Why were Paul and Patricia disappointed? Who or what do you think was responsible for their frustration?
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Answer:
t’s a little before six in the morning and quite cold on the beach. It’s low tide, and the sand is wet and hard-packed and stony. This early on a Sunday, there are often only two people here, on the California coast just north of San Diego. Patricia Churchland is throwing a rubber ball into the ocean for her two dogs (Fergus and Maxwell, golden retrievers) to fetch. Her husband, Paul Churchland, is standing next to her. They are both wearing heavy sweaters. They are in their early sixties. They are tall—she is five feet eight, he is six feet five. They come here every Sunday at dawn.
Pat is constantly in motion, throwing the ball, stepping backward, rubbing her hands together, walking forward in a vigorous, twitchy way. She has pale eyes, a sharp chin, and the crisp, alert look of someone who likes being outside in the cold. (Even when it is sunny, she looks as though she were enjoying a bracing wind.) She seems younger than she is: she has the anxious vitality of a person driven to prove herself—the first to jump off a bridge into freezing water. Paul stands heavily, his hands in his pockets. He is still. He nudges at a stone with his foot. He looks up and smiles at his wife’s back. He has a thick beard. He looks like the sort of person who finds it soothing to chop his own wood (and in fact he is that sort of person).
Paul and Pat met when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and they have been married for almost forty years. They are both Canadian; she grew up on a farm in the Okanagan Valley, he, in Vancouver. They have two children and four grandchildren. They live in Solana Beach, in a nineteen-sixties house with a small pool and a hot tub and an herb garden. Each summer, they migrate north to a tiny island off the Vancouver coast. Both are professors of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. They have been talking about philosophy together since they met, which is to say more or less since either of them encountered the subject. They test ideas on each other; they criticize each other’s work. At this point, they have shaped each other so profoundly and their ideas are so intertwined that it is impossible, even for them, to say where one ends and the other begins. Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person. Some of their theories are quite radical, and at the start of their careers the Churchlands were not always taken seriously: sometimes their ideas were thought silly, sometimes repugnant, verging on immoral. In those days, they formed a habit of thinking of themselves as isolates aligned against a hostile world, and although they are now both well established in their field, the habit lingers.
“For the first twenty-five years of our career, Pat and I wrote only one paper together,” Paul says, “partly because we wanted to avoid—”
“We wrote more than that,” Pat says.
“Together? I thought ‘Stalking the Wild Epistemic Engine’ was the first.”
“There was ‘Functionalism, Intentionality, and Whatnot.’ ”
“O.K., so there’s two. In the early stages, when Pat wrote her papers she said, ‘Paul, you really had a lot of input into this, should we put your name on it?’ I’d say, ‘No, I don’t want people saying Pat’s sailing on Paul’s coattails.’ ”
The guiding obsession of their professional lives is an ancient philosophical puzzle, the mind-body problem: the problem of how to understand the relationship between conscious experience and the brain. Are they different stuffs: the mind a kind of spirit, the brain, flesh? Or are they the same stuff, their seeming difference just a peculiarly intractable illusion? And if they are the same stuff, if the mind is the brain, how can we comprehend that fact? What can it possibly mean to say that my experience of seeing blue is the same thing as a clump of tissue and membrane and salty liquid?
Think of some evanescent emotion—apprehension mixed with conceit, say. Then think, That feeling and that mass of wet tissue—same thing. Or think of the way a door shutting sounds to you, which is private, inaccessible to anyone else, and couldn’t exist without you conscious and listening; that and the firing of cells in your brain, which any neuroscientist can readily detect without your coöperation—same thing. The terms don’t match, they don’t make sense together, any more than it makes sense to ask how many words you can fit in a truck. That is the problem.
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