Is Cartesian dualism dead ?

For many, Cartesian dualism has lost the battle owing to the blows struck by the neurosciences and, in particular, functional cerebral imaging. In an article (Dualism Persists in the Science of the Mind)coauthored by Steven Laureys from the Coma Science Group at ULg, he reports on the conclusions of a vast survey he initiated: despite all, dualist conceptions still remain popular. Journey to the land of the "soul" and consciousness. Already in 1983, Jean-Pierre Changeux wrote in L'homme neuronal: "L'identité entre états mentaux et états physiologiques ou physicochimiques du cerveau s'impose en toute légitimité" (The identity between mental states and physiological or physicochemical states of the brain is definitely legitimate). Since then, studies based on functional cerebral imaging have increased and each one has added to the corroboration of this theory. In principle, Cartesian dualism is dead since everything indicates that the mind does not emanate from an immaterial substance outside the body. Modern science therefore joins forces with the materialist conceptions of the Enlightenment Philosophers. For Diderot and Baron d'Holbach, for instance, the mind is a property of the brain. And since, according to them, the latter obeys the laws of natural determinism, it cannot exist of its own free will. Hence, the belief in a free will must be slipped into the same coffin as spiritualism. In his Système de la nature, Baron d'Holbach writes: "Our life is a line that nature orders us to follow on the surface of the Earth without ever being able to stray from it for one moment."