“
Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting.

Patricia Churchland (via errabundus)

(Something came to mind when I read this.  Here’s a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on eliminative materialism An interview with Patricia and Paul Churchland can be found here from NPR.)

I am sympathetic to the eliminative materialists desire for a more precise language that corresponds to our scientific understanding of reality.  However, I wonder if Patricia Churchland couldn’t have just said, “I’m upset, Paul.  Something is bothering me.” above and it not contain the exact same general meaning.  Either way we understand something is unbalanced in the organism that is Patricia Churchland, right?  In other words, there is a point to both statements that is not lost in either.

I am curious as to the connection between our propositional understandings in relation to our physiological claims and why they both tend to seek the same accomplishment in our discourse with both having the possibility of being asserted independently of knowing the other.  That is to say, I do not have to understand the physiological substrates of the organism to speak metaphorically about it, nor do I have to understand the metaphorical conceptualizing of it to fully understand the physiology.  I think there is a peculiar type of connection between the two that originates in the physical organism.  As to what it is I cannot say.  I’m not a neurologist.

Notes