Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done..

I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don'….

The 'phenomenal concept' issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available t….

After all, in supporting phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I ….

A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physica….

I'm not so sure that I am a reductionist in the strict type-identity sense. The issues here are messy. But I certainly a reductionist in the more gen….

In truth a clear-headed physicalist shouldn't be thinking any of these dualist thoughts. If pains are one and the same as C-fibres firing, then there….

On the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal to phenomenological introspe….

This doesn't show that there is anything wrong with our theoretical understanding, any more than the intuition that the Earth is at rest shows that t….

There is a brain mechanism that works to identify colour differences directly, without first identifying the absolute colour of each surface. So on m….

Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn't made any better by your not being around to notice how ba….

I do have quite a lot of sympathy for Fodor's picture of concepts as information-free atomic entities which get locked onto their referents causally,….

My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn't help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I want….

The orthodox view of colour experience assumes that, when we see a colour difference between two surfaces viewed side-by-side, this is because we hav….

I realize that I won't have quite enough time to understand everything - but that hasn't stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can..

I think my view is rather more radical than Pete Mandik's. Both of us want to show that colour perception doesn't transcend what can be conceptualize….

Kripke says that physicalists like me can't explain the 'apparent contingency' of mind-brain identities. He maintains that, if I really believed that….

I don't think that we are capable of anything like this many possible colour responses. Instead I argue that the perception of colour differences bet….

Nearly everybody nowadays accepts the 'causal completeness of physics' - every physical event (or at least its probability) has a full physical cause….

Of course, there remains the question of why we should find mind-brain identities so persistently counter-intuitive, if they are true. But this is a ….

Schrödinger's cat has a 50% quantum chance of coming out of the box alive and a 50% quantum chance of coming out dead. If you got in the box with it,….