Uploaded February 2009 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
In this clip, journalist Bill Moyers interviews philosopher Patricia Smith Churchland on how empirical research in the neurosciences could have radical implications for longstanding philosophical questions concerning the nature of knowledge, the self, and conscious experience.
She also discuses the limits of our imaginative abilities, and how they have historically failed us when we attempt to speculate concerning what types of phenomena will, in principle, never be adequately explained in solely materialistic terms. Consequently, she thinks we shouldn't take a failure of imagination as an insight into ontological necessity.
Next, she discusses her conversations with the Dalai Lama, his amazing openness to conceptual revision in the face of advancing empirical research, and how it is unlikely that new neurobiological facts will have a radical impact on our moral reasoning.
Finally, she addresses some of the religious implications of contemporary neurobiological research, and how (just like in the case of vitalism) the religious notion of an immaterial soul has become explanatorily impotent and unnecessary.
In this clip, journalist Bill Moyers interviews philosopher Patricia Smith Churchland on how empirical research in the neurosciences could have radical implications for longstanding philosophical questions concerning the nature of knowledge, the self, and conscious experience.
She also discuses the limits of our imaginative abilities, and how they have historically failed us when we attempt to speculate concerning what types of phenomena will, in principle, never be adequately explained in solely materialistic terms. Consequently, she thinks we shouldn't take a failure of imagination as an insight into ontological necessity.
Next, she discusses her conversations with the Dalai Lama, his amazing openness to conceptual revision in the face of advancing empirical research, and how it is unlikely that new neurobiological facts will have a radical impact on our moral reasoning.
Finally, she addresses some of the religious implications of contemporary neurobiological research, and how (just like in the case of vitalism) the religious notion of an immaterial soul has become explanatorily impotent and unnecessary.
