"Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain" by philosopher Patricia Churchland

[The Skeptic]

Thanks, I'll have to add this to my list. I just borrowed Pinker's How The Mind Works.

Hi,

I'm a psychology graduate, so since you mentioned that book I figured I'd throw some info out there regarding that book and how it compares to Churchland's views. Pinker subscribes to a view of the mind called the computational theory of mind, specifically, a view based on the idea that the mind consists of formal operations on lingua-formal representations in a language of thought. In addition, his view of the mind is that it consists of modules, an idea formulated by functionalist philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor and expanded upon by other philosophers and psychologists.

The Churchlands on the other hand (Patricia's husband Paul shares the same views) subscribe to a connectionist perspective based around parallel distributed processing. They reject the idea of a language of thought as being based in a misguided folk psychology. If you have the time or interest, there's a chapter in her classic book Neurophilosophy called "functionalist psychology" (where functionalist refers to the philosophy of mind from which Pinker's views originate, not the older school of psychology by the same name) where she criticizes that view of psychology. It would be a good counter-point to Pinker's book.

Patricia sees the mind as a computer too, but it's not a "software" running on the "hardware" of the brain as some cognitive psychologists have suggested (again, based in functionalism). For her, the mind-brain is an analog, not digital, computer that computes based on inputs into various neural networks where the information is processed in a sub-symbolic fashion.

I'd also recommend her husband Paul's books A Neurocomputational Perspective and Plato's Camera.