A Critique of Biological Materialism

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Bohm2
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Bohm2 »

Quotidian wrote:Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Francis Crick:
this speculative study argues that our minds can be explained, without recourse to religious concepts of a soul, in terms of the interactions of a vast assembly of nerve cells and associated molecules. Crick delves into the nature of consciousness by focusing on visual awareness, an active, constructive process in which the brain selectively combines discrete elements into meaningful images. Early chapters include numerous interactive illustrations to demonstrate the brain's shortcuts, tricks and habits of visual perception. In later chapters Crick discusses neural networks--electronic pathways that can "remember" patterns or produce spoken language--and outlines research strategies designed to pinpoint the brain's "awareness neurons" that enable us to see.
I fully subscribe to methodological naturalism but I agree with you that we are far from explaining how mind emerges from neural stuff. So I don't find Crick's suggestion of neural networks as a good argument. In fact, neural networks have led to nothing of substance with respect to understanding the mind. Moreover, beyond the molecular level, a lot of science is mostly descriptive and not very explanatory. The exception is physics. Having said, I find terms like materialism pretty useless and vacuous since we don't have a definite conception of matter as physics/science is not finished. As Fiona Roxburgh writes:
We may, therefore, start out in the study of mind just as other sciences started out: by identifying abstract concepts, prior to any knowledge of the particular mechanical or biological realisations of these abstractions. Consequently, the positing of abstract architecture, or of concepts of cognitive science and linguistics, is perfectly legitimate: 'When we speak of the mind, we are speaking at some level of abstraction of yet-unknown physical mechanisms of the brain, much as those who spoke of the valence of oxygen or the benzene ring were speaking at some level of abstraction about physical mechanisms, then unknown.' ...

Returning to the dissolution of the mind-body distinction, any persistent use of some supposedly well established or clear notion of “solid matter” constitutes a refusal to respect the development of scientific terms. In a similar way, assumptions to the effect that we have already completed or exhausted the full set of physical scientific explanations also stand in direct contradiction with the allowance for scientific terms (and indeed theories) to progress.
Revised Kantian Naturalism: Cognition and the Limits of Inquiry
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/33046/1/20 ... hFCPhD.pdf
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Quotidian »

Neopolitan wrote: think I would be reasonably comfortable with being defined as an "emergentist" with respect to the philosophy of mind and considerations of what it is to be alive...
Thank you for that very thorough and cogent explanation. I generally agree with your definitions of 'materialism' and 'reductionism', and furthermore I think that this characterizes the opinions of the writers whom I have criticized on those grounds.
Neopolitan wrote:This does not, however, mean that I think that an additional constituent element has to be added (ie the supernatural or something spiritual). Thus I am, as far as my definition above goes, a "materialist". Note that if there are additional (and hidden) truth claims associated with "materialism", beyond what I've written into my definition, then I may not actually be a "materialist" after all...
I suspect that you don't really know what something 'supernatural or spiritual' might be, but you're pretty sure that, whatever it is, you don't want a bar of it. I think a lot of people believe exactly the same thing, but I attribute this to the fact that our collective metaphors for such things as 'mind' have failed, for various reasons.
Bohm 2 wrote: I agree with you that we are far from explaining how mind emerges from neural stuff.
Note the assumption. I would prefer 'if'.
When we speak of the mind, we are speaking at some level of abstraction of yet-unknown physical mechanisms of the brain...
I would be inclined to the view that such fundamental attributes of thought as 'rational inference' cannot in principle be explained in terms of 'physical mechanism'. Why? Because rational inference is epistemologically prior to the explanation of anything whatever; it is what enables us to create theories about 'the brain' or anything else.

Interesting article, though, I will try and find time to peruse that in more detail, thank you.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Neopolitan »

Quotidian wrote: I suspect that you don't really know what something 'supernatural or spiritual' might be, but you're pretty sure that, whatever it is, you don't want a bar of it. I think a lot of people believe exactly the same thing, but I attribute this to the fact that our collective metaphors for such things as 'mind' have failed, for various reasons.
True enough, I do not really know what something "supernatural or spiritual" would be. What I have observed, however, is how claims of the "supernatural and spiritual" are used.

I would have thought, if many generally don't know what these things are, that the people who are convinced that they exist should be explaining them better - rather than worrying about the mind. Otherwise the discussion just descends into meaningless mysticism, and that has nothing to do with science.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Radar »

I suggest downloading and reading Metaphysics by Borden Parker Brown, who is now my favorite author on the subject.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Quotidian »

I am definitely on the same side, but he was a Methodist minister, and whilst I think he's got a lot of merit, that fact alone will mean that very few people in the secular academy will take him seriously.

'Oh, he's religious.

And that has nothing to do with science.

I rest my case.'

But I need to return to an earlier point:
Fooloso4 wrote: you point to processes without a single purpose...
The passage I referred to, was the one describing the difference between a living and a dead animal. Perhaps you didn't read it very carefully, but all of the italicized words in that passage, which included behaviour, function, response, regulate, recognize, code, information, communication, error corrections, and attempts, pertain to purposive activities that can be observed in the functioning of organisms, which cannot be observed in (for instance) the formation of snow-flakes. To call them 'purposive' is not to say that they are the intentional, in the sense of the kinds of conscious purposes that humans pursue when they sit down to write a reply to a forum post, for instance. But when I say that nature is 'shot through' with purpose, this is what I'm referring to; they are 'purposive' in serving the purposes of homeostasis, reproduction, feeding, and so on, which all creatures engage in, in order to survive.

Now Dawkins denies that such things are 'purposeful' at all. In fact he seems to say that there is really no such thing as 'purpose', as such; what we interpret in terms of purpose is really an illusion of purpose - he calls it 'apparent purpose' - because our brains have evolved (fortuitously, of course) to see things as having purposes, when their purposes are really not intrinsic, but are ultimately only a means by which the selfish gene pursues its purposes; indeed you could say that in Dawkins' view, only the selfish gene has purpose, and everything else exists simply to facilitate its purposes, which are propogation. Insofar as anything exists, it only exists 'in order to' propagate.

And actually, this also goes for all of the other furniture of the psyche - reason, meaning, values, and everything else which we presume to be fundamental to the human intelligence, is really an illusion created by the brain to facilitate the passing on of the genome. We can tell ourselves that it is meaningful, and kid ourselves that these meanings we invent and project are satisfactory, but the satisfaction must be empty, because ultimately it means nothing, as there is nothing for it to mean, there is no 'meaning' to be had.

At a workshop on the topic of 'Advancing Naturalism':
While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Daniel Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.
Get a grip on what is at stake. It is all very well to stand up for 'secular humanism', but whilst this is secular, it is not 'humanism'.

@Bohm 2 - Revised Kantian Naturalism: Cognition and the Limits of Inquiry - 184 A4 pages, a PhD thesis! Thanks, but beyond the limits of my enquiry. :D
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Jklint »

A supernatural event can be a very natural occurrence which seems thoroughly excluded from our logic and our sense of what's possible and reasonable. In consequence it gets deported into the realms of the incomprehensible which only refers to the distance between us and IT.

In my view the supernatural, which is only what we call it, should not get conflated with the spiritual which exists only as a metaphor or variable customized according to context and perennially redefined. The term is tenuous but its effect is palpable since different experiences qualify as spiritual to different people who are not necessarily interested in philosophy or religion. The spiritual, like any thought or emotion only enhanced, derive from the catalytic and chemical functions of the brain of which mind being derivative elicits the spiritual. How that occurs is the mystery since its center of gravity is the physical brain. It would be easier to denote the spiritual if it weren't so supervised.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Neopolitan »

As usual, the descriptions are all horribly vague, or involve pointing off in the distance and saying something like "go read this book by a questionable author, as recommended by Radar". If "supernatural" and "spiritual" really are important, one would think that their proponents would at least have a go at trying to define them clearly. Without a clear definition, it's simply not science, even if a respectable person wrote the book in question.

Having been written by Radar's current favorite author is hardly a sterling recommendation for any book. Why is it that so many "philosophers" refuse to explain their points of view and instead defer to obscure scribblings from people that most have never heard of?

Anyway, it seems the critique here is little more than "a pejorative form of biology that I just made up is bad because it doesn't include any reference to my own person delusion, a delusion that I can't properly explain". Meanwhile those people engaged in actual biological research are progressing quite nicely without having to engage with anyone's expansive delusions of grandeur.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Quotidian »

Neopolitan wrote:If "supernatural" and "spiritual" really are important, one would think that their proponents would at least have a go at trying to define them clearly.
I did try that in another thread yesterday. What I got was:
Neopolitan wrote:You seem to have me confused with someone who is interested in your form of magical belief. I assure you that I am not.
So, why would I bother? I always get the sense that what you're actually doing is waiting for someone to say something that they believe is important, in some kind of spiritual way, so you can then pounce on it and show what a silly thing it is to believe.

Or have I misjudged you?

-- Updated September 29th, 2014, 8:38 pm to add the following --
JKlint wrote:A supernatural event can be a very natural occurrence ...
Why does that proposition strike me as self-contradictory... :roll:
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Neopolitan »

Kettle,

There is a big difference between defining your terms and directing someone to read all about your personal delusions. My comments were in reference to you going on about "the deathless" as taught in buddhism when the point at issue involved not wanting to live forever, a point on which you agreed with me, rather than a definition of "the deathless" and then there was a link to something about the dharma. Neither relate to definitions of "supernatural" or "spiritual".

In this case, you are suggesting that biology is lacking because it doesn't address the "supernatural" nor the "spiritual" but you are going out of your way to avoid explaining what those terms are supposed to mean. It's nonsense, Kettle, and for that reason this thread is in the wrong area of the forum, it should be back in "Religion, Theism and Mythology" - because your complaint has nothing to do with science and everything to do with magical thinking.

You might as well be complaining about particle physics because it fails to mention phlogiston - and when anyone suggests that it's been long since shown that there is no phlogiston, because the nature of combustion has now been better explained, you could superciliously accuse your interlocutor of having a "naive" concept of phlogiston but then refuse to ever properly explain what you mean by the term. You would be laughed out of the academy, and you should be laughed out of the academy for this current complaint as well. Certainly until such time as you define your terms.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Quotidian »

I am suggesting biology is lacking because it doesn't offer a satisfactory definition of 'mind', and furthermore, that the nature of mind is a fortiori not necessarily a matter for biology at all. And this is because, as I have said, the biological account has developed in a milieu within which 'mind' was originally defined in Cartesian terms, as being one aspect of a duality, which over the course of time, was rejected altogether in favour of a monistic monism, which holds that matter alone is real and that mind can be 'explained' in terms of matter. Concomitant with this, is the notion that the Universe can be understood in terms of the metaphor of mechanisms or machines. So that is what the thread was about, in case you have forgotten.

You will find that anyone who criticizes evolutionary thinking is automatically categorized as engaging in 'magical thinking', just as you're doing in my case. I suggest that this is because our thinking is so deeply influenced by materialism, that to question it amounts to the modern-day equivalent of heresy. That is your reaction to a T. I have endeavoured to draw your attention to a recent philosophical controversy over this very point with respect to a recent book by Thomas Nagel, about which you evince neither any knowledge nor interest.
My comments were in reference to you going on about "the deathless" as taught in buddhism when the point at issue involved not wanting to live forever, a point on which you agreed with me, rather than a definition of "the deathless" and then there was a link to something about the dharma. Neither relate to definitions of "supernatural" or "spiritual".
"The deathless' is generally understood in Western philosophy to pertain to 'the realm of spirit'. Now I don't actually like the words 'spirit', 'spiritual' or 'metaphysical' much because they are subject to so many contradictory definitions - they carry a lot of baggage. But 'mind' in the general sense, as understood by idealist philosophies, is in some respects the nearest term that we will get to 'spirit' in the philosophical lexicon. The spirit, or 'mind' in that specialised sense, is precisely that which is not subject to death. Hence trying to account for it in physicalist terms is a failure in principle.

You say that you're not reductionist, or materialist, so what kind of philosophy of mind do you advocate? Do you think that Dennett's style of evolutionary materialism - that the mind is a kind of illusory by-product of the brain, and that we're really 'moist robots' - amounts to an adequate philosophy? If not, what is wrong with it, and what would be a better approach?

-- Updated September 29th, 2014, 10:34 pm to add the following --

Incidentally, this is not 'the academy', and I don't have any particular fear of being laughed out of the Forum. As for the academy, I studied two years of undergraduate philosophy, and decided that neither Anglo-american analytical philosophy, nor the New Left, were my cup of tea. But my lecturers, to give them credit, encouraged my contrarian views, and I did alright at the subject. Recently I discovered of my teachers, David Stove, who taught positivism and David Hume, had a book posthumously published which is related to the theme of this thread, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Fooloso4 »

Quotidian:

This question is not about science, so much as the application of science to the nature of human identity.
Without a proper understanding of science we cannot determine whether it has been properly applied or misapplied.
But I don't think the nature of the mind, and the basics of human identity
I must have missed something. We were not talking about the nature of the mind or basic human identity. We were talking about the theory of evolution, whether molecules decide to do what they do, whether doing what they do entails purpose, whether the existence of designs entails a designer. You seem to be attacking the scientific theories of nature because it does not appear to conform to your theories of mind and human identity.

When you claim Darwin was wrong we need to look at the theory and the limits of his claims. He takes life as a given. He explains the origin of species as the cumulative effect of variation as selected by an environment. Cruse seems to have difficulty understanding the use of language and thus rejects Darwin because there is no intelligence selecting, no designer designing. If we can clear this up, and it really is quite easy, then Cruse is wrong when he says that Darwin was wrong.

If the real concern is to understand how nature can give rise to mind and human identity, it does not serve us well to look at misguided attempts to undermine Darwin. Your own concerns are not things that Darwin addresses.

While it is true that we do not have a satisfactory natural explanation of mind and human identity it does not follow that in principle we cannot have a natural explanation of these things. Prior to every advance in science there have been those who have claimed it could not be done and spend a good deal of time and energy explaining why it could not be done.

You seem to slide unnoticed between attempts to explain the natural world in natural terms, problems of materialism, and claims made by Dennett, Dawkins, and others. Or perhaps it only seems this way to me because I have misunderstood you. So, let me ask you to clarify your position. Are you claiming that natural explanations are not possible or are you simply taking issue with the theories of philosophers of science?
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

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Quotidian wrote:I am definitely on the same side, but he was a Methodist minister, and whilst I think he's got a lot of merit, that fact alone will mean that very few people in the secular academy will take him seriously.

'Oh, he's religious.

And that has nothing to do with science.

I rest my case.'
Very true. But that's their problem and proof that skeptics aren't so 'open-minded' after all.

The subject has to be approached philosophically because material materialism in science is dead and is no more separable from biological materialism than a triangle can be separated from its sides. Browne's approach, at least in two of his books, is philosophical rather than religious, and although in some respects a bit outdated, they are cogent enough to give a reasonable person food for thought and, perhaps, persuade a person to reevaluate their materialism.

The idea that the various attributes of a human being -- will, intelligence, sight, emotions, reason, etc. -- can be separated from the totality of the person, and that person separated from the whole of nature, is fallout from Newtonian/Carteasian dualism: it mistakes logical distinctions, which are pure abstractions, for reality itself. The various attributes of a person are not independent 'powers,' but only names for the different forms of one person's actions, actions that are inseparable from the whole of reality. Biological materialism, therefore, is but the phenomenal product of a dynamism beneath it, and when that is viewed as comprised separate factors we involve ourselves with absurdities and contradictions that give rise to debates such as this.
Last edited by Radar on September 29th, 2014, 6:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Jklint »

Quotidian wrote:
JKlint wrote:A supernatural event can be a very natural occurrence ...
Why does that proposition strike me as self-contradictory... :roll:
...because you ONLY chose to quote this and didn't even bother to quote the complete sentence to purposely mutilate the meaning. So all of your sages haven't taught you more than this!

Here, I'll quote it for you in toto:
A supernatural event can be a very natural occurrence which seems thoroughly excluded from our logic and our sense of what's possible and reasonable.
Here's the next sentence completing a very short paragraph.
In consequence it gets deported into the realms of the incomprehensible which only refers to the distance between us and IT.
So tell me again where is the contradiction in this definition of "supernatural"!
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Bohm2 »

Quotidian wrote:I am suggesting biology is lacking because it doesn't offer a satisfactory definition of 'mind', and furthermore, that the nature of mind is a fortiori not necessarily a matter for biology at all.
I don't follow this. Consider how leading scientists in cognitive sciences/biolinguistics approach this:
I will be using the terms "mind" and "mental" here with no metaphysical import. Thus I understand "mental" to be on a par with "chemical", "optical", or "electrical". Certain phenomena, events, processes and states are informally called "chemical" etc., but no metaphysical divide is suggested thereby. The terms are used to select certain aspects of the world as a focus of inquiry. We do not seek to determine the true criterion of the chemical, or the mark of the electrical, or the boundaries of the optical. I will use "mental" the same way, with something like ordinary coverage, but no deeper implications. By "mind" I just mean the mental aspects of the world, with no more interest in sharpening the boundaries or finding a criterion than in other cases.

...It is not that ordinary discourse fails to talk about the world, or that the particulars it describes do not exist, or that the accounts are too imprecise. Rather, the categories used and principles invoked need not have even loose counterparts in naturalistic inquiry. That is true even of the parts of ordinary discourse that have a quasi-naturalistic cast. How people decide whether something is water or tea is of no concern to chemistry. It is no necessary task of biochemistry to decide at what point in the transition from simple gases to bacteria we find the "essence of life", and if some such categorization were imposed, the correspondence to common sense notions would matter no more than for the heavens, or energy, or solid. Whether ordinary usage would consider viruses "alive" is of no interest to biologists, who will categorize as they choose in terms of genes and conditions under which they function. We cannot invoke ordinary usage to judge whether Francois Jacob is correct in telling us that "for the biologist, the living begins only with what was able to constitute a genetic program", though "for the chemist, in contrast, it is somewhat arbitrary to make a demarcation where there can only be continuity"
Language and Nature
http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org ... xt_095.pdf

A similar argument is given in this quote from an earlier 1968 paper:
I have been using mentalistic terminology quite freely, but entirely without prejudice as to the question of what may be the physical realisation of the abstract mechanisms postulated to account for the phenomena of behaviour or the acquisition of knowledge. We are not constrained, as was Descartes, to postulate a second substance when we deal with phenomena that are not expressible in terms of matter in motion, in his sense. Nor is there much point in pursuing the question of psychophysical parallelism, in this connection. It is an interesting question whether the functioning and evolution of human mentality can be accommodated within the framework of physical explanation, as presently conceived, or whether there are new principles, now unknown, that must be invoked, perhaps principles that emerge only at higher levels of organisation than can now be submitted to physical investigation.

We can, however, be fairly sure that there will be a physical explanation for the phenomena in question, if they can be explained at all, for an uninteresting terminological reason, namely that the concept of “physical explanation” will no doubt be extended to incorporate whatever is discovered in this domain, exactly as it was extended to accommodate gravitational and electromagnetic force, massless particles, and numerous other entities and processes that would have offended the common sense of earlier generations. But it seems clear that this issue need not delay the study of the topics that are now open to investigation, and it seems futile to speculate about matters so remote from present understanding.
(Chomsky in Language and mind, 1968)
Neopolitan wrote:As usual, the descriptions are all horribly vague, or involve pointing off in the distance and saying something like "go read this book by a questionable author, as recommended by Radar". If "supernatural" and "spiritual" really are important, one would think that their proponents would at least have a go at trying to define them clearly. Without a clear definition, it's simply not science, even if a respectable person wrote the book in question.
I must be missing something but what does mind have to do with supernatural/spiritual? I assumed the discussion was whether present neuroscience can explain the emergence of mental stuff? Or maybe I'm just misinterpreting this thread.
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Re: A Critique of Biological Materialism

Post by Fooloso4 »

Bohm2:

We can, however, be fairly sure that there will be a physical explanation for the phenomena in question, if they can be explained at all, for an uninteresting terminological reason, namely that the concept of “physical explanation” will no doubt be extended to incorporate whatever is discovered in this domain, exactly as it was extended to accommodate gravitational and electromagnetic force, massless particles, and numerous other entities and processes that would have offended the common sense of earlier generations. But it seems clear that this issue need not delay the study of the topics that are now open to investigation, and it seems futile to speculate about matters so remote from present understanding. (Chomsky in Language and mind, 1968)
Thank you Bohm2. Chomsky clearly and eloquently makes the point I was getting at when I refused to allow the issue to be framed in term of materialism. This refusal may seem odd to anyone who has not followed this discussion from the prior thread, since the title of this thread is about materialism, but that is how Quotidian framed it and that is why in my last post I asked if he is claiming that natural explanations are not possible or if he is simply taking issue with the theories of philosophers of science.
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Wilderness Cry: A Scientific and Philosophical Approach to Understanding God and the Universe

Wilderness Cry
by Dr. Hilary L Hunt M.D.
April 2021

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute: Tools To Spark Your Dream And Ignite Your Follow-Through

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute
by Jeff Meyer
May 2021

Surviving the Business of Healthcare: Knowledge is Power

Surviving the Business of Healthcare
by Barbara Galutia Regis M.S. PA-C
June 2021

Winning the War on Cancer: The Epic Journey Towards a Natural Cure

Winning the War on Cancer
by Sylvie Beljanski
July 2021

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream
by Dr Frank L Douglas
August 2021

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts
by Mark L. Wdowiak
September 2021

The Preppers Medical Handbook

The Preppers Medical Handbook
by Dr. William W Forgey M.D.
October 2021

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress: A Practical Guide

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress
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Dream For Peace: An Ambassador Memoir

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