[b]Patricia Churchland
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. [/b]
Of course some things don’t really lend themselves to a “nature”.
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.
Either that or lead us to blows.
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.
Not for the “know-it-alls” here, right?
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.
Well, what do you know, another “general description”.
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.
Right of course.
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.
Absolutely important is my best guess.