Tired of stale philosophical debates, and vociferously opposed to "folk psychology," the author takes her readers on a tour of the landscape in both philosophy of mind and contemporary neuroscience. The central theme of the book, if it can be said to have but one, is: How can mental states be expressed in terms of neural processes? Churchland weighs the arguments against reducing mental states to physical states, and then to particular neural states, and finds them all wanting. She finds no difficulty in the notion that patterns of neural activity can represent, and that computations can be conceived as transitions in these neural patterns.
The book is divided into three sections. The first presents the basics of neuroscience for the philosopher, the second presents the basics of philosophy of mind for the neuroscientists, and the third explores some of those new possibilities. Even as recent a book as this ...
