalmers’ hard problem, for example, is simply dismissed, and I mean, dismissed – discarded in a cursory, short, almost contemptuous way. She offers not one shred of a solution. Yet she chides us, insufferably, arguing that as dissenters, it is all because we just can’t accept the progress of science, that we are in the same class as those that could not accept Galileo, or Copernicus, or innumerable others she takes pleasure listing. Spare us, please. In this she takes her place with Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) who chides us similarly as retrograde scientific troglodytes for doubting that his robots (using, apparently, the connectionist/neural network theories that Churchland would endorse) will eclipse us in intelligence by 2045, even unto having their own spiritual experiences.Let me list just some of the problems she ignores:1) The hard problem. Chalmers demanded that any model – whether neural network or computer/software/hardware architecture – explain the origin of the qualia of the perceived world – the browns of our coffee being stirred in its cup, the silver of the spoon, the whiteness of the cream. I have argued that this is but a partial statement of the problem, for the forms of the world – the coffee cup, the stirring spoon – all of which are defined dynamically, over time, are also not simply computable. In other words, it is the image of the external world that must be accounted for. You will find discusion of this – how the brain “generates” this image – no where in Churchland; she is utterly silent, as is her neuroscience on the issue. She has a discussion of vision in the book, but it is actually a discussion of cognitive maps, e.g., a rat’s cognitive map of his maze, my chickens’ cognitive map of my farm. This gives the illusion that she is talking about vision, but this subject is not the hard problem, it is not a theory of the origin of the image of the external world. Until this problem is solved, your paradigm is worth precisely this – nothing. We see why below.2) The memory or “storage” of experience. The image of the external world – the coffee cup with white cream being stirred on the kitchen table – is our experience of the world. If you have no theory of the origin of the image, that is, no theory of perception, you can have no theory of the storage of the experience; your theory is ungrounded for you do not know what experience is let alone how it can be “stored.” Churchland states with supreme confidence that all memory is stored in the neural connections of the brain. In actuality, the theory of memory has not one clue how experience is stored in the brain; there are only the vaguest of notions – perhaps some “elements” of an experience are stored. How these elements are re-assembled into the original experience is unanswered, nor is there a principled theory of the nature of or selection of these elements). Or perhaps some samples of a time extended event (say of a rotating cube, a stirring spoon, or a face biting a carrot) are stored, but there is no principled theory as to how such a selection of “samples” (snapshots) is made or how snapshots or samples are used reconstruct an event, in motion, over time. The theory that experience is stored in the brain, while considered a virtually unquestionable dogma, is, again, nothing but an hypothesis. The fact that a “konk” on the head which damages some neural structures and thus memories disappear is not proof that the experiences were stored in the brain. The konk could equally, for example, have destroyed the ability of the brain to now achieve the needed modulation patterns to access (as a reconstructive wave) the experiences in the universal holographic field in which the brain is embedded. This was Bergson’s argument (Matter and Memory, 1896). (If you want to see truly mind blowing problems of memory for current theory, I suggest also Gunther’s

⭐.) This notion, by the way, that destruction (or chemical modification) of neural structures destroys or changes consciousness, therefore “this proves that consciousness is generated by the brain,” is pervasive in the book. The concept that consciousness might require the intactness of, or certain precise functioning of, physical structures in the brain to express itself in this physical world – yes even for memory retrieval – is never considered.3) The problem of analogy. Hofstadter and Sander (Surfaces and Essences) have just spent an entire book showing that analogy is the absolute foundation of thought. If you have no theory of analogy, you have no theory of cognition. Period. They have argued that “analogy defines concepts (or categories or “features”).” This operation (of analogy) requires dynamic transformations – over a continuous, extended time – of “stored” experiences. Yes, there is that old experience problem. Connectionist (neural network) models and symbolic computer models exist for analogy – they are complete failures disguised as illusory successes. They assume the inverse, that the features define the analogy, and this strategy is in fact their only option. They will not be capable of handling the reality, for they cannot store experience, nor is their operative dynamic in a continuous, indivisible or non-differentiable flow of time.4) Explicit memory. A famous patient, H.M., after an operation in which his medial temporal lobes were removed, lost all explicit memory. He could work on a mirror tracing apparatus day after day, steadily improving his tracing ability (an implicit memory), yet had no memory the next day of the experimenters, the room, the apparatus, or of ever having practiced. There is no theory of the true difference between (conscious) explicit memory vs. implicit (unconscious) memory. There is supposedly an explicit “system,” but, with perfect symmetry to the hard problem, there is no understanding why this “system” should produce a conscious memory rather than yet another implicit one, i.e., why or how we have an (remembered) event now explicitly localized in time. I have argued (ref. above) that this system, involving a dynamic developmental trajectory requiring years, operates in a quite different model of time, a model in which current models of neural networks do not work, and that changes how we must think about the brain and consciousness. This is a very partial list. The solution to all of these, frankly, requires a new metaphysical structure, i.e., a new general way of thinking about space, time and matter (actually old, for Bergson proposed it, it has never been understood). This will transform the structure in which Churchland works. Physics – in quantum theory and its theoretical problems – obviously is already feeling the tremors preceding this change, a subject to which Churchland is studiously oblivious. She asks how consciousness (or “soul” as she likes to frame it) can possibly affect matter, for example, how can consciousness cause us to act. It would violate the conservation of energy. Issue settled. As if there is a settled theory on what either matter or energy is. But this mythical “settled theory” is the framework in which she constantly, implicitly works.The question of freewill is artfully transformed into one of “control structures,” i.e., neural structures in the brain that control or inhibit my poking a political opponent with a pitchfork. To her there is no question that there is free will for obviously we have all these control structures. Given the settled framework in which she works, a framework fully deterministic, a framework even Dennett accepts and struggles mightily to obscure by arguing we are “practically” free, one waits with baited breath for her to address this issue – how are the implications of this deterministic framework avoided? One waits… and waits. It amazingly never happens.Churchland hits many other subjects – war, religion, morality, values – all within this brain-based frame. Too much to assess here. Even yoga and its effects appear to be explained. Interesting. I just ran across this: I suspect Yogiraj Siddhanath [ […] ] might disagree. For laying out what a good brain-is-all theorist believes, three stars. But in all, I suspect Dr. Churchland is in for, yes, some unsettling.

⭐The author takes the time a trouble to offer balanced views of what we believe to be true (for example: we have souls, heaven and hell exist, there is life after death) and what actually is true (for example: the earth orbits the sun and not the other way around). She counsels readers to examine the ‘facts’ and not appeal to the great unknown and unknowable.One issue (the ‘paradox’ I refer to in the title) does puzzle me about the book though. For example, she presents arguments that it was folly for mankind to believe that the sun orbits the earth and had the right equipment (telescopes) been available, it would have been obvious that things were reversed: the earth orbits the sun. She presents similar arguments for what we once believed about the cause of disease before microorganisms were discovered with the aid of microscopes (she points out that there are still a few who believe that vaccinations are ‘bad’ when there is little evidence to support that belief). The puzzling issue is that she argues that souls, afterlife and all that ‘spiritual’ stuff can’t reasonably exist because ‘she’ has not seen any evidence. Isn’t this the same argument mankind made prior to telescopes and microscopes? The sun orbited the earth because we had no evidence to the contrary. This is puzzling. We have no evidence of anything ‘spiritual’ so it doesn’t exist. She is careful to say ‘in all probability’ though leaving a crack open, just in case. We had no evidence that Newton’s equations describing motion in a gravitational field were incomplete until Einstein showed us Relativity. We all learned from Newton that objects, independent of their mass, experience identical acceleration in a gravitational field, except, with Relativity, we now know they don’t (mass distorts the space-time fabric). Now we learn that quantum entanglement (Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’) is real. Who knows what we will learn next?Maybe the author is right about life after death, souls and all the ‘spiritual stuff’. However, her arguments are very weak and as a species we’ve been there: we dismiss things we don’t understand. I’m being a bit harsh with this statement because the author does make the point quite often that ‘we’ should keep our eyes open: find a way to measure, to validate, ask questions, don’t just defer to ‘blind faith’. Yet, it seems that she invites us to throw out all of spirituality with, in essence, no evidence. Lack of evidence isn’t evidence at all. Our judicial system knows this, for example, the only way you can prove you were ‘not’ somewhere is to prove that you were somewhere else. Thus, you cannot be ‘guilty’ solely because you have no alibi. Where would quantum entanglement be, or cosmic inflation if we proceeded along those lines?I would have found the book more robust if the ‘arguments’ in it were a little more ‘water tight’. It felt as if one set of rules were applied to what is now obvious (planetary orbits, micro-organisms) and another for spiritual things (souls and afterlife) that are not so obvious. I imagine one could argue the case that when there is no concrete, verifiable and reproducible evidence, one should keep an open mind and not jump to the most mystical conclusion as mankind seems to have a predilection for. I agree. Therefore, don’t argue that because there is a lack of evidence, spirituality can’t exists (notwithstanding the loophole I mentioned). This is like taking the following position: I observe the sun rising on one horizon and setting on the other. Therefore there is no evidence that the earth orbits the sun bringing us to conclude that therefore the sun must orbit the earth. Essentially, let’s admit that we don’t know what we don’t know.The book is worth reading, but as you read it, do keep in mind that there are two sets of rules being used and keep an open mind. Others have reported that the book is accessible in its style, and I agree it is. The author is clear and presents her ideas well. You might also want to contemplate what will happen when consciousness and intelligence appears in silicon (what I mean: we will one day be able to create a machine, a computer system that is self aware, conscious and intelligent). The author argues effectively that our brains, which are really electro-chemical bio-computers, are what makes us ‘us’. We are not far from what, in the industry, is called the ‘singularity’ (see references to Kurzweil for example) beyond which we do not see the impact (which is why it called a ‘singularity’). If we are what we are because of the circuitry in our brains and the chemistry those circuits are bathed in, then it stands to reason (just take a look at how quickly computing equipment has advanced in the last 50 years) that we will one day build a machine that has those properties. Interesting to contemplate, isn’t it?Enjoy the book! Good reading!

⭐Patricia Churchland writes exceedingly well and clearly about neuroscience. She makes it fascinating without resorting to wild speculation or provocative statements to jazz up the material, nor does she present opinion or wishful thinking as fact. Her research is impeccable and her book is, as they say, unputdownable. I don’t think neuroscience has ever been so compelling.

⭐A brilliant book that goes right past the Decartesian dualism of mind versus matter. Cartland is uncompromisingly scientific in her approach to brain research and its philosophical consequences. Yet she imbues relentless theorising with homely examples drawn from her life on a farm.Her outlook leaves no room for pie in the sky hopes but instead a clean air of realism.

⭐This is one of the most readable and well informed books on the subject of consciousness and our present understanding of neuroscience. Patricia Churchland reveals a very human and humane approach to a subject that is so often the victim of scientists and thinkers who believe they have the absolute truth in their hands without realising how easy it is to be utterly wrong. This is one of the few books on the subject of the self and the mind that did not fall into the trap of assuming almost everything is already understood.

⭐Very readable book on relation between brain mind and self.

⭐Loved it!

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