Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind
ISBN-10
0262530740
ISBN-13
9780262530743
Category
Philosophy
Pages
204
Language
English
Published
1988
Publisher
MIT Press
Author
Paul M. Churchland

Description

In "Matter and Consciousness," Paul Churchland clearly presents the advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism, reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical issues. Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism. "A Bradford Book"

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