These are hard times for anyone who wishes to defend Cartesian dualism—the idea that our minds are somehow separate from the workings of the material world, that our thinking is not done in our brain. There is evidence from neuroscience—both regular neuroscience and its sexier children, cognitive neuroscience, affective neuroscience, and social neuroscience—making it abundantly clear that the brain really is the source of mental life. It’s long been known that damage to certain brain areas can impair capacities such as moral judgment and conscious experience, and over the last few decades
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