23 Quotes by Patricia Churchland

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.

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.

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.

Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead to the truth about these phenomena, not just to tidy things up a bit.

When philosophers try to understand consciousness, much of what they claim is not conceptual analysis at all, though it may be shopped under that description.