En Garde Against Traces of Cartesianism-A Reply to Clay C. Whitehead

My reaction to Clay Whitehead's comments is twofold. One is gratitude for his gracious overall appreciation of my ideas. The other is ironic puzzlement that he finds my article replete with Cartesian thinking—a challenge that I must not ignore out of respect for his serious consideration of my arguments. Despite my efforts to cast my ideas in a nondualistic light, I have apparently failed to meet his criteria for keeping myself innocent of Cartesian bias.

But, sadly, his examples of my defection cast substantial doubt on his criteria. For example, there is a mistaken impression that I have used the term “neurodynamics” in a metapsychological sense when in fact I was referring to neural phenomena—intracellular, synaptic, and collective (as in neural networks). I did not claim the dynamic nature of neural innervations and associated electrochemical activities to be another instance of metapsychology in the sense of underlying psychological process. Although it may be true that he who claims to be free of Cartesian sin should cast the first stone, I would prefer to defend arguments that are more vulnerable targets.

Another semantic misattribution relates to my metaphoric use of the word “envelope” in referring to the cellular boundary between organisms such as ourselves and their (our) outer world. The boundary—actually biological in nature—also includes the mediating functions of neuronal cells, synapses, memory storage, and cerebral emulation processes that intervene between sensory input, fantasies and subsequent behaviors, and other brain-derived activities. These mediating processes have evolved over eons of struggle to further personal and genomic survival in a world of danger and opportunity, and of competition and cooperation. As I argue under the heading of Darwinian neurodynamics of subjectivity, transference phenomena can be seen as outcomes of these emulation processes in which affect-laden early