Three arguments are raised in this article with regard to the indices used to measure the digital divide. First, I criticize policymakers who rely on simplistic measures of the digital divide, at the expense of a thoughtful analysis of (1) the purpose of the tool, (2) the level of observation, and (3) the method of approaching the data. Second, I argue that networks and associated technologies ...

A partial review of Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False is used to articulate some systems-theoretic ideas about the challenge of understanding subjective experience. The article accepts Nagel’s view that reductionist materialism fails as an approach to this challenge, but argues that seeking an explanation of mi...

What we normally think of as the “physical world” is also the world as experienced, that is, a world of appearances. Given this, what is the reality behind the appearances, and what might its relation be to consciousness and to constructive processes in the mind? According to Kant, the thing itself that brings about and supports these appearances is unknowable and we can never gain any understa...

According to ontological pluralism, there are different modes of being — different ways to exist. The view has been thought dead for a long time, destroyed by the Quinean doctrine that to be is to be needed as the value of a variable bound by an existential quantifier. Announcements of its death were premature. Ontological pluralism is consistent with the Quinean doctrine if there are multiple ...

In the struggle about the role of monism and dualism as basic concepts of the mind-brain relation, the indeterminacy of quantum events has led an increasing number of authors to postulate quantum brain dynamics as the key towards a scientific understanding of consciousness. In most cases some specific form of macroscopic quantum states in the brain are invoked without giving details for their o...

Over the past decade, governmental agencies, medical schools, influential voices in the media, and the public at large have seen a remarkable surge of interest in alternative medicine in the United States. While many therapies focus on unproven but otherwise spiritually neutral approaches (for example, nutritional supplements), others arise from or validate worldviews — especially the monism ("...

The problem of qualitative heterogeneity is to explain how an extended simple can enjoy qualitative variation across its spatial or temporal axes, given that it lacks both spatial and temporal parts. I discuss how friends of extended simples should address the problem of qualitative heterogeneity. I present a series of arguments designed to show that rather than appealing to fundamental distrib...