Matter and Consciousness

Preface to the 1984 Edition

Preface to the 1984 Edition Philosophers usually write their books for other philosophers, and express parenthetical hopes that the book will prove useful to students and lay readers as well. Such hopes are usually vain. In hopeful contrast, I have written this book primarily and explicitly for people who are not professionals in philosophy, or in artificial intelligence, or in the neurosciences. It is the imagination of the general reader, and of the student, that I am here aiming to capture. I do indeed have subsidiary hopes that this compact volume will prove useful, as a comprehensive summary and source book, to my professional colleagues and to advanced graduate students. But I did not write this book for them. I have written it for newcomers to the philosophy of mind. This book was first conceived during a recent undergraduate course in the philosophy of mind, taught with the aid of familiar and long-standard texts. Since so much has happened in this field in the last fifteen years, those standard texts and anthologies are now badly dated. And while some good anthologies of very recent work are now available, they are too advanced and too expensive to be used easily with undergraduates. At the end of that course, I resolved to write a more suitable and more accessible text, free of fossilized issues, swift with historical summary, and bristling with the new developments. This volume is the result. xii Preface to the 1984 Edition It was written during the summer of 1982, mostly at our cottage retreat on Moose Lake in the Manitoba wilderness, where the unearthly loons voiced nightly amusement at my labors. And it was completed in mid-autumn at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, whose resident flock of Canada geese gave similar commentary. I have occasionally profited, however, from more substantial inspiration and instruction. I must thank first my friend and colleague , Larry Jordan, for taking me into his neurophysiology lab during 1981/82, for making me a part of his marathon Wednesday Experiments, and for being the agent of so much entertainment and priceless instruction. I must thank fellow philosophers Daniel Dennett and Stephen Stich for arranging my participation in a number of professional gatherings both in the United States and in England, and for all that they have taught me during our many pleasant and useful encounters. I am in debt to my friend and colleague Michael Stack, for what is now a decade of fruitful discussion concerning the mind and its place in nature. And I must thank above all my wife and professional colleague Patricia Smith Churchland, who has taught me more about the mind/ brain than any philosopher living. Finally, my thanks to Ken Warmbrod, Ned Block, Bob Richardson , Amélie Rorty, Cliff Hooker, and David Woodruff Smith for their various encouragements, and for their valuable criticisms of the initial draft. And I am forever indebted to the Institute for Advanced Study for the facilities with which to complete this work, and for the opportunity to launch several other more theoretical pursuits. Paul M. Churchland Princeton, NJ, 1983 ...