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Patricia Churchland article:

Philosophy
Churchland first gained notoriety through her championing of eliminative materialism, a paradigm in the philosophy of mind which argues that commonsense, immediately intuitive, or "folk psychological" concepts such as thought, free will, and consciousness will need to be revised in a physically reductionistic way as neuroscientists uncover the mechanisms of brain function. In keeping with her eliminitavist perspective, Churchland's Neurophilosophy: Toward A Unified Science of the Mind-Brain forcefully argued that empirical facts about the brain must play a central role in philosophy of mind. Likewise, it argued that philosophy had significant contributions to make to neuroscience. Churchland has since been an important figure in the growing interface between neuroscience and philosophy, advocating for a "co-evolution" of the two disciplines. According to her, philosophers are increasingly realizing that to understand the mind one must understand the brain. More recently, Churchland's attention has moved to the ethical implications of neuroscientific discovery, a subject she considers in her latest work, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality.

Influences
Churchland has cited David Hume as an influence on her thinking, in contrast to Emmanuel Kant. She has also cited Willard van Orman Quine as a significant influence, beginning when she took a seminar on Quine in college. She has described her empirical approach to philosophy as "essentially continuing Quine's program." Many of her important influences are scientists, among them Francis Crick, who influenced much of her thinking on consciousness.

Scientific Work
In complement to her purely philosophical work, Churchland has also done significant work in theoretical neuroscience.

Biography
Great part in the TSN piece about how she felt about Oxonian analytic philosophy, "not very much gold in those hills" she says. Also she talks about Quine as an influence in this piece, and Francis Crick. Further there's a discussion of how she was the first of the pair to become interested in the relationship of neuroscience to philosophy, and that her husband subsequently joined in.

Also she served as Chair of UCSD's philosophy dept. from 2000-2007

Philosophy
Discussion of eliminative materialism, neurophilosophy and collaboration with husband Paul Churchland. Talk about her opinion of the is/ought distinction, source "Braintrust". Also might find useful stuff at Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader.

Other crap that might have a place/cut from the current version of the article
She was interviewed along with her husband Paul Churchland for the book Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore, 2006.

And some more sources:

Her opinion on Hume, Aristotle, the war on drugs, Sam Harris, morality, etc. Here she suggests that Hume would have liked her principles such as constraint satisfaction and so on.

More about her and Paul's background, philosophy in the New Yorker.

Philosophy bites: David Edmonds: "Pat Churchland.... is a well-known and contentious critic of folk psychology." 0:36-0:43. "She say that we can't approach folk psychology uncritically.  Folk psychology can be wrong.  As we learn more and more about the brain, we'll need to modify some of our concepts, and even eliminate them." 0:48-0:60. Churchland on eliminative materialism, how it is informed by the history of science. "One of the things you see in the history of science is a kind of progression" of ideas, with some concepts being thrown out or replaced over time. 1:30-. (2:55-3:25)  "The eliminativist part of the story was a prediction.  A prediction that certain concepts might be modified, developed, might even be eliminated as neuroscience progressed." (3:25-3:39)

The Partially Examined Life:

She defines eliminative materialism as the combination of a materialist hypothesis that concepts such as consciousness, memory beliefs, desires, motivations refer only to states of the physical brain, and the eliminativist prediction that certain of these concepts might need to be modified, developed, or even eliminated as neuroscience progresses.

Speakers
The master of ceremonies at the event was Roger Bingham, co-founder and director of The Science Network. The speakers were:


 * Lawrence Krauss, physicist
 * Steven Weinberg, physicist
 * Neil deGrasse Tyson, physicst


 * Carolyn Porco, planetary scientist


 * Pat Churchland, philosopher
 * Paul Churchland, philosopher
 * Steven Nadler, philosopher
 * Susan Neiman, philosopher
 * Loyal Rue, philosopher
 * James Woodward, philosopher


 * Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and writer
 * Francisco Ayala, evolutionary biologist
 * Joan Roughgarden, evolutionary biologist
 * Sir Harold Kroto, chemist
 * VS Ramachandran, neuroscientist
 * Terrence Sejnowski, neuroscientist and physicist
 * Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist


 * Scott Atran, anthropologist
 * Melvin Konner, anthropologist


 * Mahzarin Banaji, sociologist


 * Elizabeth Loftus, psychologist
 * Richard Sloan, psychologist


 * Ann Druyan, author
 * Sam Harris, author
 * Michael Shermer, author


 * Charles Harper, Senior Vice-President, John Templeton Foundation

Neutrino time-of-flight anomaly
On 23 September 2011, the OPERA Collaboration announced that neutrinos had been observed travelling from CERN in Geneva to the OPERA detector at faster-than-light speed. The particles were measured arriving at the detector by a factor of (v − c)/c = (2.28 ± 0.28 ± 0.30) (roughly 1 part in 40,000) prior to the time expected if they were travelling at lightspeed, at significance of 6.0 sigma (or $100 %$). In particle physics, the standard baseline for a discovery announcement is 5-sigma significance.

OPERA collaboration scientist Antonio Ereditato explained that the OPERA team has "not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement." James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN said on 22 September that the scientists are "inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements."

Previous experiments have not detected statistically significant faster-than-light motion; for instance, in 2007 Fermilab's MINOS collaboration reported results measuring the flight-time of neutrinos yielding a speed exceeding that of light by 1.8 sigma. Those measurements were consistent with neutrinos traveling at lightspeed.

In a much lower energy range, a limit of |v − c|/c < 2 was set by the observation of anti-neutrinos detected in connection with the SN 1987A supernova. Had neutrinos emitted by SN 1987A been travelling with a speed corresponding to the speed reported by the OPERA experiment, the particles would have arrived at Earth almost four years before light from the event did, while light from the supernova was in fact detected at roughly the same time as the neutrinos, consistent with the neutrinos travelling at the same speed as light. However, according to physicist John Beacom of Ohio State University, a comparison between SN 1987A and the OPERA anomaly is "meaningless without knowing how the speed might vary with neutrino energy, distance, etc."

Spokespeople for both Fermilab and the T2K experiment confirmed their intentions to test the OPERA result in coming months. Fermilab noted in reaction to the OPERA announcement that the detectors for the MINOS project are being upgraded, and new results are not expected until at least 2012.