Let me add a few remarks, not to disagree with Charles Taliaferro, but to help bring the discussion back to earth after wondering about zombies, etc! I understand quite a bit about my friend Jack's political point of view (we argue often enough in the pub); but I've little idea where he is coming from sexually (what clues I have seem to have no pattern, and a few drunken chats have left me even more mystified). My colleague Jill shares my tastes in music, and we seem to enjoy much the the same concerts and CDs for the same reasons -- when we talk about them, sometimes at length, we seem to be very much on the same wavelength; but in some other respects she's a closed book to me, and the more we discuss, the less I feel that I am "getting" her. And isn't that how it ordinarily is (when we use "understand" in the ordinary way, not in some fanciful philosopher's sense)? We might understand someone's take on X very well, find it difficult to get on their wavelength on Y but sort-of understand, and...

Well, there's mind-altering and mind-altering! Dope that makes you dopey might give you time out from the nagging concerns of philosophy, but isn't likely to play a role in producing serious thought. Wine or beer seems different. The glass or two in the pub after the seminar do often lubricate good philosophy, and the convivial arguments in the conference bar certainly play their part in world of philosophy. As to philosophizing about mind-altering stuffs, there's of course a good amount of discussion on the ethics and politics of legalizing this or banning that. But Charles Taliaferro is right that, when it comes to writing about our experience of the stuff itself (as opposed to ethical and legal issues about it), it is wine that traditionally gets the attention. That's not too surprising, perhaps, when we recall that at least some it is produced, not just to be glugged down, and certainly not just to make you intoxicated, but to be an object of aesthetic attention and reflection, as a...

Two comments on the central pair of assertions: "[T]houghts are not physical. They're metaphysical" -- one terminological (but not insignificant), the other more substantial. (1) The terminological comment is this: "Metaphysical" does not mean "non-physical", "supernatural", or anything of that kind. Metaphysics is just the traditional label for a bunch of topics famously discussed -- though not for the first time! -- in Aristotle's Metaphysics . That book, or rather collection of books, is so called because it was placed meta ta phusika , after the Physics , by ancient editors. Its topics include questions like what makes something an object rather than an event or process? must objects have essential properties and if so what? are numbers a kind of object? what is a cause? Now, those questions (and similar ones that we also nowadays by extension call metaphysical) raise very general issues. And you can see why the ancients might have been at a bit of a loss as to how to...

Short answer: People (in comas or otherwise) don't have souls, so the question doesn't arise. Longer answer: The idea of a soul is, in one main tradition, the idea of an entity, quite distinct from our physical body, which can at least in principle survive independently of the body (and is often thought to be immortal), is the locus of conscious mental activity and is the initiator of our actions as self-aware agents. So, this idea of a soul goes with a dualist or two-component view of the person as compromising a material body and an immaterial soul or mind. Most contemporary philosophers of mind think that there are no good reasons to accept this kind of dualism, and very good reasons not to do so. For some of the arguments, see the opening chapters of The Philosophy of Mind: an Introduction , by myself and O.R. Jones, or any one of a couple of dozen other introductory books on the mind. So most philosophers hold that people don't have souls (that isn't, of course, to deny that...

If this question has gone unanswered for a while, that isn't because it is an uninteresting one. On the contrary! It raises a whole range of deep and difficult issues that have been the subject of a vast amount of discussion (from cognitive psychologists as well as arm-chair philosophers) for years. So I hesitate to plunge in. But still, since no one else has responded yet, let me get the ball rolling -- though these remarks are no more than a very preliminary sorting out of some of the issues. For we need to clarify what is meant here by (1) "language", (2) "thought", and (3) "tied up together". (1) What is meant by "language"? A shared natural language like English, or Welsh, or Sanskrit? Or might we more generously count as a language any system of representations which has a syntax (i.e. there are structural rules determining which arrays of elements from system are allowed) and a semantics (there are rules determining what these arrays mean )? Some have argued that we have an innate ...

I'm sure that you won't be doing something "horribly wrong" by continuing the relationship, if you both can acknowledge and work with your boyfriend's cast of mind. And it's hardly an uncommon situation you are in (as I'm sure many partners of male academics in the mathematical sciences could ruefully tell you!). Though the situation will probably be harder for you than your boyfriend -- for there will be occasions when his lack of ready perception of your more subtle emotional needs will, almost inevitably, be hurtful (for that is as natural reaction for you as his failures will be for him), and be upsetting however much you can explain things away as due to his mild autism. Can I add to your reading list (this is certainly one for both of you!)? Simon Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain is very readable and very insightful by a leading researcher into autism-spectrum conditions.