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,… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
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… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
Studies of decision-making in the monkey, where activity of single neurons in parietal cortex is recorded, you can see a lot about the time-accuracy… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
It is important to understand that while oxytocin may be the hub of the evolution of the social brain in mammals, it is part… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
It seems probable that humans have been on the planet, with much the same brain, for about 250,000 years. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
Remember, in the heyday of vitalism, people said that when all the data are in about cells and how they work, we will still… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
Suppression of impulses that would put you in danger is obviously an important neurobiological function. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
Early studies of sleep and dreaming were crucially dependent on waking subjects up during sleep to find out whether they are dreaming or not.… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
When that theory is isolated from known facts, it is likely not to be productive. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
I used to suspect that in the brain, time is its own representation. I now think the problem is so much more complicated. Initially… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
When philosophers try to understand consciousness, much of what they claim is not conceptual analysis at all, though it may be shopped under that… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share
