Neuroscience and the Soul Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion

Professor Roger Scruton gives a talk for the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion on the 21st October, 2010. Patricia Churchland argued that 'folk psychology , with its everyday concepts of belief, desire, perception and thought, and its idea of the 'mind' as an individual entity in which all these processes occur, is a kind of explanatory science, effective in its way, but with obscure and empirically empty theoretical terms. It is destined to be replaced by a better science of human behaviour, and that science will be the science of the brain and the nervous system. Advances in brain physiology and the accumulation of evidence from brain-scans etc have given some credibility to Churchland's conjecture, and the attempt to meld neuroscience with the 'cognitive science' view of the brain and its functions has radically revised our picture of mental processes. Should we go along with this revision? Is folk psychology simply a proto-science? Should we adopt the view that the brain is the true locus of our mental life and the thing to which we are referring when we describe what we think, decide or feel? Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/