I defend the thesis that the physicalist two perspectives position on qualia described below merits further examination and debate – that it has potential as a possible basis for a correct account of the relationship of qualia1 to our physical world view. The idea that what is a quale to one observer is a brain state to another – that each is simply a different perspective on a single reality –...

Parallel to psychiatry, "philosophy of mind" investigates the relationship between mind (mental domain) and body/brain (physical domain). Unlike older forms of philosophy of mind, contemporary analytical philosophy is not exclusively based on introspection and conceptual analysis, but also draws upon the empirical methods and findings of the sciences. This article outlines the conceptual framew...

We study the fundamental properties of curvature in groupoids within the framework of synthetic differential geometry. As is usual in synthetic differential geometry, its combinatorial nature is emphasized. In particular, the classical Bianchi identity is deduced from its combinatorial one.

Abstract We discuss several well known results about Schur functions that can be proved using cancellations in alternating summations; notably we shall discuss the Pieri and Murnaghan-Nakayama rules, the JacobiTrudi identity and its dual (Von Nägelsbach-Kostka) identity, their proofs using the correspondence with lattice paths of Gessel and Viennot, and finally the Littlewood-Richardson rule. O...

For redundant second-class constraints the Dirac brackets cannot be defined and new brackets must be introduced. We prove here that the Jacobi identity for the new brackets must hold on the surface of the second-class constraints. In order to illustrate our proof we work out explicitly the cases of a fractional spin particle in 2 + 1 dimensions and the original Brink-Schwarz massless superparti...

1. THE PROBLEM AND THE PROGRAMME Only a dreadful prig could seriously condemn secret lust as a form of adultery. However, even someone who claims to be wholly concerned with the things of the mind must have some interest in what he says and does, and these require the occurrence of bodily processes. Realising that so much of what matters to us involves physical events and processes, it is natur...

Frank Jackson’s famous Knowledge Argument moves from the premise that complete physical knowledge about experiences is not complete knowledge about experiences to the falsity of physicalism. Some physicalists (e.g., John Perry) have countered by arguing that what Jackson’s Mary, the perfect scientist who acquires all physical knowledge about experiencing red while being locked in a monochromati...

For over twenty years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for nonreductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-...