But if citizens project their attitudes onto the government, won't that amount to electing legislators who favor certain policies? And won't that likely result in the passage of laws that favor certain points of view and mesh with certain attitudes? And by the way, would MLK day have been made a holiday if there hadn't been broad public support for doing just that?

I think the best place to begin is with the first sentence: "All the empirical objects that I perceive around me are structures of sensations." I think this confuses two things. The objects we perceive are things like tables, chairs, tin nickels and left-handed paper-hangers. And none of those things are structures of sensations. Now it may be that the way we perceive these things is by having various sensations, and it's also true that in some sense the sensations are manufactured in the brain, brought about with the causal assistance of the paper-hangers and such. But the machinery of perception isn't the same as what's perceived. More generally, it's no surprise that we perceive things by way of stuff going on in our brains. But that stuff isn't what we see; it's what makes seeing possible. So yes: the real world really is real (last time I checked). It's not composed of sensations, though sensations may be among the many things that make up the world entire.

No. Alice may think that Jones is a genius; Bob may think he's a fool. He might be neither.

It's possible that the constituents of a conscious being might be conscious, though there's no strong reason to think that it's true. Some philosophers have speculated that there are primitive little events or occasions of experience that, when arranged properly, make up minds like ours, though this isn't a popular view. Perhaps a little less odd is the possibility that each hemisphere of your brain contains a separate stream of consciousness. The philosopher Derek Parfit (among others) has had some interesting things to say about this based on evidence from cases of people whose corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) has been cut. Whether this would be a case of one conscious being with parts that are also conscious is harder to say. In any case, from the fact that you are conscious, nothing follows one way or the other about whether your cells are. To infer that they must be would be to commit the fallacy of division. To infer that they must not...

We normally assume that causes can't precede their effects, but this isn't a logical truth, and in fact it's possible to tell coherent stories where the principle fails. By "tell coherent stories," I don't just mean tell science fiction. As your author may point out (I haven't read the book), it's possible to say how causal loops and backward causation might fit into physical theory, even though there's no strong case for saying that such things actually happen. So there's no issue about the "logic" of causality being violated. As for your Christmas shopping, this isn't really an example of the future affecting the present. Your present intentions do the causing. You want to make sure that come Christmas day, Granny gets that gorgeous pair of Manolo Blahniks, and it's that present desire and intention that gets you to head off to the shoe store. Granny's beaming grin isn't reaching back from the future to get you to the mall.

The idea of an "opposite" isn't really well-defined. What you're calling the opposite (e.g., "not-dog" as the opposite of "dog") is what a logician might call the contradictory . But even though "opposite"' doesn't have a precise meaning, it's clear from the way that people use the term that it doesn't just mean the contradictory. If we want to figure out what a term means, we're well-advised to attend to how competent speakers use it. Ask any competent speaker for the opposite of "white" and she'll say "black." Ask any competent speaker for the opposite of "tall" and he'll say "short." But what can we gather from this? First, that a term and its opposite can't both apply to the same thing. Opposites are contraries . A bit more precisely, if the term "Y" is the opposite of a term "X," then "a is an X" and "a is a Y" can't both be true. However, in typical cases of opposites, they could both be false. (My pen is neither white nor black, for instance.) Still, that isn't enough. After all, ...

If Olla Fritzharold were to give a scat-singing performance whose syllables accidentally added up to something that sounded just like calling one of the audience members a shiftless monkey in his own native language, would that qualify as an insult? No. There's nothing like the relevant intention anywhere in the ballpark (or the auditorium.) Art and insults aren't the same thing, but it's part of the conventions that go with what counts as art that typically, at least, there had to be some sort of relevant intention behind the object. Of course, this isn't airtight. After all, there's such a thing as "found art," and then there's Duchamp's famous "Fountain," which was a factory-made urinal. But in cases like these, there's a good case for saying that what makes the thing art as opposed to merely an interesting(?) object is the fact that someone who stands in the right relation to the "Artworld" declares it to be art. And so we still have an art-relevant intention. The larger point is...

I'll have to confess that I'm one of those people who was early on seduced by a particular sort of solution to this sort of problem, and since then I've never been able to feel the force of the puzzle. Here's a somewhat fanciful example that conveys the idea. Suppose that we have a body whose temperature at 12:00 midnite is o° Celsius. And imagine that the body's temperature is increasing at a steady rate as follows. Let T t be the body's temperature at time t. And let the temperature at any given time over the hour after midnite be given by T t = t where t is the number of minutes after midnite. In other words, the temperature rises steadily at the rate of one degree Celsius per minute. It goes through all the intermediate values in finite time. If the arithmetic of real numbers makes sense, so does this. And so I can't find the puzzle. Pick any time you like over that one hour period. There's an answer to the question "What is the body's temperature at that instant?" And in...

The best piece of advice I ever heard on this issue came in a talk I heard years ago about Darwin. Darwin wanted to convince us of something that wasn't at all obvious when he introduced it. But more to the point, he wanted to be taken seriously by the scientific community. How did he do it? By spending the early part of his career demonstrating that he could do what his fellow scientists did -- that he could do credible, solid research that his colleagues would recognize as such. That made it possible for him to be taken seriously when he introduced his novel ideas. If someone is going to invest the time and energy needed to explore and evaluate ideas that are far from the mainstream, they need good reason to think that the effort might pay off. For every brilliant maverick in any field, there are at least 10 cranks. We might put it this way: if you want to persuade your peers, you need to be accepted by them as an able worker in your field. And doing that has an advantage from your own...

I am an animal, and I am at least intermittently self-aware, so yes. But I'm guessing you wanted to know whether non-human animals are self-aware. We could spend some time trying to sort out exactly what counts as self-awareness, and that would be a lengthy though worthwhile exercise. But the short and plausible answer is that some are and some (perhaps most) aren't. One reason to think that some are comes from research with mirrors. Some elephants and some chimps, at least, seem to be able to figure out that what they're seeing in a mirror is their own reflection. You can read a short account of some of the research here .