Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Churchland is a great philosopher who has made many significant contributions to the study of the mind. Unfortunately, most of those contributions lie in his papers, other books, and works co-authored with his wife, Patricia Churchland."The Engine of Reason..." is aimed for the 'popular science' crowd, and it is a wonderful introduction to vector coding and some introductory neuroscience. But it is surprisingly weak in philosophical arguments. It really reads like a light, scientific textbook, and the bulk of it consists of oversimplified explanations which rely too heavily on scientific findings that aren't thoroughly established yet. He is extremely unfair towards philosophers who aren't eliminative materialists (like Searle, Nagel, etc.), and he spends literally no time refuting their arguments. Instead he bullies the reader into believing that the above writers must hold some antiquated Cartesian view which relies too heavily on intuition. He knows he has science on his side and is rather insulting towards philosophers, making them look like idiotic armchair scientists. While unfortunately philosophers are notorious for that fault, they also ask some pretty good questions and make you think. Churchland does neither in this book.This book is a real good starter for vector coding and neuroscience. But for 'popular science' that's scientific but extremely philosophical, I haven't found anything yet that beats Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. For a good refutation of Searle, Nagel and the rest, read their own works and don't just listen to the brief overview Churchland gives.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Bradford Books)
A new picture of the mind is emerging, and explanations now exist forwhat has so long seemed mysterious. This real understanding of how the biologicalbrain works -- of how we work -- has generated a mood of excitement that is sharedin a half-dozen intersecting disciplines. Philosopher Paul Churchland, who is widelyknown as a gifted teacher and expository writer, explains these scientificdevelopments in a simple, authoritative, and pictorial fashion. He not only opensthe door into the ongoing research of the neurobiological and connectionistcommunities but goes further, probing the social and moral dimensions of recentexperimental results that assign consciousness to all but the very simplest forms ofanimals.In a fast-paced, entertaining narrative, replete with examples and numerousexplanatory illustrations, Churchland brings together an exceptionally broad rangeof intellectual issues. He summarizes new results from neuroscience and recent workwith artificial neural networks that together suggest a unified set of answers toquestions about how the brain actually works; how it sustains a thinking, feeling,dreaming self; and how it sustains a self-conscious person.Churchland first explainsthe science -- the powerful role of vector coding in sensory representation andpattern recognition, artificial neural networks that imitate parts of the brain,recurrent networks, neural representation of the social world, and diagnostictechnologies and therapies for the brain in trouble. He then explores thefar-reaching consequences of the current neurocomputational understanding of mindfor our philosophical convictions, and for our social, moral, legal, medical, andpersonal lives.Churchland's wry wit and skillful teaching style are evidentthroughout. He introduces the remarkable representational power of a single humanbrain, for instance, via a captivating brain/World-Trade-Tower TV screen analogy."Who can be watching this pixilated show?" Churchland queries; the answer is aprovocative "no one." And he has included a folded stereoscopic viewer, attached tothe inside back cover of the book, that readers can use to participate directly inseveral revealing experiments concerning stereo vision.A Bradford Book
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