This final chapter returns to the issues that the cognitive neuroscience of autoscopy raise for the philosophy of mind. The neuroscience project is to develop a detailed understanding and explanation of the relation between the physical and mental. I appeal to the works of Paul Schilder, Antonio Damasio, and Mohed Constandi to forge a tentative way of understanding how multiple perceptual modalities such as proprioception, vision, touch, and somatic perception are integrated to form a unified sense of the self and the body.

The most disastrous blunder of the age was its refusal to acknowledge what most subalternised cultures and people took for granted: nature does not belong to us; we belong to nature. The reckless destruction of nature ended up threatening the survival of the human species, in the form of recurrent pandemics, extreme weather events, massive numbers of environment refugees, the disappearance of small island states, and environment-related chronic diseases. I argue in this chapter that all the main mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination at work in modern societies – whether class, race or gender – are traceable to the root dualisms between humanity and nature, and between mind/soul and body. The ways in which modern society deals with inferiority are modelled on the ways it deals with nature. If abyssal exclusion means domination by appropriation/violence, nature – including land, rivers and forests as well as people and ways of being and living whose humanity was negated precisely for being part of nature – has been the favoured target of this domination in Western modernity since the sixteenth century. I start by examining old and new contestations of Cartesian dualism, then I illustrate how this contestation has entered the field of law, what it entails and the prospects for the future. The rights of nature are a promising real legal utopia.

Two parallel trends prepared scholars for the investigation of the mind–body relationship so that a model of psychological inquiry could evolve. The first trend was methodological, characterized by the triumph of empiricism. Scientific innovations by Francis Bacon and Newton were firmly based on careful observations and quantification of observables. Using inductive methods, moving from observed particulars to cautious generalization, empiricism stood in contrast to the deductive methods of the Scholastic philosophers. The second trend occurred in the attempt to develop conceptions on the nature of humanity and was more a philosophical enterprise. Spinoza taught that mind and body are manifestations of the same unity of the person. Human activity, although unique because of humanity’s higher intellectual powers, is determined by the laws of nature. Descartes stated that the first principle of life is self-awareness of the idea, and all else that we know proceeds from self-reflection. His dualism of the interaction between mind and body distinguishes psychology from physiology. Descartes’ views were developed in the French and British philosophical traditions; Spinoza influenced the German efforts to develop a model of psychology.