The mind is not the brain. The locus of our consciousness is in the world. Portalism embraces radical phenomenal externalism and represents a contemporary form of dualism that rejects materialist assumptions of mind/brain identity. As a philosophy of mind, Portalism breaks with traditional thinking in two significant ways: first by holding that consciousness is in fact a fifth fundamental force of nature endowed with behavioural attributes not unlike that of gravity, and second by arguing how consciousness inheres in all living organisms regardless of their biological sophistication. Portalism compels us to reject traditional monist theories about the nature of consciousness and boldly enter into a new way of thinking about our own reality.

What are phenomenal qualities, the qualities of conscious experiences? How do the phenomenal aspects of conscious experiences relate to brain processes? To what extent do experiences represent the things around us, or the states of our own bodies? Are phenomenal qualities subjective, belonging to inner mental episodes of some kind, and merely dependent on our brains? Or should they be seen as objective, belonging in some way to the physical things in the world around us? Are they physical properties at all? The problematic nature of phenomenal qualities makes it hard to understand how the mind is related to the physical world. There is no settled view about these issues, which concern some of the deepest, and most central, problems in philosophy. Fourteen original papers, written by a team of distinguished philosophers and psychologists and set in context by a full introduction, explore the ways in which phenomenal qualities fit in with our understanding of mind and reality. The topics covered include: phenomenal concepts, the relation of sensory qualities to the modalities, the limits of current theories about physical matter; problems about the nature of perceptual experience, projectivism, and the extent to which perception is direct; non-conceptual content, the representational nature of pain experience, and the phenomenology of thought; and issues relating to empirical work on synaesthesia, psychological theories of attention, and prospects for unifying the phenomenal array with neurophysiological accounts of the brain. This volume offers an indispensable resource for anyone wishing to understand the nature of conscious experience.

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. In nineteen new essays, philosophers and cognitive scientists explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information and what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. Questions pertaining to how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful feature prominently. Contributors examine the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. Many of the essays engage with the idea that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities. Rather, contributors contend that to understand perception properly we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. In doing so, they aim to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception.

This is a "How To' book about improving one's athletic and golfing ability. It exposes the 'I'm too old," belief and the "I can't' charade. The better teaching in golf comes from those with an inveterate knowledge of the game, and the ability to convey it. As one who has lived the experience of improvement through strengthening the left hand, I'm able to sneak up beside the reader and say, "Oh yes you can. Yes, you CAN. SEE? You couldn't get there from HERE, but if you do THIS first, or accomplish THAT task, you'll improve enough to do THIS." And enjoy the doing of it. Sports like golf - with intricate physical mechanics - SEEM like mysteries to many because they've missed the good instruction, or listened through ears of disbelief because they weren't athletic superstars in their youth. Careful readers will understand they don't NEED to have learned golf as a child to become proficient and have fun with it as an adult. They just need to learn to transfer their personal physical talents and sports abilities into the mechanics of the golf swing. This is a process, and it's what the book is about. I've sought in the writing to simplify golf - a game in which intricacy and difficulty IS the draw, as well as the bane. The book never strays from the theme that golf is a physical game, but without spreading it thin, I maintain that athleticism is gained through diligent and guided practice, peppered with belief. The book focuses on elemental truths fundamental to successfully striking a golf ball. immutable nuggets I've come face-to-face with through experience, highlighted and punctuated by wisdom from, among others, Ted Williams, Jack Nicklaus and Muhammed Ali. Most golfers swing the clubwith a dominant right hand, because 90 percent of the population is right-handed.

One of the most important problems of modern philosophy concerns the place of the mind — and, in particular, of consciousness, meaning, and intentionality — in a physical universe. Brian Loar was a major contributor to the discussion of this problem for over four decades. This volume has two parts: one a selection of Loar's essays on the philosophy of language, the other on the philosophy of mind. A common thread in Loar's essays on language is his engagement with the Gricean program of analyzing linguistic representation in terms of mental representation, thus reducing the semantic to the psychological. In the philosophy of mind he was concerned with understanding consciousness and intentionality (mental representation) from the subjective perspective. The concern that unifies Loar's work in mind and language is how to understand subjectivity in a physical universe. He was committed to the reality of phenomenology, qualia, and the subjective perspective; and he found that phenomena like intentionality and consciousness are, in a certain sense, ineliminable and irreducible to objective ones. At the same time he believed that intentionality and consciousness are grounded in the physical. One of his great contributions was to reconcile these two positions by being a conceptual and explanatory anti-reductionist about both consciousness and intentionality but a metaphysical reductionist nonetheless. He had a deep commitment both to physicalism and to the reality and significance of the subjective point of view.

"[Thich Nhat Hanh] shows us the connection between personal, inner peace and peace on earth." --His Holiness The Dalai Lama Nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr. for a Nobel Peace Prize, Thich Nhat Hanh is one of today’s leading sources of wisdom, peace, compassion and comfort. Exiled from Vietnam over thirty years ago, Thich Nhat Hanh has become known as a healer of the heart, a monk who shows us how the everyday world can both enrich and endanger our spiritual lives. In this book, Jesus and Buddha share a conversation about prayer and ritual and renewal, and about where such concepts as resurrection and the practice of mindfulness converge. In this unique way, Thich Nhat Hanh shows the brotherhood between Jesus and Buddha-- and in the process shows how we can take their wisdom into the world with us, to "practice in such a way that Buddha is born every moment of our daily life, that Jesus Christ is born every moment of our daily life."