In praise of dualism

摘要

Time flies, and it seems only yesterday that the twin bastions of genetics and neuroscience were on the brink of resolving the fundamental questions of "being human". "The search for the holy grail of who we are has now reached its culminating phase," observed Walter Gilbert of Harvard University at the launch of the Human Genome Project in 1991. And similarly neuroscience, revolutionised by the capacity of PET scanning techniques to observe for the first time the brain "in action", promised to clarify the physical basis of the human mind, thinking, memorising, perceiving and interpreting the world "out there".