As the number of systems which offer annotations on digital documents increases, robust anchoring of annotations is a key challenge. It is especially important if the annotator lacks write-access to the document being annotated. For example, if someone makes an annotation on a web page today and the web page changes tomorrow, what happens to the annotation? One approach is simply to “orphan” th...

Physicalism has a problem: experience must derive from wholly physical things, but how can physical matter produce experience? An answer to this question may require a drastic change in the physicalist paradigm. Some propose Panpsychism as the best available response. Panpsychism contends that all physical matter has mental properties. To many such a notion is a sheer absurdity. Two mainstream ...

This paper describes ‘mentality’ in terms of the contents of dynamic state spaces, then goes on to explore how consciousness-associated features of these contents, termed ‘ruling attractors’, could ‘map’ onto neural states. A fractal mapping, its links with memory mediated by the protein CaMKll, is pictured; it’s a view that, with minor differences of emphasis, turns out to have a lot in common...

In recent years, much of the hope for the basic project of materialism, that of explaining mentality in purely physical terms, has been vested in materialist varieties of functionalism (Kim 1998, 73). 1 Instead of identifying mentality with either behavior or brain states as the failed approaches of behaviorism and physicalism do, functionalism identifies mental states as “consisting of a dispo...

The new work, Morphons and Bions (2011), is a realtime computer music work generated in Pd. All sounds in the work are synthesized as opposed to recorded. The sound sources rely fundamentally on white noise and digital noise mediated by classical synthesis techniques and random processes. Since the work is built on a substrate entirely made of noise, the piece is situated within certain philoso...

This paper examines an issue at the centre of feminist debates about pornography and sex work, and that is whether these practices reduce women to sex objects. I question the assumption that the expression of sexual desire is unique in its power to degrade and dehumanize persons. I show that this assumption underlies Catharine MacKinnon’s attack on pornography by considering MacKinnon’s intelle...