Many mammals and birds have systems for strong self-control, and it is not difficult to see why such systems were advantageous and were selected for. Biding your time, deferring gratification, staying still, foregoing sex for safety, and so forth, is essential in getting food, in surviving, and in successful reproduction.

Patricia Churchland

Brains are not magical; they are causal machines.

Patricia Churchland

machines brain

Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was the software, not the hardware, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.

Patricia Churchland

understanding mind brain

I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem.

Patricia Churchland

progress problem done

If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out.

Patricia Churchland

phenomenon giving-up missing

Being engaged in some way for the good of the community, whatever that community, is a factor in a meaningful life. We long to belong, and belonging and caring anchors our sense of place in the universe.

Patricia Churchland

atheist caring meaningful

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.

Patricia Churchland

significant humility

It seems that the brain has a "small world" architecture - or at least the cortex does. Everything can connect to everything else in a few synaptic steps.

Patricia Churchland

doe brain world

When that theory is isolated from known facts, it is likely not to be productive.

Patricia Churchland

isolated theory facts

Knowing about the neurobiological and evolutionary basis for social behavior can soften the arrogance and self-righteousness that often attends discussions of morality. It may help us all to think a little more carefully and rationally.

Patricia Churchland

knowing self thinking

If you want to understand the nature of something, to find out the truth, that is one thing. If you want to play semantics, make up wild thought 'experiments', that is another thing. I am not so interested in the latter, though I do appreciate that it can be fun, however unproductive.

Patricia Churchland

appreciate play fun

If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

Patricia Churchland

psychology alive world

In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen.

Patricia Churchland

levels states brain

I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, consciousness, the self, the origin of values, and so forth.

Patricia Churchland

assumption analysis self

It is surely important that the differences between coma, deep sleep, being under anesthesia, on the one hand, and being alert on the other, all involve changes in the brain.

Patricia Churchland

differences sleep hands

Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive.

Patricia Churchland

progress understanding knowing

The neuroscience of consciousness is not going to stop in its tracks because some philosophers guesses that project cannot be productive.

Patricia Churchland

philosopher track consciousness

It seems probable that humans have been on the planet, with much the same brain, for about 250,000 years.

Patricia Churchland

planets brain years

Suppression of impulses that would put you in danger is obviously an important neurobiological function.

Patricia Churchland

function important danger

I had no idea what philosophy was until I went to college at UBC. I first read Hume and Plato, so naturally I was under the misapprehension that philosophers are trying to figure out what is true, and that contemporary philosophers are mainly trying to figure out what is true about the mind. Of course Hume and Plato were trying to do that, hence my misapprehension.

Patricia Churchland

plato college philosophy

Remember, in the heyday of vitalism, people said that when all the data are in about cells and how they work, we will still know nothing about the life force - about the basic difference between being alive and not being alive.

Patricia Churchland

data differences cells