A person with dementia is gradually losing the capacity to think and problem solve, remember, use language and behave as they once did. However, the person-centred approach to caring for people with dementia asserts that the 'personhood' of each person is present despite this decline in abilities. What is a person in the context of dementia and how do we understand the person who has dementia in philosophical terms?

Why is it that solipsism can't be 100% refuted? It seems that the theory is very flawed and is called incoherent. And if this is the case then why is it said to be irrefutable? Is the only reason that it can't be refuted is because we can't directly experience what another peron is experiencing, so in other words we can only experience life through ourselves. Is this correct?

Is psychoanalysis science?

Are humans capable of imagining things, that are not based on other things they've already seen, or a combination of things they have already seen? For instance if I ask a kid to imagine a new animal (there I'm already using things I know 'animal'), he/she will most likely come up with something like a elephant feeted, giraffe necked, winged, crocodile or somewhere in that fashion. Now of course some people are more creative, but when you look at e.g. art, again what you get are the elephants with long feet, crazily constructed houses, people in all kinds of strange and surreal forms. But in the end it always seems completely based on things we've perceived in the past. What is your view on this, are humans capable of coming up with something 'new'? This raises the question, what do you consider 'new' (not based on things we've seen/heard/perceived in any way before)? This also draws me to the question if there is knowledge which is not acquired by learning? I hope some of you are interested in answering...

Have the advances in brain scanning techniques that allow the brain to be monitored in real-time had an effect on the philosophical discussions regarding the mind/body question? If so what are they? I'd be interested to find out what a student of Wittgenstein or Peter Winch had to say about the subject?

What is the current philosophical viewpoint (from professional academics) regarding the concept of "the embodied mind"? I have just finished rereading "Philosophy in the Flesh" (Lakoff, Johnson); I would like to know the current philosophical standpoint regarding the proposition of the embodied mind. Thanks in advance for all replies!

I can see images and hear sounds inside my head at command. How is our mind able to perceive these things without them being real? I can create whatever image I want, and recall sounds, but I don't understand where or how this information is stored in the brain, and how we can see or hear it.

If my friend is on a street corner with a life-like model of a dog and I drive past in my car so fast that I can't tell the difference between the fake dog and a real dog is there any point in me saying I saw a real or fake dog since, to me, the two are indistinguishable? The classes real dog and fake dog seem to combine to form the class dog-like object. If this same analysis were applied to Searle's Chinese room then it seems pointless to say the room does or doesn't understand. If a person who is unaware of the room's setup (sort of like me in my car) goes up to the room and asks it questions then it provides answers that are consistent with the room understanding Chinese so from that persons point of view the room is just as understanding as any chinese person on the street. If we miniaturised the room and put it in someone's head and put a real Chinese speaker behind the Chinese room slot then the questioner will not be able to tell that any change has occurred.

Can your belief affect the outcome of an event? Such as if you believe that the future will happen a certain way, will the outcome be what you believe?

I was just playing chess against my computer, and suddenly I realized that computer chess has no rules. In computer chess there are things that happen and things that don't happen; there are "laws of nature" (although "nature" is here a computer running a certain software), but there are no rules in the sense of "things regarded as customary or normal", as my dictionary says, or in the sense of "a convention set forth or accepted by a group of people". This way, computer chess is very different from over the board chess. Do you agree?