The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain [Paperback]

Paul M. Churchland (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262531429 | ISBN-13: 978-0262531429 | Publication Date: August 1, 1996

A new picture of the mind is emerging, and explanations now exist for what has so long seemed mysterious. This real understanding of how the biological brain works -- of how we work -- has generated a mood of excitement that is shared in a half-dozen intersecting disciplines. Philosopher Paul Churchland, who is widely known as a gifted teacher and expository writer, explains these scientific developments in a simple, authoritative, and pictorial fashion. He not only opens the door into the ongoing research of the neurobiological and connectionist communities but goes further, probing the social and moral dimensions of recent experimental results that assign consciousness to all but the very simplest forms of animals.In a fast-paced, entertaining narrative, replete with examples and numerous explanatory illustrations, Churchland brings together an exceptionally broad range of intellectual issues. He summarizes new results from neuroscience and recent work with artificial neural networks that together suggest a unified set of answers to questions about how the brain actually works; how it sustains a thinking, feeling, dreaming self; and how it sustains a self-conscious person.Churchland first explains the science -- the powerful role of vector coding in sensory representation and pattern recognition, artificial neural networks that imitate parts of the brain, recurrent networks, neural representation of the social world, and diagnostic technologies and therapies for the brain in trouble. He then explores the far-reaching consequences of the current neurocomputational understanding of mind for our philosophical convictions, and for our social, moral, legal, medical, and personal lives.Churchland's wry wit and skillful teaching style are evident throughout. He introduces the remarkable representational power of a single human brain, for instance, via a captivating brain/World-Trade-Tower TV screen analogy. "Who can be watching this pixilated show?" Churchland queries; the answer is a provocative "no one." And he has included a folded stereoscopic viewer, attached to the inside back cover of the book, that readers can use to participate directly in several revealing experiments concerning stereo vision.A Bradford Book

Editorial Reviews

Review

"... The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul [is] a veryimportant book full of tantalizing and astute observations andinsights about consciousness, thinking and thought. Its sweepencompasses morality, politics, the arts, education, penology,psychiatry and the very nature of freedom itself. This is a bookto be reckoned with." Los Angeles Times

"Paul Churchland's The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soulis an outstanding philosophical achievement, integrating artificialintelligence, brain neurology, cognitive psychology, ethnology,epistemology, scientific method, and even ethics and aesthetics,into an interlocking whole." W.V. Quine, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University

About the Author

Paul M. Churchland is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California at San Diego.

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (August 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262531429
• ISBN-13: 978-0262531429
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #804,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Regretfully Disappointed, June 7, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Paperback)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exciting and Eminently Readable, August 31, 2002

By 

Geoff Pynn (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Paperback)

I can't evaluate the neurobiology in the book since I'm no scientist, but Churchland's entirely accessible discussions of vector coding, feed-forward and recurrent networks, and the general landscape of contemporary neuroscience were exhilarating to read. They made me want to rush out and buy textbooks on the brain--a pretty impressive achievement, as far as I'm concerned.

Churchland's philosophical perspective, as anyone familiar with his work will expect, is thoroughly naturalistic. He has very little patience with anti-reductive arguments, and the three he discusses (Nagel's, Jackson's, and Searle's) receive straw-man treatments, though like everything else in the book, each treatment is good-natured and fairly humble. Readers already lacking tolerance for Searle will enjoy Churchland's caricature of The Rediscovery of Mind as a Betty Crocker cookbook.

Though his explicit discussion of anti-reductionism is sparse, the rest of Churchland's book serves as a demonstration of how much exciting work can be done if we simply ignore armchair naysaying. So I was more bothered by his lack of engagement with philosophers already on the elimintivist bandwagon. His discussion of Dennett, in particular, was cursory and frustrating. It seems to me that he conflates Dennett's distinct accounts of consciousness and content, needlessly (and in the relevant sense inaccurately) portraying Dennett as being a friend of robust human uniqueness.

But quibbles aside, the book is a fantastic read. Its optimistic view of the possibilities of computational neuroscience is infectious. Anyone without ideological blinders on will come away excited about the future of brain research.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great philosophy, effortless to read, August 12, 1999

By 

SeanFurl (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Paperback)

I've not come across a more sensible and lucidly written philosophy book. The author loves and deeply believes in science. He shows to my satisfaction that the hard sciences can answer many humanities questions or make them clearly pointless. The chapters on vector processing are still not quite as scientific as the author would like them to be, but the book overall has significantly improved my understanding and appreciation of human and mammalian minds. Since Amazon doesn't do it, here is the table of contents: (1) The little computer that could: the biological brain, (2) Sensory representation: the incredible power of vector coding, (3) Vector processing: how it works and why it is essential, (4) Artificial neural networks: imitating parts of the brain, (5) Recurrent networks: the conquest of time, (6) The neural representation of the social world, (7) The brain in trouble: cognitive dysfunction and mental illness, (8) The puzzle of consciousness, (9) Could an electronic machine be conscious?, (10) Consequences for language, science, politics and art, (11) Neurotechnology and human life. Looking at the Index at the back, the entry that occurs on the most pages in the book is "prototype" which in this book means pretty much the same as what some other authors call a paradigm.