Abstract
This chapter relates to a philosophy that has been integral with my intellectual life since my early years as a medical student. I had been confronted by an irreligious philosophy of monist-materialism that I could not accept. In my wide reading of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the present, I had come to the dualist philosophy of Descartes with his res externa and res cogitans. It gave a secure status to the human soul or self, but his interaction story was completely erroneous. In fact from my reading of philosophy I discovered a pervasive ignorance of the brain at the subtle level at which it could relate to conscious experiences, for example, in neurology. So I decided to concentrate my studies on the brain. My initial success was to go in 1925 from Melbourne to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to work with the greatest neuroscientist of the age, Sir Charles Sherrington.
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Eccles, J.C. (1994). Dualist-interactionism—My Story. In: How the SELF Controls Its BRAIN. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-49224-2_2
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