Patricia Churchland.LUIS GRANENA
Patricia Churchland, one of the world's leading experts on neurophilosophy, arrives for the appointment after a busy morning on the phone with other colleagues.
Noam Chomsky had published an essay in
The New York Times
about the weaknesses of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence tool.
Churchland herself (Oliver, Canada, 79 years old) exposes her criticism.
“Your limitations are not the amount of information you can handle, but rather having goals, drive, or concerns.
And probably many aspects of moral decision making or learning.
It lacks what all mammals basically have, which is the ability to care for others," says the emeritus professor at the University of California at San Diego.
In his most recent book,
Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition
(2019), Churchland addressed how biological knowledge of the brain explains that we are conscious beings.
Humans share the way our nervous systems are wired, but our opinions of right and wrong can differ beyond our experience.
Years before, the scientist had already set herself the goal of building a bridge between what is the mind and our brain.
In
The Moral Brain
, published in Spanish in 2012, Churchland talks about the importance of oxytocin, the molecule that is crucial for maintaining blood pressure and fluid balance.
But not only.
It has also been associated with trust, tolerance of others, and its ability to reduce fear.
More information
Our brain is not like a computer
Churchland grew up in Canada, on a farm in British Columbia.
There was no television in his house.
The main entertainment in the small community of less than 4,000 people in western Canada was the conversations between her father, a farmer who also edited a small newspaper, and her mother, a devoted nurse.
None had finished high school, but they were curious and asked big questions about the environment, life, and religion.
Patricia came to college wanting to be a lawyer, but in her early years she became interested in philosophy.
She thought that if we want to understand the nature of knowledge and memory, we must understand the brain.
And that she was going to find a lot of people at the university who were worried about the same thing.
"Of course it wasn't," laughs Churchland.
In Pittsburgh, where she specialized, she found a partner who had the same curiosity, as well as a scientific and engineering background.
Her name was Paul Churchland, who is her husband today and one of the leaders in the field of neurophilosophy along with Patricia.
At the University of Manitoba, where she arrived to take charge of her first professorship, Patricia Churchland witnessed a scene carried out by a former dean.
An older guy, very distinguished, who began to speak for a few minutes when suddenly, and without warning, he began to cry.
She cried in the most horrible way.
She suddenly she stopped.
“I was very interested in all this when the professor said: 'I'm sorry, I suffered a blow to the brain stem and suddenly the circuit that causes crying is stimulated.
I look sad, but I'm not,” recalls Churchland, who was struck by how a physical reaction was devoid of feeling.
That scene was decisive.
From there, Churchland began taking the same classes as first-year medical students.
She studied anatomy and dissected a human brain to learn about neurons and synapses.
The experience helped him shape
Neurophilosophy
, the pioneering book that he published in 1986 and in which he dissected the scientific news on brain functions, and which has been decisive for the discipline.
In
Descartes' error
(1994), Antonio Damasio, a renowned neuroscientist, talks about a common phenomenon among patients with brain injuries.
Many of them consider that their symptoms are affectations to their conscious being, when this is not the case.
In his work, Damasio cites the work of the Churchlands as proof.
The revolutions that Churchland foresaw almost 40 years ago are already underway.
The first is optogenetics, a process discovered by Karl Deisseroth, a professor of Bioengineering at Stanford, which has made it possible to manipulate the behavior of mice through light stimuli sent to the brain.
"He has proven that we can do something that we knew we needed in neuroscience: find out what a population of cells does," says the academic.
The magic of the brain is not in individual cells, but in groups.
“The idea that the Earth is round or that it is raining outside is represented in them.
But without a technique to access these populations it was hard to know,” she asserts.
The other front is that of neural networks, an artificial intelligence made up of algorithms and mathematical formulas that emulate human thought.
Networks have given science more accurate mathematical models to project hundreds of millions of parameters, similar to human cells (in the case of ChatGPT it is billions of parameters).
"It is not very clear what will come out of the union between neuroscience and neural networks, but it will be something very different from what scientists were studying 20 years ago."
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