" The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century-with the attendant attempt to analyze all observable phenomena in terms of mechanical chains of causation-was a knife in the heart of moral philosophy, for it reduced human beings to automatons. If all of the body and brain canbe completely described without invoking anything so empyreal as a mind, let alone a consciousness, then the notion that a person is morally responsible for his actions appears quaint, if not scientifically naive. A machine cannot be held responsible for its actions. If our minds are impotent to affect our behavior, then surely we are no more responsible for our actions than a robot is. It is an understatement to note that the triumph of materialism, as applied to questions of mind and brain, therefore makes many people squirm. For if the mysteries of the mind are reducible to physics and chemistry, then "mind is but the babbling of a robot, chained ineluctably to crude causality," as the neurobiologist Robert Doty put it in 1998. "

― Jeffrey M. Schwartz , The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force