Interview with Patricia Churchland

“Brian McLaughlin wrote the entry on consciousness for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Consciousness. He said the Churchlands don’t believe in consciousness. And it was so interesting because we had studiously avoided saying any such thing about consciousness. So I phoned Brian after I read this and I said, ‘Well, what the fuck?’”

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Are we addicted to addiction?

Addiction is a vague term and professionals usually prefer to talk about dependence. Still, whatever word you use, somewhere between champagne truffles and crack cocaine a line is crossed. But where?. Whether we have free will or not, there is an important difference between choosing to have a coffee and being consumed by the need to shoot heroin.

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Brain games

Be prepared for the information about to enter your brain via your retina to cause neuronal firings that will result in the raising of your eyebrows: a leading neuroscientist has declared that that we are not mere collections of atoms, nor just biological machines. According to Sebastian Seung, the self is a non-material entity. The 21st-century soul, however, is not some strange ghost in the machine. It’s information. You are, in effect, a piece of software running on the wetware in your skull…

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