Patricia Churchland

This editorial presents a comprehensive analysis of the Journal of NeuroPhilosophy's digital performance and reader engagement over approximately four years, from its establishment through March 2026. Leveraging detailed analytics data encompassing user demographics, engagement metrics, content performance, search engine visibility, and technological access patterns, we examine the journal's growth trajectory, global reach, and academic influence. The analysis reveals that JNphi has successfully attracted 37,835 active users who generated 355,116 interactions, with particularly strong engagement from key regions including the United States, China, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Notable findings include exceptional reader engagement metrics from Turkey, Italy, and Iran, high visibility for articles addressing artificial intelligence, free will, and consciousness, and emerging traffic from AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. The journal demonstrates robust performance in direct and organic search traffic, with Google Scholar serving as a significant referral source—confirming JNphi's recognition within the academic community. This editorial celebrates these achievements while offering strategic reflections for continued growth and enhanced reader engagement in the evolving digital publishing landscape.

Part I begins with Patricia Churchland exploring the impact of social neuroscience on moral philosophy. She argues that the basic platform for morality is attachment and bonding, and the caring behavior motivated by such attachment—and that oxytocin, a neurohormone, is at the hub of attachment behavior in social mammals and probably birds. Not acting alone, oxytocin works with other hormones and neurotransmitters and circuitry adaptations. Among its many roles, oxytocin decreases the stress response, making possible the trusting and cooperative interactions typical of life in social mammals. Churchland also argues that learning local social practices depends on the reward system because in social animals approval brings pleasure and disapproval brings pain. Subcortical structures, she argues, are the key to acquiring social values, and quite a lot is known about how the reward system works. Acquiring social skills also involves generalizing from samples, so that learned exemplars can be applied to new circumstances.

Social psychologists have shown human decisions to be sensitive to numerous ordinary, possibly nonconscious, situational contingencies, motivating the view that control is largely illusory, and that our choices are largely governed by such external contingencies. Against this view is evidence that self-control and goal-maintenance are regularly displayed by humans and other animals, and evidence concerning neurobiological processes that support such control. Evolutionarily speaking, animals with a robust capacity to exercise control - both conscious and nonconscious - probably enjoyed a selective advantage. Counterbalancing data thus point to an account of control that sees an important role for nonconscious control in action and goal maintenance. We propose a conceptual model of control that encompasses such nonconscious control and links in-control behavior to neurobiological parameters.

What happens when we accept that everything we feel and think stems not from an immaterial spirit but from electrical and chemical activity in our brains? In this thought-provoking narrative―drawn from professional expertise as well as personal life experiences―trailblazing neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland grounds the philosophy of mind in the essential ingredients of biology. She reflects with humor on how she came to harmonize science and philosophy, the mind and the brain, abstract ideals and daily life. Offering lucid explanations of the neural workings that underlie identity, she reveals how the latest research into consciousness, memory, and free will can help us reexamine enduring philosophical, ethical, and spiritual questions: What shapes our personalities? How do we account for near-death experiences? How do we make decisions? And why do we feel empathy for others? Recent scientific discoveries also provide insights into a fascinating range of real-world dilemmas―for example, whether an adolescent can be held responsible for his actions and whether a patient in a coma can be considered a self.

Here is one way to portray the history of research on the visual system. It consists of a rivalry between those who discern the benchmarks of intelligence in visual perception, and those who seek to show how the appearance of intelligence can be stripped away to reveal the reality of essential stupidity. In the main the rivalry has been exciting and productive, as the two egg each other on to ever more extreme exertions; that is to exhibit demonstrations of ever more cunning ways in which stupid elements can be wired and assembled to yield smart looking results, and by reply, to exhibit demonstrations of ever more subtle and striking performances of the visual system which betoken intelligence and defy reduction by existing reductive hypotheses. The demonstrations of intelligence have typically come from behavioral experiments concerning, for example, illusory contours, and constancy in such things as size.perception and orientation perception.

What we humans call ethics or morality depends on four interlocking brain processes: caring. Learning local social practices and the ways of others – by positive and negative reinforcement, by imitation, by trial and error, by various kinds of conditioning, and by analogy. Recognition of others' psychological states. Problem-solving in a social context. These four broad capacities are not unique to humans, but are probably uniquely developed in human brains by virtue of the expansion of the prefrontal cortex.1.

Using the Gödel Incompleteness Result for leverage, Roger Penrose has argued that the mechanism for consciousness involves quantum gravitational phenomena, acting through microtubules in neurons. We show that this hypothesis is implausible. First, the Gödel Result does not imply that human thought is in fact non algorithmic. Second, whether or not non algorithmic quantum gravitational phenomena actually exist, and if they did how that could conceivably implicate microtubules, and if microtubules were involved, how that could conceivably implicate consciousness, is entirely speculative. Third, cytoplasmic ions such as calcium and sodium are almost certainly present in the microtubule pore, barring the quantum mechanical effects Penrose envisages. Finally, physiological evidence indicates that consciousness does not directly depend on microtubule properties in any case, rendering doubtful any theory according to which consciousness is generated in the microtubules

The study of morality is increasingly an interdisciplinary endeavor spanning the cognitive, social, and biological sciences. This article provides an overview and synthesis of recent work fields relevant to the scientific understanding of morality, with a focus on how moral judgment and behavior are rooted in the functioning, development, and evolution of the brain. It presents themes that have emerged from studies examining the cognitive processes involved in morality. It shows studies that directly investigate the neural substrates of morality using modern brain imaging techniques. A number of brain regions and systems are identified that appear to be essential for normal moral behavior. The article focuses on two clinical conditions: lesions to the prefrontal cortex and psychopathy. Furthermore, it discusses neuroendocrinology and evolutionary neurobiology—that is relevant to understanding the development of morality and concerns evolutionary history and functions of two neuropeptides, oxytocin and vasopressin, in the mammalian brain and their effects on behavior.

Using the Godel incompleteness result for leverage, Roger Penrose has argued that the mechanism for consciousness involves quantum gravitational phenomena, acting through microtubules in neurons. We show that this hypothesis is implausible. First the Godel result does not imply that human thought is in fact non-algorithmic. Second, whether or not non-algorithmic quantum gravitational phenomena actually exist, and if they did how that could conceivably implicate microtubules, and if microtubules were involved, how that could conceivably implicate consciousness, is entirely speculative. Third, cytoplasmic ions such as calcium and sodium are almost certainly present in the microtubule pore, barring the quantum-mechanical effects Penrose envisages. Finally, physiological evidence indicates that consciousness does not directly depend on microtubule properties in any case, rendering doubtful any theory according to which consciousness is generated in the microtubules.

Two very different insights motivate characterizing the brain as a computer. One depends on mathematical theory that defines computability in a highly abstract sense. Here the foundational idea is that of a Turing machine. Not an actual machine, the Turing machine is really a conceptual way of making the point that any well-defined function could be executed, step by step, according to simple 'if-you-are-in-state-P-and-have-input-Q-then-do-R' rules, given enough time (maybe infinite time) [see COMPUTATION]. Insofar as the brain is a device whose input and output can be characterized in terms of some mathematical function -- however complicated -- then in that very abstract sense, it can be mimicked by a Turning machine. Given what is known so far brains do seem to depend on cause-effect operations, and hence brains appear to be, in some formal sense, equivalent to a Turing machine [see CHURCH-TURING THESIS]. On its own, however, this reveals nothing at all of how the mind-brain actually works. The second insight depends on looking at the brain as a biological device that processes information from the environment to build complex representations that enable the brain to make predictions and select advantageous behaviors. Where necessary to avoid ambiguity, we will refer to the first notion of computation as.

Morality is often defined in opposition to the natural "instincts," or as a tool to keep those instincts in check. New findings in neuroscience, social psychology, animal behaviour, and anthropology have brought us back to the original Darwinian position that moral behaviour is continuous with the social behavior of animals, and most likely evolved to enhance the cooperativeness of society. In this view, morality is part of human nature rather than its opposite. This interdisciplinary volume debates the origin and working of human morality within the context of science as well as religion and philosophy. Experts from widely different backgrounds speculate how morality may have evolved, how it develops in the child, and what science can tell us about its working and origin. They also discuss how to deal with the age-old facts-versus-values debate, also known as the naturalistic fallacy. The implications of this exchange are enormous, as they may transform cherished views on if and why we are the only moral species.

De nos jours existe un extraordinaire engouement pour les sciences du cerveau qui captivent de plus en plus de penseurs. Des philosophes americains encouragent leurs pairs a s'initier aux neurosciences. Des hommes de science, conscients des enjeux metaphysiques inherents a leur domaine, invitent les philosophes a decouvrir les faits nouveaux apportes par les decouvertes sur le systeme nerveux. Il parait donc legitime que le philosophe soit concerne par les developpements recents des sciences du cerveau. Par la diversite des points de vus et des perspectives, le present recueil souhaite contribuer a eclairer, dans la mesure du possible, quelques-unes des questions inherentes aux interactions entre la philosophie et les neurosciences.