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Abstract
The distinguished neuroscientist and Nobel laureate John Eccles is a modern proponent of dualism.3 Furthermore, Spinoza's predecessor Descartes propounded in Passions of the Soul (1649) an interactionist mind-body dualism, with the pineal gland posited as the locus of that interaction.4 Descartes's hypothetical "animal spirits" are the physiologic analogues of our neurotransmitters. [...]the reductive materialism advanced in the first chapter of Leviathan (1651) is far more consonant with the philosophy of modern neuropsychiatry than the theological monism of Spinoza.5 To the Editor: It was interesting to read the account of depression from a reductionist point of view in the same issue of the Journal in which a number of letters were published complaining that medicine has lost its heart to scientific objectivism. To Sperry, conscious phenomena are emergent, functional properties of brain processing that obey higher-order laws not yet existent at the level of their constituent material, neuronal, and electrophysiologic processes.1 An additional feature is that these higher-order brain processes have active, central roles as determinants in shaping the flow pattern of cerebral excitation.1 Sperry compares the emergent laws governing consciousness to a molecule that follows the lower-order chemical laws pertaining to molecules but, when it is part of a single cell, is obliged, with all of its parts and partners, to follow along a trail of events in time and space determined largely by the higherorder dynamics of the cell.1 If such a cell is broken up into its constituent parts, its unique organization is lost; therefore, it has not been and cannot be reduced to its parts.1 According to this model, thoughts and feelings cannot simply be reduced to brain physiology but rather serve as emergent properties, determining the form of an inner self that in turn is responsive to and can modulate lower-order processes.