Paul Churchland

 ( 1942 Births ) 

As of this February 2017, Churchland is recognised as Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where he earlier held the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy (through 2011),As of February 2017, the UCSD Philosophy webpage reports Richard J. Arneson as the Valtz Chair, and Arneson reports his having assumed that position in July, 2011. and continues to appear as a philosophy faculty member on the UCSD Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Cognitive Science and with the affiliated faculty of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation. As of February 2017, he is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Consciousness Studies of the Philosophy Department, Moscow State University.

Along with his wife, Churchland is a major proponent of eliminative materialism, the belief that

where by folk psychology is meant everyday mental concepts such as beliefs, feelings, and desires, which are viewed as theoretical constructs without coherent definition, and thus destined to be obviated by a scientific understanding of human nature. From the perspective of Zawidzki, Churchland's concept of eliminativism is suggested as early as his book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), with its most explicit formulation appearing in a Journal of Philosophy essay, "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes" (1981).

Churchland believes that beliefs are not ontologically real; that is, that a future, fully matured neuroscience is likely to have no need for "beliefs" (see propositional attitudes), in the same manner that modern science discarded such notions as legends or witchcraft. According to Churchland, such concepts will not merely be reduced to more finely grained explanation and retained as useful proximate levels of description, but will be strictly eliminated as wholly lacking in correspondence to precise objective phenomena, such as activation patterns across neural networks. He points out that the history of science has seen many posits that were considered as real entities: such as phlogiston; caloric; the luminiferous ether; and Vitalism that were thus eliminated.

Moreover, in The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul, Churchland suggests that consciousness might be explained in terms of a recurrent neural network with its hub in the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus, and feedback connections to all parts of the cortex. He acknowledges that this proposal will likely be found in error with regard to the neurological details, but states his belief that it is on the right track in its use of recurrent neural networks to account for consciousness. This has been described as a reductionism rather than eliminativist account of consciousness.

The Churchlands are the parents of two children, Mark Churchland and Anne Churchland, both of whom are neuroscientists.

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