QUIURIUS: your recent e-mail message has prompted me to edit parts of my reply to you, for Serenipia purposes... You wrote,

...it is rather strange, in view of all the damage that alcohol has done to human beings over the centuries... so little research... a curious lack of scientific curiosity.

Jumping to conclusions. No lack of curiosity, just lack of technology.

...how physical brain systems create rational thought. To know what a thing is, is to be able to act appropriately in regard to it, or to know what to expect in the manner of its actions and interactions with other things.

The cortex has an extraordinary number of cognition areas. One may lose the capacity to use a sphygmomanometer, even being a doctor, and yet be able to drive a car a long distance. There may be an associated loss of the capacity to know how to read words, even though one recognizes the letters. One may even see the word 'the' and understand its meaning, yet be incapable of pronouncing it normally. Intending to read, the speech may be a garbled utterance. At the same time, the vocabulary may become very limited, with speech narrowed in range, all this with the patient realizing the type of limitation befalling to him, and asking to be listened to with patience and understanding. Yet, he may be able to explain quite appropriately ideas that are well known to him. He will understand well what he hears, and he will ask to be read to, because he cannot understand what he reads. If he tries to transfer to his word processor a couple of lines from a source, it will take him half an hour and the result be gibberish, even though he believed he was succeeding, with great effort. He will be bewildered and absolutely amazed at what is happening.

Such very unusual phenomena may be entirely reversible, related to transient hypoxia. Some of this happens to alpinists who do not use oxygen as they climb the Everest. But in such cases, the patient is not too aware of the inimical results, because his capacity for analysis continues to be affected under the persistent hypoxia, while in the described case the hypoxia had ceased; only the damaged areas had remained, being fruitfully subjected to analysis by the unscathed cognitive areas.

I should add that the cortex's 'monitoring areas' are constantly 'percepting,' that is, sorting out the colors, shapes, shadows, positions, and more, of every input from the eyes and, similarly, of all the components of other senses' inputs. All this information is submitted to further brain elaboration for its conversion into the output of the conscious information called perception.
Simultaneously, there is a constant input of the fact that the brain is capable of perceiving i.e., seeing, listening, and so on. This means that when a person becomes blind or deaf, the brain must be able of continuosly inputting this knowledge; otherwise, the patient will not know that he has become handicapped. Such situation is very uncommon, and it my be difficult to comprehend that a patient is unable to know that he has become blind! Yet, experimental hypnosis can mimic the phenomenon.

... Therefore, learning more about the motor control systems of the brain is an important aspect of learning how brains create rational thought.

Nothing doing with motor: all is cognitive. No way finding out how the brain creates thought of any kind. Take this theory: special proteins constitute the cognitive units ("cog-prot units") of an immense array, billions of 'coprots' in a multidimensional real-virtual array. Every input by the senses (percept) is filtered, organized, compared, interconnected, as it traverses this array. The result goes to an area which is the final projection 'screen' for rational perception.
To fully comprehend how the final screen is made conscious, is tantamount to asking what the prime nature is, of matter, of the Universe, and of its Creator, whatever his Nature might be. There is the 'navel'! Even the retina has a navel, a blind spot.

Now take this, Quiurius: An hologram is based on the changed fronts of the initially coherent (one front) laser (monochromatic) light, as it is reflected from the various points of the photographed object, compared with the one-front laser light projected. It would appear that the neurons utilize an anlogous method to compare between memories and present percepts. Feelings are very difficult to theorize about; it seems, though, that they are very influencial in the embedding of memories. There obviously must exist 'cog-prots' related to feelings. Perhaps there is an 'array' of coprots devoted to feelings, with connections to the hypothalamic autonomic neural and neuro-hormonal centers.

Just out of curiosity, though, I was wondering about what a man of your logical positivist sentiments would make of Spinoza. Surely you have to admire his character as most every one does, but what about his system of thought? In many ways he was the very apotheosis of everything the logical positivists were against, but he was such a courageous monist and naturalist ---his God was a necessary system of nature that even Einstein found congenial. (Einstein was no positivist, at least in the formal sense, but I think he spoke for many scientists when he said that he believed in the God of Spinoza.) I was just curious what you might make of him. To me, of course, he was the first truly great philosopher of modern times, an exemplar of all that philosophy is or ought to be. But what do you think? Just curious.

Agree! Nothing adding to your exposition. As you have realized, I use the term 'philosophy' in the strict sense, but also in the wide sense of 'way' of thinking and acting (cognitive and motor manifestations determined by a set of beliefs). Therefore, I cannot say that Spinoza's writings encompass every thing in those areas...