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Introduction to Philosophy/What is Philosophy!?

Definition & Meaning
The word Philosophy is derived from two Greek words; Philo meaning love and Sophia meaning wisdom. In general, it means love of wisdom. Philosophy is a broad field of knowledge in which the definition of knowledge itself is one of the subjects investigated. It spans the nature of the universe, the mind, and the body; the relationships between all three, and between people. Philosophy is a field of inquiry – the pursuit of wisdom; the predecessor and complement of science, developing the issues which underlie science and pondering those questions which are beyond the scope of science.

Using Philosophy
The essence of philosophy is the study and development of fundamental ideas and methods that are not adequately addressed in specialized empirical disciplines, such as physics or history. As such, philosophy provides the foundations upon which all belief structures and fields of knowledge are built. It is responsible for the definitions of, and the approaches used to develop the theories of, such diverse fields as religion, language, science, law, psychology, mathematics, and politics. It also examines and develops its own structure and procedures, and when it does so is called metaphilosophy: the philosophy of philosophy.

Philosophy has a rich literary heritage, including the writings and teachings of profound thinkers from many cultures throughout history. Philosophers seek to understand the principles that underlie all knowledge and being. For this purpose, they develop methods of thinking, including logic, introspection, and meditation. Applying these methods, they investigate the most fundamental questions, such as "What is the nature of the universe?" (metaphysics), "What do we know, and how do we know it?" (epistemology), "What is the difference between good and evil?" (ethics), "What is beauty?" (aesthetics), and "What is the meaning of life?" (teleology).

Philosophical Perspectives & Traditions
'What is philosophy', is itself a philosophical question. This is a clue to the nature of philosophy. It is very general in scope; so general that it, perhaps uniquely among the disciplines, includes itself in its scope. What is clear is that philosophy is, in some sense, thinking about thinking.

In the analytic tradition of Europe and its subsequent transplanting to the Americas, philosophy has reinvented itself with a new set of techniques that would be out of place in the world of the ancient Greeks, where philosophy started. It centres on logic and conceptual analysis. Topics at its centre include the theory of knowledge, ethics, the nature of language, and the nature of mind.

Earlier traditions of philosophy placed more emphasis on the study of the arts and science of life: a general theory and a commendation of way of life. In this sense, philosophy is concerned with the practical bits of how to live rather than a theoretical attempt to understand. This legacy was derived from some of the earliest philosophers known to us: the Sophists, who were the teachers of rhetoric, grammar and science of the ancient world. Though somewhat akin to sages these Sophists played an important role in the development of philosophy.

In the subsequent analytic tradition that developed after the Sophists, philosophy became a subject you could pursue for purely abstract and metaphysical reasons. In the Sophist tradition, philosophy is a body of knowledge to be mastered with which you could gain power or reward. It is possible to exaggerate these differences for when philosophy is not dogma each tradition pays some homage to the other.

In the Western world, at one time the term 'philosophy' covered all disciplines. Over time, as the corpus of human knowledge grew, various disciplines emerged, each with their own methodologies and domains of study, and these disciplines became to a large extent autonomous. For example, if you go into a public library that uses the Dewey decimal classification system, you will find that psychology books have a classmark starting with 150 - right in the middle of the philosophy section. This is because at the time the system was created, in the latter half of the 19th century, psychology was only just beginning to emerge as a distinct discipline. Another example is the term 'natural philosophy', which was once used to mean science, or more particularly physics. By this view, what is called 'philosophy' at any time in history are those provinces of human knowledge which have not yet come of age, which not yet developed their own autonomous character and status.

These independent disciplines do have their own philosophies; so there is a philosophy of science, a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of psychology, and so on. When studying in these areas, one looks at methodological issues or examines some of the core concepts of the discipline, as well as various ethical issues.

There are domains which definitely belong in a philosophy department. Epistemology is concerned with 'how do I know what I know?', Ontology with 'what is real?', Ethics with 'how should one conduct oneself?'. Logic is concerned with proper reasoning. Many other disciplines exist within philosophy.


text:
Ordinary Differential Equations/First Order Linear

Lesson 1: Separable equations

 * Explanation
 * Examples
 * Problems
 * Answers

Lesson 2: Graphing differential equations

 * Explanation
 * Examples
 * Problems
 * Answers

Lesson 3: Non-separable equations

 * Explanation
 * Examples
 * Problems
 * Answers

Lesson 4: Substitution methods

 * Explanation
 * Examples
 * Problems
 * Answers

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Talk:Introduction to Philosophy/What is Philosophy!?

Sorry, but this module should be totally redone. We have already determined the origins of philosophy and now we would like to discuss of how philosophy is studied. What happens in philosophy? We need to maintain fluid motion throughout this text.

Format:

 * 1) Tell of how philosophy is studied.it is methodologically with alongside ,spontaneously ,precission.
 * 2) Give examples of simple philosophical questions throughout history. Why is it that people dwell in mistakes that are to grieve and/or cost them their loss of common sense?
 * 3) Give attempts to answer these simple philosophical questions.where are questions?
 * 4) Tell of what is gained by attempting to answer these questions.

Please try to expand texton these issues. --Destrogal 09:59, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Suggested mere of content
There was another "What is Philosophy" page on Wikibooks that I'm deleting, but the content is so brief I am deciding to add it here instead:

Bertrand Russell used the simple definition that Philosophy is speculation on subjects where definite information is not available. Thus in some areas, such as the physical nature of the world, knowledge has expanded greatly in such fields as Astronomy, Geology, Physics, and Chemistry, and these areas of study move out of the scope of philosophy; while in other areas, such as ethics, little or no progress has been made since ancient times and are still considered suitable for philosophical speculation.

Add this content, ignore it, or whatever. I'm throwing it here so there is a chance it might be used. --Rob Horning 09:22, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Philosophy as a discipline or an area of study
In modern anglo-american analytic philosophy, philosophy is a discipline. That is, there are rules about how to do it, tools and techniques that may be employed, etc. Other types of philosophy (perhaps Eastern Philosophy, Continental philosophy) may not be disciplines but areas of study (morality, virtue, government) when the student is not confined by established methods.

This causes endless problems when the word "philosophy" is mentioned to laymen.

It need to be made clear whether the subject of the book is a discipline or an area of study.Logicalgregory (talk) 09:03, 28 September 2010 (UTC)


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Wikibooks:Collaboration of the Month/July 2005

London is a travel guide to the city of London, the capital of England. Vote for August - Collaboration of the Month


text:
Portuguese/Contents/L2/Lesson Fifteen - Eating Out Part II

< Portuguese:L2


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Portuguese/Contents/L1/Lesson Six - The Train

Return to Portuguese – Return to Contents – Go to Lesson Seven

Here Ricardo is buying a ticket on a train station (o comboio in Portugal, "the train", is translated as o trem in Brazil). He also asks some other questions about the train he wants to catch. In this lesson we're going to learn how to make questions in Portuguese. We've already seen one way of asking about things, when we looked at verbs like "gostar".

These are almost exactly the same as stating something.

In fact, the only difference between these sentences is that there is a question mark at the end. In Portuguese, you can ask a yes/no question by just stating something, and putting a question mark at the end of it. In the spoken language, you should pronounce with a raising intonation to the end of the sentence, just like in English. This is an extremely easy way to form a question.

STATEMENT & QUESTION MARK =  YES/NO QUESTION

And how do we answer such questions? Well, of course, with a "Yes" or a "No". When Alberto asks Ricardo:

O senhor tem bilhete?

Ricardo could answer with...

We've also encountered another way to ask questions. Back in lesson three we learnt how to ask someone what they were going to do on a certain day. Do you remember?

O que vai fazer na terça-feira? - What are you going to do on Tuesday?

O que eles vão fazer no domingo? - What are they going to do on Sunday?

The two words 'O que' mean "what?" You can also ask "o que é que...", which literally means "what is it that...".

de:Portugiesisch: Lektionen: Der Zug


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Mambo Open Source/Have more than one mambo installation on the same server

This is a guide on how to set up multiple mambo installations on one server with only one database.

What is the ting?
When one wants to set up multiple installations on one server, there are some issues to deal with. The first is the amount of storage on the server. One mambo installation requires at least 8MB, so if you have a small web hotel with only 15 megs, you have already met a definite limitation.

If you have enough storage space, though, it is the database that is the "problem". It is not really a problem though, as there are workaround for this. If you have the option to have multiple databases with your web host, that is surely recommended. This is very easy to manage, and easy to use. But, the most common feature is only one mysql database.

The problem
The problem is of course overlapping tables. A database consists of many tables, and each of these tables contain data. Mambo has tables like "components", "users" and of course the "content" table. If you want to have two mambo installations on the same sql database, the problem occurs - the databases will overlap and overwrite each other!

The solution
Mambo has by default a setting called database prefix, that adds a prefix to all the tables. For instance, if the prefix is "mos_" (which is default in mambo - all tables will get this prefix unless otherwise is specified) and the table is named "downloads", the table will in fact be named "mos_downloads".

This prefix is specified during the installation of mambo. By default it is "mos_", as mentioned above, and that is what you should use for your site. Then, when installing the second site - simply change the database prefix! This will ensure that no tables overlap, and that everything runs smoothly.


text: General Astronomy/Motion and Gravity

title: General Astronomy/Motion and Gravity


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Wikibooks:Collaboration of the Month/August 2005 voting

Voting Rules
The following are the rules and conditions for voting for the Collaboration of the Month:

 * 1) Only registered users with 20 or more edits to their name may vote.
 * 2) You may vote under as many nominations as you wish, however, you may only vote for each book itself once.
 * 3) Sign your vote with a number sign and four tildes, #~, after the most previous vote under the book's nomination. Unsigned votes will be removed.
 * 4) Any nomination which receives 3 or more votes in one month will automatically be renominated the next month if it is not chosen.
 * 5) If you wish to include a short comment for your vote, then you may do so. Make sure that if you leave such a comment, that you are also voting for that page.
 * 6) Do not post objection votes as these will have no effect on the final tally.
 * 7) Voting will end at 00:00 UTC on the first day of each month. In essence, when a new month begins voting ends. Any votes added after this time will be discarded.
 * 8) The nomination with most votes will be chosen as the Collaboration of the Month. In case of a tie, the older Wikibook will be chosen.

Isle of Arran

 * 1) Charlie123 8 July 2005 11:55 (UTC)
 * 2) Klingoncowboy4 22:26, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Comments...
 * This isn't my book - but it needs help.
 * Needs help isn't strong enough but i'll put my vote in Klingoncowboy4 22:26, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Biotechnology
Could use some help with content and formating - thanks in advance
 * 1) tmaioli#Tom Maioli 02:56, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Mitchc 07:10, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

1911 wikipedia
Someone should add more articles, proofread, and update it. Also, it would be a great acheivement if finished! (over 100,000 proofread and updated pages of the greatest encyclopedia ever written!)

 * 1) Member 23:17, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Klingoncowboy4 17:44, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Raising Chickens
Raising Chickens is a book about how to raise chickens. It is designed to be ongoing and a way for people to add advice that has worked for them.

 * 1) Klingoncowboy4 22:24, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)

How to build a Computer

 * 1) Klingoncowboy4 22:30, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Masterjamie 19:47, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) Nathan8225 21:09, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
 * 4) Panic 05:00, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

United_States_Government
While one of the first Wikibooks to achieve the "100%" rating, it has languished for some time and perhaps needs to be revisited. There are some dead end spots, but at the same time it does show some signs of promise, if there would be a little bit of effort done to fix it up.

 * 1) Rob Horning 19:40, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Klingoncowboy4 19:54, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Art_History
This Wikibook is virtually blank - but it should be a major part of the humanities project, and could easily be used (when developed) as a class text due to the nature of the content.

 * 1) Serge July 9, 2005 10:41 (UTC)

Literature
This too is barely started but should be a larger book - easily collaborated on by a large amount of people, I would have thought.
 * 1) Serge July 9, 2005 10:45 (UTC)

Programming:C -/- -/-

 * 1) Eyu100 15:17, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Klingoncowboy4 22:14, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikiversity

 * 1) Klingoncowboy4 22:19, 28 July 2005 (UTC)


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Wikibooks:Book of the month/August 2005 voting

The voting for the Book of the month for August 2005 is open from 1 - 31 July, 2005, and will close on July 31, 2005, 00:00 UTC. The book of the month will be featured on the main page of Wikibooks.

'''Closed. Any votes added will be reverted.'''

Wikijunior Solar System (6)
(Automatically nominated with 4 votes in June.)

 * 1) Rob Horning 19:14, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Klingoncowboy4 19:16, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) Rachel Knott 22:16, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 4) Nathan8225 01:09, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
 * 5) 159753 19:14, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
 * 6) Shanel 15:26, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Coments:

 * With only 4 hours left I think it is safe to say that unless there is a suddent serge of votes this book will be the first Wikijunior book to win Book of the Month. Klingoncowboy4 20:10, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

London (1)
(Automatically nominated with 3 votes in June.)

 * 1) Klingoncowboy4 19:19, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)

comments...

 * Not enough content yet.

Mandarin Chinese (4)
(Automatically nominated with 3 votes in June.)

 * 1) Klingoncowboy4 19:18, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Destrogal 22:37, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) Serge July 9, 2005 01:56 (UTC)
 * 4) Everlong 00:01, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Programming:C -/- -/- (4)
(Automatically nominated with 3 votes in June.)

 * 1) Klingoncowboy4 19:17, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Masterjamie 19:46, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) Eyu100 15:15, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
 * 4) Dirtyliberal 06:35, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Raising Chickens (1)

 * 1) Klingoncowboy4 19:21, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Mambo Open Source (3)

 * 1) August 22:04, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Klingoncowboy4 22:38, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) Masterjamie 19:48, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

United_States_Government (1)

 * 1) Klingoncowboy4 19:59, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Choosing a Car (2)

 * 1) Charlie123 14:40, 14 July 2005 (UTC) By the end of July this book will be complete, and a good guide to all the important questions to ask when choosing your next car.
 * 2) Klingoncowboy4 22:11, 28 July 2005 (UTC)


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Consciousness Studies/The Conflict2

''This part of this section is about the where and when of the experience called consciousness. Is it in the world, in the brain or are the world and brain within it?''

Phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness
Block(1995) drew attention to the way that there appear to be two types of consciousness: phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness:

Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. (Block 1995).

See the section on Ned Block's ideas for a deeper coverage of his approach to access and phenomenal consciousness.

Block uses Nagel's famous (1974) paper, "What is it like to be a bat?" as an exemplary description of phenomenal consciousness. Excellent descriptions have also been proffered by the empiricist philosophers who gave lengthy descriptions of consciousness as partly experience itself. Although Block has formalised the idea of phenomenal and access consciousness similar ideas have also been put forward by many philosophers including Kant and Whitehead.

Access consciousness has two interpretations, in the first, used by Block, it applies to the functions that appear to operate on phenomenal consciousness. In the second, used by the behaviourists and eliminativists, it is some property of the functions of the brain that can be called 'consciousness'.

This division between phenomenal and functional aspects of consciousness is useful because it emphasises the idea of phenomenal consciousness as observation rather than action. Some philosophers such as Huxley in 1874, have taken the view that because phenomenal consciousness appears to have no function it is of no importance or cannot exist. James (1879) introduced the term "epiphenomenalism" to summarise the idea that consciousness has no function.

The idea that phenomenal consciousness cannot exist is a type of Eliminativism (also known as Eliminative Materialism). Eliminativism owes much to the work of Sellars(1956) and Feyerbend (1963). Dennett (1978) applied Eliminativism to phenomenal consciousness and denies that pain is real. Others such as Rey(1997) have also applied eliminativism to phenomenal consciousness.

Dennett (1988) redefines consciousness in terms of access consciousness alone, he argues that "Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties". Having related all consciousness to properties he then declares that these properties are actually judgements of properties. He considers judgements of the properties of consciousness to be identical to the properties themselves. He writes:

"The infallibilist line on qualia treats them as properties of one's experience one cannot in principle misdiscover, and this is a mysterious doctrine (at least as mysterious as papal infallibility) unless we shift the emphasis a little and treat qualia as logical constructs out of subjects' qualia-judgments: a subject's experience has the quale F if and only if the subject judges his experience to have quale F. "

Having identified "properties" with "judgement of properties" he can then show that the judgements are insubstantial, hence the properties are insubstantial and hence the qualia are insubstantial or even non-existent. Dennett concludes that qualia can be rejected as non-existent:

"So when we look one last time at our original characterization of qualia, as ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible properties of experience, we find that there is nothing to fill the bill. In their place are relatively or practically ineffable public properties we can refer to indirectly via reference to our private property-detectors-- private only in the sense of idiosyncratic. And insofar as we wish to cling to our subjective authority about the occurrence within us of states of certain types or with certain properties, we can have some authority--not infallibility or incorrigibility, but something better than sheer guessing--but only if we restrict ourselves to relational, extrinsic properties like the power of certain internal states of ours to provoke acts of apparent re- identification. So contrary to what seems obvious at first blush, there simply are no qualia at all. " (Dennett 1988)

Dennett's asserts that "a subject's experience has the quale F if and only if the subject judges his experience to have quale F". This is a statement of the belief that qualia are the same as processes such as judgements. Processes such as judgements are flows of data where one state examines a previous state in a succession over time and embody what Whitehead called the "materialist" concept of time. Dennett does not consider how a scientific concept of time might affect his argument.

Dennett's argument has been persuasive and there are now many philosophers and neuroscientists who believe that the problem of phenomenal consciousness does not exist. This means that, to them, what we call 'consciousness' can only be a property of the functions performed by the brain and body. According to these philosophers only access consciousness exists.

Those who support the idea of phenomenal consciousness also tend to frame it in terms of nineteenth century theory where one state examines a previous state in a succession over time, for instance Edelman(1993) places the past in memories at an instant and time within experience is explained as continuing modelling processes:

"Primary consciousness is the state of being mentally aware of things in the world--of having mental images in the present. But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and a future.... In contrast, higher-order consciousness involves the recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts or affections. It embodies a model of the personal, and of the past and the future as well as the present. It exhibits direct awareness--the noninferential or immediate awareness of mental episodes without the involvement of sense organs or receptors. It is what we humans have in addition to primary consciousness. We are conscious of being conscious."

Block(2004) also suggests this flow from state to state in his idea of "Reflexivity" where our idea of familiarity with an object is due to one state being analysed by another:

"Thus in the “conscious” case, the subject must have a state that is about the subject’s own perceptual experience (looking familiar) and thus conscious in what might be termed a “reflexive” sense. An experience is conscious in this sense just in case it is the object of another of the subject’s states; for example, one has a thought to the effect that one has that experience. The reflexive sense of 'consciousness' contrasts with phenomenality, which perhaps attaches to some states which are not the objects of other mental states. Reflexive consciousness might better be called ‘awareness’ than ‘consciousness’. Reflexivity is phenomenality plus something else (reflection) and that opens up the possibility in principle for phenomenality without reflection. For example, it is at least conceptually possible for there to be two people in pain, one of whom is introspecting the pain the other not. (Perhaps infants or animals can have pain but don’t introspect it.) The first is reflexively conscious of the pain, but both have phenomenally conscious states, since pain is by its very nature a phenomenally conscious state. "

Both Block and Edelman allow phenomenal consciousness, our experience, as an unexplained phenomenon. Block, Edelman and also Dennett's ideas of consciousness are shown in the illustration below:

This model differs from the empirical reports of phenomenal consciousness that were considered earlier. According to the empirical reports the present moment in our experience is extended so the succession of outputs or stages of access consciousness could constitute the contents of phenomenal consciousness. In other words phenomenal consciousness is composed of periods of access consciousness. This is how it seems to the empiricist and in our own experience but how such a state could be explained in terms of brain activity is highly problematical. Given that nineteenth century ideas cannot explain such a state a scientific explanation will be required.

The idea that phenomenal consciousness misrepresents or "misdiscovers" itself (Dennett 1988) deserves further discussion. According to materialism the present instant has no duration so can only be known in succeeding instants as a report or memory and this could be wrong. Whitehead considered that this viewpoint originates in an archaic view of science, particularly the concept of time in science:

"The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries accepted as their natural philosophy a certain circle of concepts which were as rigid and definite as those of the philosophy of the middle ages, and were accepted with as little critical research. I will call this natural philosophy 'materialism.' Not only were men of science materialists, but also adherents of all schools of philosophy. The idealists only differed from the philosophic materialists on question of the alignment of nature in reference to mind. But no one had any doubt that the philosophy of nature considered in itself was of the type which I have called materialism. It is the philosophy which I have already examined in my two lectures of this course preceding the present one. It can be summarised as the belief that nature is an aggregate of material and that this material exists in some sense at each successive member of a one-dimensional series of extensionless instants of time. Furthermore the mutual relations of the material entities at each instant formed these entities into a spatial configuration in an unbounded space. It would seem that space---on this theory-would be as instantaneous as the instants, and that some explanation is required of the relations between the successive instantaneous spaces. The materialistic theory is however silent on this point; and the succession of instantaneous spaces is tacitly combined into one persistent space. This theory is a purely intellectual rendering of experience which has had the luck to get itself formulated at the dawn of scientific thought. It has dominated the language and the imagination of science since science flourished in Alexandria, with the result that it is now hardly possible to speak without appearing to assume its immediate obviousness." (Whitehead 1920).

Direct Realism and Direct Perception
Direct Realism proposes that phenomenal experience is directly objects in the world without any intervening representation. It is motivated by the belief that the Problem of Regression, the Subject-Object Paradox and the recursion form of the Homunculus arguments show that phenomenal consciousness cannot occur in the brain alone. Direct Realists reason that if phenomenal consciousness cannot be things in the brain then it must be something outside the brain.

There are two principle types of Direct Realism: Natural Dualism and Behaviourism (both Radical and Analytical). Some behaviourists use the term “Direct Perception” rather than Direct Realism and consider that only the invariant parts of perception are direct (see for instance Michaels and Carello 1981). Thomas Reid is generally regarded as the founder of Direct Realism. In his Natural Dualism he proposed that the soul is in direct contact with the contents of experience and these contents are things in the world beyond the body. The Direct Realism of Reid is summarised in the statement of his famous disciple Sir William Hamilton: "In the simplest act of perception I am conscious of myself as the perceiving subject and of an external reality as the object perceived". Reid's Natural Dualism has now been largely replaced by radical and analytical behaviourism which eschew the idea of a soul and propose that phenomenal consciousness, if it exists at all, is a behavioural reflex.

The modern justification of Direct Realism mainly consists of arguments against Indirect Realism or Representationalism. Philosophers such as Austin (1962) and Le Morvan (2004) have summarised the Direct Realism debate and have identified the following arguments in favour of Indirect Realism and given rebuttals to each of them:

1. The Causal Argument: perception involves a succession of causal events such as the reflection of photons, bleaching of retinal pigments etc. so perception must involve the end of this causal chain. The Direct Realist response is that, although there may be a causal chain in sensation this does not inevitably imply that the end of the chain is the content of phenomenal experience.

2. The Time Lag Argument: it takes time for light to travel from an object to the senses, time for chemical changes in the retina etc... The Direct Realist response is that direct perception may be referred back in time.

3. The Partial Character of Perception Argument: we only perceive the surface of objects, and then only a part of the surface. As the whole object would be perceived directly perception must be indirect. The Direct Realist response is that direct perception could occur even if only parts of an object were perceived.

4. The Perceptual Relativity Argument: things appear to be different shapes depending upon the point of view. The Direct Realist response is that if perception can occur backwards in time it should have no problem occurring back down a line of sight. However, Le Morvan's argument does not seem to encompass the geometrical nature of phenomenal experience, seeking to explain geometry in terms of movement.

5. The Argument from Perceptual Illusion: A stick may appear bent when projecting from the surface of water. Direct Realists apply the argument used in (4) to this problem. The bent stick illusion is a physical event in the world beyond the eye rather than a normal optical illusion such as the Muller-Lyer illusion etc., see (6) for a discussion of optical illusions.

6. The Argument from Hallucination: Hallucinations are not in the world beyond the body. This is highly problematical for Direct Realists especially when phenomena such as lucid dreams, dreams and visual imaginations are included along with hallucinations. Direct Realists classify these phenomena as not being perceptions or deny that they actually exist as phenomena. Indirect Realists would maintain that all of perception is a reconstruction and use optical illusions such as the Muller-Lyer, Ames Room etc. to justify this contention so the Direct Realist approach to hallucination, dreams etc. might seem like an unwillingness to accept Indirect Realism rather than an argument.

7. The Dubitability Argument (cf: Indubitability argument): we cannot doubt current phenomenal experience but we can doubt the world beyond the body therefore phenomenal experience is not the world beyond the body. Direct Realists fall back on Presentism or functional Presentism to defeat this argument. If phenomenal experience is instantaneous and made anew at each instant then anything can be doubted.

The points above have summarised the Direct Realist stance on visual perception. Other sensory modalities have also been considered in the Direct Realism debate.

Fowler (1986) considered that sounds were attached to objects in the world. This idea is strange because sounds only seem to be closely attached to objects in the world when these objects are seen as well as heard. For example, when a subject is blindfolded it is found that there can be a large error in locating the position of a sound in the world, this is especially true for low frequency sounds. The Direct Realist approach has difficulty explaining the transition from sounds with an indefinite location when a subject is blindfolded to sounds that are bound to visual events when the blindfold is removed. It also runs into problems explaining how the sound of speech from a single loudspeaker can become bound to lip movements on a cinema screen. If the binding does not occur in the brain then where does it occur?

Pain is particularly problematic for Direct Realism because, unlike colour vision where 'red' is inferred to be a property of electrons or light, pain is an inner experience that is not a property of tissue damage. Tissue damage has properties such as bleeding, wheal formation etc. but pain seems to be phenomenal experience in the brain and 'phantom pain' can occur without tissue damage (see Aydede (2001), Tye (2004) and Chapman, and Nakamura (1999) for further analysis). On closer inspection other sensations also appear to be inner experiences rather than direct sensations. For instance, the red crosses of different hues in the illustration below are all due to the same physical wavelengths of light. In this case the range of hues in experience is unrelated to the actual physical red on the page or screen.

Another problem for Direct Realism is that it does not overcome the problems that it is supposed to solve. The argument for Direct Realism begins with the idea that there are severe problems with representationalism (the idea that phenomenal experience is in the brain) and that direct perception is an alternative that does not have these problems. However on closer inspection Direct Realism suffers from almost same problems as representationalism. If phenomenal experience is the world itself then Ryle's regress applies to the world itself and this can only be avoided by assuming that phenomenal experience is a subset of the world (i.e.: a representation) that receives input from other parts of the world that are not part of phenomenal experience.

It is also commonly assumed that Direct Realism avoids the recursion argument because it is believed that the separation of the observer from the things that are observed is simply due to the geometry of the world. If such simple geometry is possible between the eye and the world then it should also be possible in the brain and a similar geometrical explanation could be invoked to avoid recursion in representations.

These points are shown in the illustration below:

Scientists have a further problem with Direct Realism. The illustration below demonstrates that our scientific knowledge of the world differs markedly from our phenomenal experience.

It is difficult to see how the form and content of phenomenal experience could supervene directly on the world beyond the body. The world inferred from measurements beyond the body seems to be a nebulous set of quantum phenomena that are arranged as probability fields in three dimensions at any instant. The objects in this real world are mostly space. The world of phenomenal experience on the other hand contains objects that are one-sided, and are like a 2 dimensional field of vectors directed simultaneously at an observation point which is apparently separate from them. Phenomenal experience is not three dimensional, the rear of objects is not available within it at any instant. Visual phenomenal experience seems to be a geometrical relationship between an abstract observation point and the reflection properties of the part of the world external to the body. It is a form that crudely overlies the angular separations in inferred reality, providing approximate directional data. It is not like things in themselves beyond the body, not even in type, being a set of directional vectors. (See the module on the neuroscience of perception for a discussion of depth perception).

If the form and content of visual phenomenal experience are abstractions separated according to the angular positions of things in the world beyond the body then theories which propose that phenomenal experience is the world itself are problematical. It should be noted that things arranged according to angular positions can appear to overlie any group of similar things along a radius from the centre point.

If Direct Realists admit that things are as they appear to be, observed according to angular positions at a 'point eye', then any representation of things on the inside of a sphere of any radius would appear similar. The geometry of the 'point eye' is problematical whether the view contains the world itself or a representation of the world; it cannot be the movements of lumps of matter or energy and the point observation cannot be due to lumps all landing at a point. In other words the 'view' is inconsistent with nineteenth century materialism and will require a scientific explanation.

Radical and Analytical Behaviourism tackle the problem of the difference between the world inferred from measurements beyond the body and the phenomenal world by denying phenomenal consciousness and maintaining that access and reflex consciousness are all that exists or is necessary. Radical Behaviourism is an offshoot of psychological behaviourism and was established as a philosophical adjunct to Marxism by Vygotsky and popularised by Burrhus Frederic Skinner (see Skinner 1953). There is another movement in psychological behaviourism which is similar to Radical Behaviourism called Ecological Psychology (see Gibson 1966, 1979 and also Michaels and Carello 1981). Analytical Behaviourism is a philosophical movement established by Gilbert Ryle (see Ryle 1949).

The core of Analytical and Radical Behaviourism is the assumption that consciousness exists for a durationless instant so that the Dubitability Argument and the Regression and Recursion Arguments can be applied (Ryle 1949, Skinner 1971 and see the sections on Ryle's Regress and the Subject-Object Paradox above). As a result the Direct Realist is able to insinuate that subjects only think that they have had a particular experience (cf: Dennett 1991a). It is intriguing that Eliminativists also maintain that experience is the world itself, for instance an insight into Dennett's idea of the mind is to be found on pages 407-408 of Consciousness Explained:

"It seemed to him, according to the text, as if his mind - his visual field - were filled with intricate details of gold-green buds an wiggling branches, but although this is how it seemed this was an illusion. No such "plenum" ever came into his mind; the plenum remained out in the world where it is didn't have to be represented, but could just be. When we marvel, in those moments of heightened self-consciousness, at the glorious richness of our conscious experience, the richness we marvel at is actually the richness of the world outside, in all its ravishing detail. It does not "enter" our conscious minds, but is simply available"

This is a clear description of Direct Realism (although Dennett does not describe himself as a direct realist).

Radical Behaviourism is sometimes described as the dictum that the only psychological events that are of importance are those that occur outside the head. The absurdity of this has led to jokes:

Q: What does one behaviorist say to another when they meet on the street?

A: You're fine. How am I?

Q: What does one behaviorist say to another after sex?

A: That was great for you. How was it for me?

(Ziff 1958)

However Vygotsky, Skinner and other Radical Behaviourists hold that inner behaviour is possible so that events within the brain can result in reward or punishment. Vygotsky (1925) describes this approach:

"Consciousness is wholly reduced to the transmitting mechanisms of reflexes operating according to general laws, i.e., no processes other than reactions can be admitted into the organism. The way is also paved for the solution of the problem of self-awareness and self-observation. Inner perception and introspection are possible only thanks to the existence of a proprioceptive field and secondary reflexes, which are connected with it. This is always the echo of a reaction."

Hence Radical Behaviourists are able to make the claim that what are believed to be representations with phenomenal content are processes. Even events such as pain can then be explained as reflexes involving organs within the skin. However, by opening the possibility that such reflexes could occur at any sense organ, including the eye, this makes Radical Behaviourism a mixed Direct Realist/Indirect Realist philosophy with consciousness as a process, not a separate thing such as phenomenal consciousness (see the section on representationalism and intentionality below).

But this raises a serious issue for science: can the phenomenal consciousness that seems to contain our observations really be argued out of existence on the basis of a theory? As Gregory (1988) put it: “ ‘If you can’t explain it – deny it’ is one strategy for dealing with embarrassing questions such as ‘what is consciousness?’ ”. But is this the right strategy?

Direct Realism fails to overcome the problems of regression and recursion inherent in representations. It proposes that phenomenal consciousness is identical to the physical world beyond the body but must then use a plethora of arguments to explain why this is evidently not so. When confronted with these problems its proponents resort to the argument that everything can be doubted and can misrepresent itself. Yet it is still widely believed.

It should be noted that Direct Realism is espoused in Religious Natural Dualism, some forms of Augustinian theology, nineteenth century materialism and its offspring such as Marxism, post-modernism, post-Marxism, and various sociological movements. It is also necessary for some forms of Strong AI to occur. Perhaps this explains why few ideas have attracted as much attention and defence as Direct Realism.

It is interesting to compare the Direct Realist and Indirect Realist interpretations of something as simple as a cartoon on television (such as the image below). According to Indirect Realism the cartoon would be a moving representation constructed in the brain using data from the senses. This leads to the prediction of brain mechanisms for modelling motions, combining colours, binding sound and vision etc., many of which have been verified. Can you demonstrate how the theory of Direct Realism could explain the phenomenal experience that contains the cartoon and produce a list of the predictions made by the theory?

In science a theory should be of predictive value, for instance, information theory describes how the state of a thing can be impressed on a carrier so that a signal can be transmitted from one place to another. This theory predicts what will happen when the signal arrives at its destination and how the state of the source can be inferred from the events at the destination, the total amount of information that can be transmitted etc. At the destination it is the form of the signal that is directly known by interaction and measurement, the form of the source is inferred. Direct Realism is a direct challenge to this information theory but does it deliver a more powerful predictive description of phenomenal consciousness or is experience always dependent on what happens to the information flow between things in the world and somewhere in the brain? Does direct realism have a physical theory?

Ultimately it appears as if Direct Realism is about various understandings of Information Theory. For example, Austin (1962) discusses what we see when we see a church camouflaged as a barn and comments that: "We see, of course, a church that now looks like a barn.". Do we see a church or a barn? Scientific information theory is clear about this, the church is an entity composed of selected information from the quantum state of its constituents, the optical image of a camouflaged church is an arrangement of photons emanating from a screen on which it is projected, the retina has an arrangement of chemical and electrical events based on an optical image and conscious visual experience correlates with the arrangement of things on the retina. The fact that conscious experience also correlates with classifications of the retinal image as a barn or a church suggests that conscious experience is an arrangement of things in the brain based on both the retinal arrangement and the contents of a relational database.

Austin's arguments have been mythologised as a final demonstration that "sense data" theories are false. However, as will be seen below, sense data theories merely claim that there is a succession of information states between an information state outside the body and that reported as conscious experience i.e.: subjects report that a church is camouflaged when it is camouflaged.

Indirect Realism
Indirect realism proposes that phenomenal consciousness exists and is a set of signals or sense data, usually in the brain. This was proposed by philosophers from Aristotle to Locke and was probably the most widespread idea of conscious experience until the eighteenth century.

The idea of sense data is discussed in depth by Russell (1912). Russell's original definition is given below:

"Let us give the name of 'sense-data' to the things that are immediately known in sensation: such things as colours, sounds, smells, hardnesses, roughnesses, and so on. We shall give the name 'sensation' to the experience of being immediately aware of these things. Thus, whenever we see a colour, we have a sensation of the colour, but the colour itself is a sense-datum, not a sensation. The colour is that of which we are immediately aware, and the awareness itself is the sensation. It is plain that if we are to know anything about the table, it must be by means of the sense-data -- brown colour, oblong shape, smoothness, etc. -- which we associate with the table; but, for the reasons which have been given, we cannot say that the table is the sense-data, or even that the sense-data are directly properties of the table."

Russell's definition is a materialist concept in which experience is always of something because the durationless instant of the present has always gone. As such it differs from some empiricist ideas where experience is not confined to the durationless instant.

Science is Indirect Realist because it holds that the scientist can only make measurements of events in the world. These measurements give rise to signals as a result of interaction with the event. According to decoherence theory the signals are a state that is a mixture of the state of the measuring instrument and the state of the thing being measured. For example, the eyes are measuring instruments that are sensitive to photons, photons are signals containing a state that is based on the state of electrons in a surface and the state of electrons is based on the state of the surface etc. Scientific inference allows some aspects of the state of the surface to be inferred from the state of the photons.

In modern Indirect Realism there is an attempt to distinguish the phenomenal content of conscious experience from the processing involved in accessing this phenomenal content. According to these theories phenomenal experience is an arrangement of signals that are the content of the experience. This arrangement forms a representation of things in the world so this form of indirect realism is known as Representationalism. Tye (2003) describes types of representationalist theory:

"Representationalism, as I have presented it so far, is an identity thesis with respect to qualia: qualia are supposedly one and the same as certain representational contents."

Tye also describes variants of this idea of representationalism:

"Sometimes it is held instead that qualia are one and the same as certain representational properties of experiences; and sometimes it is is argued that these representational properties are themselves irreducible (Siewert 1998). There is also a weaker version of representationalism, according to which it is metaphysically necessary that experiences exactly alike with respect to their representational contents are exactly alike with respect to their qualia. Obviously, this supervenience thesis leaves open the further question as to the essential nature of qualia." (Tye 2003).

In a scientific sense Direct Realists believe that phenomenal experience is the signals that occur next to things in the world beyond the body (which they call "things in themselves") and Indirect Realists usually believe that phenomenal experience is signals in the brain. It can be seen from the pattern of signal flow that the signals travelling into the brain preserve the spatial relationships of the original signals and encode the properties in the original signals. This means that the original signals next to the QM sources and the signals in the brain are equivalent provided the latter are oriented appropriately relative to signals from the body. Either set of signals could transmit or contain the same information. Both Direct and Indirect Realism cannot, at present, explain the physics of how a viewing point occurs in experience i.e.: how we seem to see through an apparent space to the signals that are the contents of experience. So the choice between Direct Realism and Indirect Realism reduces to whether there is only one set of signals or a chain of signals between the world and phenomenal experience.

The philosophical arguments for Indirect Realism are listed below:

1. Variable perspective: when we see things the view changes so what we see must be a different set of signals depending on the view rather than a constant object.

2. Illusions: we can see through fingers and see a variety of colours where measurements tell us one exists. Direct Realists quote the "bent stick illusion", which is not really an illusion at all, being a physical event.

3. Hallucinations: two people can have phenomenal experience containing a table. The first may be viewing a real table whereas the second may be hallucinating a table. If the tables are the same (phenomenally) then experience is indirect.

4. Double vision: press the side of one eye, two images appear (cf Hume 1739) yet there are not two things in the world.

5. Time gap arguments: according to materialism the past has gone. The things being seen no longer exist in the state that relates to the state in experience. In the extreme case, some stars in the night sky no longer exist but are still in experience so experience must be a derived signal.

6. Secondary qualities such as pain, colour and smell do not exist as physical things in the source of signals and are likely to be properties of signals in the brain.

Indirect Realism has received strong support from recent discoveries in neuroscience, for example, it is now clear that both the colour and motion in phenomenal experience are added by cortical processes. In Cerebral Achromatopsia patients have suffered trauma to area V4 of the cerebral cortex and report seeing the world in greyscale with no colour vision and in Congenital Achromatopsia people do not even understand the meaning of 'colour'. In an astonishing ailment called Akinetopsia patients perceive movement as a succession of stationary images (Rizzo et al. 1995). Akinetopsia is usually associated with damage to cortical area V5. Moutoussis and Zeki (1997) have demonstrated that the addition of colour occurs more rapidly than the addition of motion. The section on the Neuroscience of Consciousness describes these discoveries and many other aspects of the creation of phenomenal experience in the brain.

Unfortunately knowledge of the whereabouts of the signals that are the content of conscious experience does not resolve the problem of phenomenal consciousness. Whether these signals are next to objects in the world or at the end of a chain of signals in the brain there still remains the problem of how they become arranged in the form of experience. If such a thing occurs at all.

Intentionality and representation
There is a materialist interpretation of representationalism in which representations are redefined as intentional states:

"One way of explaining what is meant by ‘intentionality’ in the (more obscure) philosophical sense is this: it is that aspect of mental states or events that consists in their being of or about things (as pertains to the questions, ‘What are you thinking of?’ and ‘What are you thinking about?’). Intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mind (or states of mind) to things, objects, states of affairs, events. So if you are thinking about San Francisco, or about the increased cost of living there, or about your meeting someone there at Union Square—your mind, your thinking, is directed toward San Francisco, or the increased cost of living, or the meeting in Union Square. To think at all is to think of or about something in this sense. This ‘directedness’ conception of intentionality plays a prominent role in the influential philosophical writings of Franz Brentano and those whose views developed in response to his (to be discussed further in Section 3)."(Siewert 2003)

This definition allows "representation" to be redefined as a data stream rather than a set of things arranged in some mental or neural state that represents things in space. Husserl thought this approach would allow a description of consciousness that "carefully abstains from affirming the existence of anything in spatio-temporal reality" (Siewert 2003) although it could be argued that a data stream such as any description can never escape the constraints of representation in time at some place.

Unfortunately the concept of "intentionality" has become so diverse that it could be applied to almost any aspect of the description of consciousness. An interesting example of this is given by Loar (2001) where "intentionality" is considered to overlap "representing" and "conceiving":

"A person's thoughts represent things to her -- conceive things -- in many ways: perceptually, memory-wise, descriptively, by naming, by analogy, by intuitive sorting, theoretically, abstractly, implicitly and explicitly. These various manners of conceiving have something in common: they have intentional properties, and they have them essentially.

The usage of the term "intentional state" has become so broad that it now means little more than a state that is about another state.

References

Siewert, C. (2003). Consciousness and Intentionality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentionality/

Also see Loar, B. (2001) “Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content”, in Reflections and Replies, ed. M. Hahn and B. Ramsberg, MIT. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/concepts/loar.html Williford, K. (2002) The intentionality of consciousness and the consciousness of intentionality. Intentionality: Past and Future, edited by Gábor Forrai and George Kampis, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. http://web.stcloudstate.edu/kwwilliford/Intentionality%20of%20Consciousness.pdf

Byrne, A. (2001). Intentionalism Defended. Philosophical Review 110 (April 2001):199-240. http://stripe.colorado.edu/~leeds/byrne.pdf

Cartesian materialism
The term "Cartesian materialism" once meant the idea that the mind is in the brain (see for instance Block 1995). The term had largely fallen out of use in philosophy until revived by Daniel Dennett (1991) in the book Consciousness Explained. Dennett uses a very particular definition of the term in his discussions and also uses a particular definition of the word "mind". See the section on Daniel Dennett for Dennett's critique. Philosophers who adhere to the idea that the mind is in the brain tend to call themselves "indirect realists" or "representationalists" where the substrate of conscious experience is in the brain and would deny that Dennett's critique applies to their proposals. Dennett's critique makes the materialist assumption that if there is a representation in the brain then a further flow of material out of this representation would be required for the representation to become part of mind.

Identity theories of mind
The idea that mental states are brain states is known as the identity theory of mind. There are two sorts of identity theory, in type identity theory it is held that mental states are identical to brain states whereas in token identity theory it is held that mental states correlate with brain states.

Type identity theory was attacked by Putnam in "The Nature of Mental States" where he pointed out that if mental states are functions then type identity theory would presuppose that animals that had the same mental states would need to have identical brain structures. He suggested that this is unlikely, it being more probable that animals have functional systems that perform similar overall functions but which are not identical. In other words, if it is assumed that conscious experience is a set of functions then token identity theory is more probable than type identity theory.

Putnam's critique does not preclude identity theories of mind that involve "passive ideas" (i.e.: states that are not classical functions).

Most identity theories of mind would be representational, the physical states representing the world in some way. All identity theories of mind involve Cartesian materialism in the sense of the mental states being brain states. According to identity theories the mind is in the brain.

Putnam, H. (1967) The nature of mental states. In The Nature of Mind, edited by Rosenthal, pp. 197–203. Originally published as "Psychological predicates in Art, Mind, and Religion", edited by Capitan and Merill, pp. 37–48.

Dualism
Prior to considering the arguments surrounding dualism it is important to have a clear idea of "information" because many of these arguments have parallels with the difference between information as a set of states that can be transmitted and the substrate on which this information is expressed or from which the information is derived. See Elementary information and information systems theory.

Cartesian dualism
Descartes, a philosopher, analysed his experience and developed an empirical description of how it is arranged. He described mental images and perceptions as extended in space and with a duration. He called these extended things ideas (Cartesian ideas) and proposed that they are patterns in the brain. Descartes thought the pineal gland was the most likely location for these ideas because it is one of the few single organs in the brain. He also proposed that there is a rational soul that directly contacts these ideas:

"Now among these figures, it is not those imprinted on the external sense organs, or on the internal surface of the brain, which should be taken to be ideas - but only those which are traced in the spirits on the surface of gland H (where the seat of the imagination and the 'common sense' is located). That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses." Descartes (1664)

See section on Descartes for more information and references.

Descartes considered that the soul was a physical point, an unextended entity that acts like a mind's eye. He called this unextended place the res cogitans and concluded that it was a substance that differed from that of material things:

".. I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that " I," that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is."Descartes (1637)

This unextended substance that is not material gives the word "substance" a new meaning. It has been attacked as a concept by Locke, Hume, Berkely and many other philosophers. The concept of there being two substances, that which composes the physical world and that which composes the soul, is the origin of the word Dualism but dualism, as a concept, has been extended beyond this original meaning. Cartesian dualism is a type of substance dualism.

Cartesian dualism is an attempt to explain our experience. According to Descartes something supernatural would be needed for an unextended viewing point to exist.

Reid's Natural Dualism also has a point soul looking at things but proposes that the things in question are forms in the world rather than in the brain.

Property dualism
Another sort of dualism has arisen out of a particular interpretation of the regress and homunculus arguments. These arguments show that phenomenal experience is not due entirely to flows from place to place (i.e.: it is not due to classical processes and functions). Property dualism asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e. in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge.

As Goldman (1993) pointed out, qualitative experience does not seem to be needed in a functional description of a system:

"For any functional description of a system that is in pain (or has an itch), it seems as if we can imagine another system with the same functional description but lacking the qualitative property of painfulness (or itchiness)."

Certainly a functional system that merely reports the words "I am in pain" when it is dropped on the floor does not require any qualitative property of painfulness. The absent qualia arguments suggest that even in a large system there would be no need for qualitative properties for the performance of any classical function.

Chalmers (1993) commenting on Goldman's point, said that this implies that zombies might exist, functional replicas of humans but without qualia. He then denied that a complete functional replica of a human could exist without also including qualia:

"It seems to me that the only way to avoid this conclusion is to deny that Zombie Dave is a conceptual possibility; and the only principled way to deny that Zombie Dave is a conceptual possibility is to allow that functional organization is conceptually constitutive of qualitative content." Chalmers (1993).

In other words he identifies qualia with function. According to Chalmers (1996) qualia are a particular type of function:

"I claim that conscious experience arises from fine-grained functional organization. More specifically, I will argue for a principle of organizational invariance, holding that given any system that has conscious experiences, then any system that has the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. According to this principle, consciousness is an organizational invariant: a property that remains constant over all functional isomorphs of a given system. Whether the organization is realized in silicon chips, in the population of China, or in beer cans and ping-pong balls does not matter. As long as the functional organisation is right, conscious experience will be determined." p249

Chalmers' idea of functional organisation has within it a sometimes vague implication that the functional units must have a particular form; for instance, in the development of his argument, he refers to “fine grained” replacement of organic functional units with inorganic units.

Chalmers is actually making two major points, firstly that qualia occur during the motion of things (functions), secondly that qualia are independent of any particular substrate.**  For the first point to be consistent with materialism the qualia must have no effect on the function, they must be epiphenomenal. Epiphenomenal qualia would not be forbidden by the regress and homunculus arguments and would be akin to Berkeley's "passive ideas".

Whether or not epiphenomenal qualia are physical depends upon the definition of the word "physical". If physical functions cause qualia but qualia cannot affect functions then the qualia are "physical" in the sense of being caused by physical events but might be regarded as non-physical in the sense of being isolated from further physical events. In philosophical terms they violate the principle of Causal Closure. However, there are other definitions of physicalism based on arguments such as Methodological Naturalism which hold that anything that can be investigated using the methods of natural science is a physical thing (see Stoljar 2001). Thus, although epiphenomenal qualia may not conform to materialism they may be encompassed by physicalism; as events that are related to material events they are awaiting a physical theory of how they emerge from a given function.

The reader might consider whether phenomenal consciousness is indeed epiphenomenal. Empirical reports describe it as something that is different from the world beyond the body (see direct realism) - could we generate empirical reports of an epiphenomenon?

The term property dualism describes how physical events might give rise to a set of properties that cannot be predicted from the fine structure of the physical system. The "dualism" is present because one set of events is related to two sets of properties, one of which is not related by materialism to the set of events. In the case of the proposal about consciousness outlined above an extra assumption, beyond materialism, would be needed to explain qualia. Property dualism might be defined as a theory that there could be a theory of consciousness but that this requires some new assumption.

As far as the "when and where" of consciousness are concerned, property dualism states that it is somewhere in the processes performed by the organism and the parts of the organism.

** In terms of information processing, Chalmers is proposing that qualia are the enactment of a particular information processing structure.

 * Block, N. (2006). Max Black's objection to mind-body identity. Oxford Review of Metaphysics No.3. http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/BlockFest/MaxBlack.rtf
 * Chalmers, D.J. (1993) Commentary on "The Psychology of Folk Psychology". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16:35-36, 1993
 * Chalmers, D.J. (1996) "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory". Oxford University Press. 1996.
 * Goldman, A.I., (1993). The Psychology of Folk Psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 15-28 (1993). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/goldman.psyc.html

Predicate dualism
Predicate dualism is the view espoused by most non-reductive physicalists, such as Donald Davidson(1980) and Jerry Fodor(1968), who maintain that while there is only one ontological category of substances and properties of substances (usually physical), the predicates that we use to describe mental events cannot be redescribed in terms of (or reduced to) physical predicates of natural languages. If we characterize predicate monism as the view subscribed to by eliminative materialists, who maintain that such intentional predicates as believe, desire, think, feel, etc., will eventually be eliminated from both the language of science and from ordinary language because the entities to which they refer do not exist, then predicate dualism is most easily defined as the negation of this position. Predicate dualists believe that so-called "folk psychology", with all of its propositional attitude ascriptions, is an ineliminable part of the enterprise of describing, explaining and understanding human mental states and behavior.

Davidson, for example, subscribes to Anomalous Monism, according to which there can be no strict psycho-physical laws which connect mental and physical events under their descriptions as mental and physical events. However, all mental events also have physical descriptions. It is in terms of the latter that such events can be connected in law-like relations with other physical events. Mental predicates are irreducibly different in character (rational, holistic and necessary) from physical predicates (contingent, atomic and causal).

(Section based on Wikipedia article)

 * Davidson, D (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924627-0
 * Fodor,J. (1968) Psychological Explanation, Random House. ISBN 0-07-021412-3.

Interactionism
Interactionism is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states. This is a position which is very appealing to common-sense intuitions, notwithstanding the fact that it is very difficult to establish its validity or correctness by way of logical argumentation or empirical proof. It is appealing to common-sense because we are surrounded by such everyday occurrences as a child's touching a hot stove (physical event) which causes him to feel pain (mental event) and then yell and scream (physical event) which causes his parents to experience a sensation of fear and protectiveness (mental event) and so on.

Epiphenomalism
According to epiphenomenalism, all mental events are caused by a physical event and have no physical consequences. So, a mental event of deciding to pick up a rock (call it "M") is caused by the firing of specific neurons in the brain (call it "P"), however when the arm and hand move to pick up a rock (call it "E") this is only caused by P. The physical causes are in principle reducible to fundamental physics, and therefore mental causes are eliminated using this reductionist explanation. If P causes M and E, there is no overdetermination in the explanation for E.

Parallelism
Psycho-physical parallelism is a very unusual view about the interaction between mental and physical events which was most prominently, and perhaps only truly, advocated by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Like Malebranche and others before him, Leibniz recognized the weaknesses of Descartes' account of causal interaction taking place in a physical location in the brain. Malebranche decided that such a material basis of interaction between material and immaterial was impossible and therefore formulated his doctrine of occasionalism, stating that the interactions were really caused by the intervention of God on each individual occasion. Leibniz idea is that God has created a pre-established harmony such that it only seems as if physical and mental events cause, and are caused by, one another. In reality, mental causes only have mental effects and physical causes only have physical effects. Hence the term parallelism is used to describe this view.

Occasionalism
Occasionalism argues that bodily events are the occasion of an act by the Creator causing a corresponding mental event, and vice versa. Any such view requires a theological structure as a premise.

Idealism
According to Idealism only the mental truly exists.

The form and content of personal conscious experience might be related to the structure of the world and brain in several ways. It could be a solipsism or be the mind of God.

This is a stub and needs expansion.

Etymology
Ancient Greek pan (πᾶν : "all, everything, whole") and psyche (ψυχή : "soul, mind"). Psyche is the from ψύχω (psukhō, "I blow") and means mind or 'life-breath'.

Philip Goff, a proponent of panpsychism, carves out a distinction between panexperientialism and pancognitivism. Panexperientialism is the belief that experience is ubiquitous, while pancognitivism is the belief that cognition is ubiquitous. Most modern purponents of panpsychism, such as Annaka Harris and David Chalmers, are careful to distance themselves from pancognitivism.

In some interpretations, such as monadism, Panpsychism and Idealism can overlap because the universe is conceived as being composed of an infinity of point consciousnesses that each contain information about the whole universe.

The form and content of personal conscious experience might be related to the structure of the world and brain in many ways.

This is a stub and needs expansion.

title: Consciousness Studies/The Conflict2


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Physical Chemistry/Introduction to QM

Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics developed in the first part of the 20th century that was highly successful in explaining the behavior of atoms, molecules and nuclei. Developed between 1900 and 1930 and later combined with the general special theory of relativity, it revolutionized the field of physics. The new concepts, which were the particle properties of radiation, the wave properties of matter, quantization of physical properties and the idea that one can no longer know exactly where a single particle such as an electron is at any one time were necessary to explain all of the new experimental evidence that was available at the time.

At the turn of the 20th century, classical theories were well-established for thermodynamics, optics, electromagnetism, and motion of objects. Classical predictions were very accurate for nearly every system that had been studied, and there was a common belief that all of the conceptual problems in chemistry and physics were essentially solved (although solving the equations for a large complex system could be computationally challenging).

A series of experimental results that could not be explained using classical mechanics ultimately led to the development of quantum mechanics. As a result, much of modern chemistry has been explained using the principles of quantum mechanics: for example, atomic structure, molecular bonding, and all types of spectroscopy are directly related to quantum chemistry. Quantum mechanics has also been applied to develop devices we use every day including semiconductors in the circuitry of our computers and lasers in our CD players.

title: Physical Chemistry/Introduction to QM


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Talk:QBasic/Text Output

PRINT "This line will never be seen" CLS PRINT "Hello"; PRINT " World", PRINT "Hello Jupiter" PRINT "Good Bye",,"For";" Now" PRINT 1,2,3,4,5

Complete Restructure
I would like this page to be completely restructured so that it will be more user friendly.

--Grich 08:26, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

title: Talk:QBasic/Text Output


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Talk:Music Theory/Playing by Ear

=Perfect Pitch=

Untitled
On http://www.perfectpitch.com, it says that perfect (or absolute) pitch can in fact be aquired. I've never tried there course myself, but they say that there is research done by universities that backs up what they say. --Kram 20:18, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Music Theory/Playing by Ear


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User:BarnacleKB~enwikibooks

Two Cent Description
BarnacleKB is a sardonic Washingtonian who mangles web sites by day for a small consultancy firm. By night, however, his superpowers reveal themselves and he typically saves the world by being immersed in motorsports.

When relaxing, he can often be found listening to loud obnoxius music, or reading books of absolutely no merit.

When all else fails, he sleeps.

He can be found on both Wikibooks and Wikipedia under the pseudonym BarnacleKB.

Professional Life
I am currently employed for a small strategic marketing consultancy as a web developer and rookie marketing wonk.

I prefer focusing on websites using Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (xHTML) + Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Some of my previous occupations have included gigs as a warehouseman, bartender, and bump on a log.

Recreational Life
My biggest passion in life has to do with motorsport. I love all forms, but am generally less intersted when they only turn left.

I'm fond of automobiles in general, being a huge Bimmerphile in particular.

Personal Life
I was born in the late 1970s in Winter Park, Florida, spent way too much of my life in Duvall, Washington, and now live in Shoreline, Washington.

title: User:BarnacleKB~enwikibooks


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User:Lcolson

I'm a graduate student in Madison. I ocassionally add stuff when I search for things on wiki's and get dissapointed that they don't have relevent information. Currently, I'm thinking of adding some more pictures to wiki's that I can take myself cause I think some could really use more pictoral examples... I also added some initial stuff to the wikiversity nuclear engineering book.

title: User:Lcolson


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Template:Computer science bookshelf

Computer Science G ENERAL T OPICS  - A-level Computing - Algorithms - Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms - Basic Computer Security - Cryptography - Technology Certifications - Data Structures - Open Source - Operating System Design - Reverse Engineering - The Computer Revolution - The Design and Organization of Data Centers - T HEORY  - Computability and Complexity - Logic for Computer Scientists - Parallel Processing Theory and Application - Self-Replicating Automata - P ROGRAMMING  - Active Server Pages - ASP.NET - Cocoa - Compiler Construction - GNU C Compiler Internals - Computer Programming - Object Oriented Programming - Procedural programming - Software Engineering - Struts — P ROGRAMMING LANGUAGES BOOKSHELF  — D OMAIN-SPECIFIC LANGUAGES BOOKSHELF  — C OMPUTATIONAL I NTELLIGENCE  - Artificial Intelligence - Programming AI with Leaf - Neural Networks - Robotics - C OMMUNICATIONS AND N ETWORKING  - Internet Technologies - CORBA - Communication Systems - Voice over IP - Semantic Web - XForms Tutorial and Cookbook - C OMPUTING IN I NDUSTRY  - Collected Real-life Experiences - Database Management System (edit template) All Computer Science books...

title: Template:Computer science bookshelf


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Playful Organizing/Setting Objectives

How To Set Objectives

 * 1) Decide the time to allow, for example allow three hours.
 * 2) List potential goals, for example:
 * 3) Update address book.
 * 4) Add list for bookshelf on Amazon.
 * 5) File papers.
 * 6) Talk about what to do with crafts.
 * 7) Talk about what to do with tapes.
 * 8) Prioritize goals, for example:

 * High priority : Update address book, talk about crafts, talk about tapes, file papers.
 * Low priority : Add list for Amazon.

title: Playful Organizing/Setting Objectives


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Mambo Open Source/Country locale

This article explains what country locale is, and is also a guide to what you should set as country locale.

title: Mambo Open Source/Country locale


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Talk:Movie Making Manual/Writing/Writing

Tried using the wordplayer link, doesnt seem to work...--220.236.47.222 01:54, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * I Know this comment is from over 8 years ago, but the link is working :) --Illusional (discuss • contribs) 01:05, 9 October 2013 (UTC)


text: Template:Portuguese Grammar/index

title: Template:Portuguese Grammar/index


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Wikibooks talk:Book of the month

Book of the Month Award Template
I created a simple template to put onto the "winning" book that could show an "award" or special distinction has been granted to that book. This is just something to get started, and feel free to edit the template if you think some more work should be there. I was trying to do something like the picture of the day or the article of the day on Wikipedia, and added a trophy picture I found on commons to show it was something special. For now, this is just quick and dirty.Rob Horning 06:08, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)

We sure are running out of good wikibooks to host on the front page aren't we, ey? --Cyberman 23:42, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Is a "Book of the Year" award planned? Xiaodai 8 July 2005 09:01 (UTC)

BotM completeness
Out of curiosity, what characteristics do you look for when voting? How important is completeness? Many past BsotM are relatively complete, but many books that are less developed are nominated every month. The German book, for example, is far from complete, but seems to be coming along nicely. The extra attention received by an award would be beneficial for any developing book -- but I also understand the argument that developing books may not represent the "best" of Wikibooks to new or casual visitors. Vault 20:19, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

 * I litterally try to vote on the best that is currently available on Wikibooks at the moment, and hasn't yet won the Book of the Month title. Sometimes this does become a book that is not yet complete, mainly because Wikibooks is still a relatively new project.  It takes some time to complete a book and a lot of effort, usually from many people.  IMHO some books have "won" in the past due to the percieved benefit (and there is some) of getting a prominent place on the front page, which has resulted unfortunately in some "sock puppet" votes, or at least by relative newcommers to Wikibooks voting only for their favorite book because it is a topic they are interested in, not because it is necessarily the best on Wikibooks at the moment.  Some lower quality books have therefore won the monthly vote.  In the case of the German Wikibook, I think it has been developing quite nicely, and I don't have a personal objection to it becoming a Book of the month, although I think there are some better books out there.  --Rob Horning 14:07, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Inflation
Is it too much to hand out an award (and icon) for a wikibook every month? It seems like nearly everything on the main page now has an award next to it. Maybe it'd be better to save the awards for the projects which are *really* producing something substantial and useful. Otherwise the awards start to become a little meaningless or even counterproductive (all wikibooks with an award are not equal but it doesn't seem that way at first sight). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.72.169.116 (discuss • contribs) 14:15, 20 March 2006

 * The reason why so many books on the main page have an award to them is quite simple: Only bookshelves of the month books winners are shown on Template:Main Page navigation. Apart from BOTM winners, books with PDFs, Wikijunior Books, the 10 newest books, and so called hot picks are shown. That is a pretty select group. Prehaps you want to participate in Template talk:Highlighted as well if you are concerned about the main page. --Krischik T 15:10, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

 * I'm not entirely sure that we even need to have the book of the month winners listed on the front page in this manner, as it is going to get us back to the original situation we had earlier with a huge pile of listings of random books. Still, they are going to be somewhat higher quality than the list of all Wikibooks was before on the front page.  On average, I would say that about 5-10 serious books are started on Wikibooks each month, so handing out an award every month is not going to run out of a supply of possible book titles.  The real trick is to dig up the gems that are buried in Wikibooks at the moment.  --Rob Horning 14:13, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Voting Rules
If the rules is - just vote - why were 2 users deleted because they have less than 20 edits? You can have arule saying one should have at least 50/100 edits. But at the moment there is no such rule - so the votes shouldn't be disregarded.

Mailing list

 * Anyway to get a monthly email telling us the book of the month?--203.214.95.227 13:50, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

title: Wikibooks talk:Book of the month


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Talk:Blender 3D: HotKeys

Updates For Blender 2.5
I have added a couple of templates for marking keys as being specific to “Pre-Blender-2.5” or “Blender 2.5”. If you have a look on the Object Mode HotKeys page, you can see these being used in the definitions of CTRL+NKEY, CTRL+SKEY, CTRL+WKEY and CTRL+XKEY as examples. Let me know if you think this is (or isn’t) the right way to do it. Ldo (talk) 07:20, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Tutorial Authors Wanted on Official Blender MediaWiki!
The main Blender documentation and tutorial authors are now working on the Official Blender MediaWiki. If you're considering helping write Blender tutorials or documentation, please consider helping us at the official wiki instead.--Popski 17:45, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

I would like to remove that note about merging this into the Noob to Pro book. That’s a tutorial book, this is a quick reference, the two serve quite different purposes, so they shouldn’t be merged. — Ldo (talk) 04:57, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree with Ldo. I will remove the merge template. --Stepheng3 (talk) 00:55, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Hello, I've set up the new system for this wikibook. It makes very heavy use of templates. I'd like to write an explanation here about how one should go about adding to this reference, but that will have to wait for another day. If you take a look around you should be able to see very quickly how it's all set up yourself (note you'll have to press the "edit this page" link on each page to see it's setup). --Spiderworm 17:05, 2 Jul 2005 (UTC)

 * This looks nice, but how can I find, let's say, locking X axis after I press GKEY? In previous HotKeys version was easy, I just pressed CTRL-F (find) in my browser and wrote lock in find window.--Popski 06:53, 3 Jul 2005 (UTC)

I'll get that added :) --Spiderworm 5 July 2005 13:01 (UTC)

Ok Popski I added those shortcuts to the book, plus a couple more. Take a look at these pages as well:

Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Edit_Mode_HotKeys_Review

Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Object_Mode_HotKeys_Review

These templates can easily be added to other Blender books, and individual hotkey descriptions can also be added to tutorials because everything's templatized :) --Spiderworm 5 July 2005 15:12 (UTC)

 * I just wanted to say that in this template needs to be included All HotKeys. I didn't want to mess this templates without previous discussion with you. BTW, HotKeys for locking axis in your upper links are wrong. --Popski 5 July 2005 17:26 (UTC)

 * I added All HotHeys in Template:Blender_3D:_HotKeys/Navigation, maybe need this module different front page now... I'm so busy with IK right now that I don't have time to fill all HotKeys stuff in redlinks :) --Popski 18:52, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Blender 3D: HotKeys