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. that it is the brain, rather than some nonphysical stuff. Although he was trained, as Pat was, in ordinary language philosophy, by the time he graduated he also was beginning to feel that that sort of philosophy was not for him. They are also central figures in the philosophical stance known as eliminative materialism. All at once, Hugh realizes that what he had been told were inscrutable religious metaphors were in fact true: the Ship is not the whole universe after all but merely a thing inside it, and it is actually making some sort of journey. In one way, it shouldnt be a surprise, I suppose, if you think that the mind is the brain. He invited her out to the Salk Institute and, on hearing that she had a husband who was also interested in these things, invited me to come out, too. PATRICIA SMITH CHURCHLAND. Very innocent, very free. But of course your decisions arent like that. Science is not the whole of the world, and there are many ways to wisdom that dont necessarily involve science. I think its better at the end of the day to be a realist than to be romantically wishing for a soul. It might turn out, for instance, that it would make more sense, brain-wise, to group beliefs about cheese with fear of cheese and craving for dairy rather than with beliefs about life after death., Mental life was something we knew very little about, and when something was imperfectly understood it was quite likely that we would define its structure imperfectly, too. The systematic phenomenology-denial within the works of Paul and Patricia Churchland is critiqued as to its coherence with the known elelmentary physics and physiology of perception. The purpose of this exercise, Nagel explained, was to demonstrate that, however impossible it might be for humans to imagine, it was very likely that there was something it was like to be a bat, and that thing, that set of factsthe bats intimate experience, its point of view, its consciousnesscould not be translated into the sort of objective language that another creature could understand. Some philosophers think that we will never solve this problemthat our two thousand years of trying and failing indicate that its likely we are no more capable of doing so than a goat can do algebra. It is so exciting to think about revolutions in science leading to revolutions in thought, and even in what seems, to the uninitiated, to be raw feeling, that, by comparison, old words and old sentiments seem dull indeed. In the past, it seemed obvious that mind and matter were not the same stuff; the only question was whether they were connected.