Very interesting query. But is it necessarily a 'lucky coincidenceor divine act' that basic physical problems can be solved using basicmathematics? Maybe the reason is that is that our mathematics has beendeveloped in order to deal with the physical world. True, thereare many familiar cases where techniques which were were firstdeveloped by pure mathematicians later turned out to be useful fornovel physical applications. For example, complex numbers are great fordealing with alternating currents in electrical circuits. This may make it seem that the physical applicability of these bits of mathematics is a coincidence after all. But it may still be true that, at a more general level, mathematics is designed to analyse the kinds of patterns that are displayed by physical phenomena. The same kinds of patterns often repeat themselves in nature, as your question implies, so it is scarcely surprising that we have developed mathematics to deal with these patterns. Of course, none of the above...

I agree with Richard. But there is also another sense in which racism leads people to underestimate the number of 'whites'. I am thinking here of the practice of counting somebody as unequivocally 'black' if their ancestry is half European and half African, or even 80% European and 20% African. If skin colour were not considered to be socially and politically significant, this would make no sense at all.

One difference between the sciences and other disciplines is that scientists publish experimental and observational results. Since other scientists rely on these results, they want some way of checking that they are genuine. However, this can't be done simply by scrutinizing their publication, as you might assess the value of a historical argument or piece of literary critcism. Hence the demand that the results be replicable. (This is why it is so highly charged in scientific circles to say that so-and-so's results 'are not replicable'--the suggestion is that so-and-so is incompetent or even fraudulent.)

Modern physics implies that some events are genuinely chancy, in away that undermines determinism: prior circumstances plus scientificlaws don't determine events like the decay of a radium atom, but onlyfix a probability for them. This might look as if it opens theway for 'strong free will', in the sense of allowing agents to affectthe world in a way that is unconstrained by prior circumatances. Butit isn't clear that this works. The idea that physical events all havetheir probabilities fixed by prior circumstances raises just as manyproblems for free will as determinism. The hope is presumablythat strongly free agents can make a difference to the occurrence ofchancy events, given that these events aren't determined. Butunfortunately this seems to be ruled out even by the weaker claim thatthe probabilities of chancy events are fixed by prior circumstances. Ifan act of my will, unconstrained by history, can make it more likelythat a radium atom will decay, say, then that event won't have...

Some philosophers do think that our consciousness 'extends out ofour heads' when we perceive things in our environment. But even theywouldn't hold that your consciousness embraces the moon now (ieas it is when you are perceiving it). For everybody must agree that youwon't see things that happen on the moon until after adelay of more than a second. You also ask whether we see an image of the moon, ratherthan the moon itself. However, scarcely any philosophers nowadays wantto say that we see images, rather than physical things--this idearaises more problems than it solves. (Even philosophers who reject theidea that consciousness depends on how things are 'outside our heads'will generally hold that our perceptions represent physical objectsrather than images.) The general consensus then, both amongthose who think that consciousness 'extends out of our heads' and thosewho don't, is that we see the moon itself, not an image, but the moonas it was more than a second ago. You might want to argue...

I'm going to comment on the question of whether copyright laws arein fact justified, rather than the question Bernard Gert addresses,namely, of whether it is morally wrong in general to violate laws(though in passing I can't stop myself observing that, when it comes tointernet activities, it's not always obvious which country's lawsshould apply). One possible view of copyright (and ofintellectual property generally) is that the creators of such propertyhave an absolute right of ownership, and that the job of the law issimply to protect this right. But an alternative view is thatintellectual property is a socio-legal construction (however it is withother forms of property) and that the job of the law is (a) to allowthe public to maximally benefit from the creation, while at the sametime (b) ensuring that there are sufficient incentives to encourage thecreation in the first place. Nearly all systems of modern law arebased on the second view, as is shown by the fact that they place a timelimit on...

You say that 'it is impossible to prove that there are people that have minds'. But doesn't it depend on what standards of proof are required? If you insist on methods of proof that are 'demon-proof' (that is, are guaranteed to deliver truths in every possible scenario, including ones in which an evil demon is manipulating the evidence), then indeed you won't be able to prove that there are other minds (or that sun will rise tomorrow, or that there is a computer in front of you). But why ever set the standards of proof so high? There are plenty of methods of proof that are a very good guide to truth in the real world without being completely demon-proof. Isn't this enough for them to count as sources of knowledge? Of course, even if this much is agreed, plenty of awkward questions remain. Exactly how good do methods of proof need to be to yield knowledge? How can we find out which methods of proof satisfy those standards? And so on. But a first response to the threat of scepticism is surely to...

You ask specifically about self-consciousness. However, most philosophers would say that the problem of consciousness is posed by consciousness of any kind, and not only by consciousness awareness of the self. After all, it seems natural to suppose that many mammals (and small human babies) are conscious (‘sentient’), in the sense that it is ‘like something’ to be them, even though they are not sophisticated enough to think about their own (or anybody else’s) mental life. The problem of the ‘emergence of consciousness’ seems already to arise for this basic kind of non-reflexive consciousness, even before we get to self-consciousness. As for the emergence of basic consciousness, I think it makes a crucial different whether or not you think of consciousness as something over and above the material world. Your reference to ‘the concept of soul/spirit and mind-body duality’ suggests that you take consciousness to be non-material. If you do think of consciousness in this dualist way, then it will...

You are right that Superman's feat of resurrecting Lois Lane makeslittle sense. The same is true of nearly all films (or stories)involving time travel. The trouble arises when characters 'change thepast'. That whole idea is of doubtful consistency. If Superman makes itthe case that Lois didn't die yesterday, then how come we saw a realityin which she got squashed by the earthquake? Maybe some sense can bemade of this by supposing that reality has a branching structure, andthat Lois dies on one branch but not the other. But even this doesn'tseem to do the trick. Isn't Superman supposed to be saving Lois, not just adding something to a structure in which she is also still squashed? Analternative would be to suppose that Superman (and we viewers) inhabita Supertime, such that at Superdate 1 ordinary reality contains Loisdying yesterday, but by Superdate 2 Superman has changed ordinaryreality so that Lois survived yesterday. This is no doubt how weunderstand the movie, and why it seems plausible...

The idea that our familiar universe is only a fraction of reality isn't just an abstract possibility. Many serious thinkers argue that this hypothesis is in fact strongly supported by physical theory. Two distinct sets of considerations are relevant here. One is to do with the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics says that the world is basically chancy: nothing determines when a radioactive atom will decay, for example; this has a certain probability, and then either does or doesn't happen. However, it has proved surprisingly difficult to give a physically cogent account of quantum chance. Advocates of the Everettian interpretation of quantum theory (a.k.a. the 'many-worlds theory') maintain that the only viable theory is that the universe is constantly splitting into branches, one for each possible outcome of every chance event. At one level this is mind-spinningly extravagant: for starters, it means that each of us is constantly splitting into trillions of irreversibly...