Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness

Churchland, Paul M.
Matter and Consciousness.
London,, The MIT Press, a Bradford Book, 1992, 4th revised edition,Paperback. 184 pp. Yellow and green highlighting

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 artificialintelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophicalissues.

Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this researchbears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and theirimplementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform somecognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Mostsignificant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to thereductive and the eliminative versions of materialism.