These are working notes on the key concepts in the philosophy of mind and perception that figure in my thinking and writing. Each entry gives a neutral explanation of the concept followed by my own take — where I stand, what I think the concept gets right or wrong, and how it connects to the broader argument of Mind, Matter, and Meaning. They are grouped by theme, in roughly the order the book takes them up.

The inner theater and the problem of perception

Anti-Reification — Not a thesis but a working method: when a term like mind or qualia generates an intractable puzzle, ask what pattern or relation the term abbreviates rather than what inner object it names.

The Inner Theater — The picture of the mind as a private inner space where mental items appear before an inner observer — so deeply embedded in ordinary talk that most people never notice they are using it.

Indirect Realism and Sense-Data — The view that perception never touches the world directly, reaching it only by inference from inner items behind a veil — and the argument from illusion that drives people to it.

Direct Realism — The counterclaim that in ordinary perception we meet mind-independent objects themselves: the apple, not a sense-datum caused by the apple.

Disjunctivism — A rival direct realism, holding that veridical perception and an indistinguishable hallucination share no common mental element at all.

Intentionalist Direct Realism — The view I defend: we perceive mind-independent objects directly, and we do so in virtue of representational content rather than in spite of it. Content is not a screen the world shows up behind; it is what the experience’s directedness at the world consists in.

The Myth of the Given — Sellars’s name for the picture in which empirical knowledge rests on items delivered to consciousness whole, prior to all concepts and theory.

Transparency — Attend to your experience of a red apple and you find only the apple — the observation Moore noticed, Harman made central, and Tye built into an argument.

Phenomenology — Three different things go by the name — a Continental method, the felt character of experience, and the data any theory of consciousness must explain — and conflating them causes trouble.

Predictive Processing and the Interface — Two frameworks from cognitive science — the predictive brain and Hoffman’s interface theory — and the question of whether either really shows that perception hides the world.

Consciousness and the hard problem

The Hard Problem of Consciousness — Chalmers’s question: why does physical processing give rise to any experience at all, rather than going on in the dark?

The Explanatory Gap — Levine’s subtler predecessor to the hard problem: even granting that pain is a brain state, we cannot see why that state should feel like anything.

Qualia — The intrinsic, non-relational qualities conscious experiences are supposed to have — the redness of the red-experience, over and above the red of the tomato.

Qualia Realism — The metaphysical thesis that those qualities genuinely exist, and the primary opponent of any representational account of experience.

Mary’s Room — Jackson’s scientist who knows every physical fact about color vision, walks out of her black-and-white room, sees red, and seems to learn something new.

Zombies and Conceivability — Chalmers’s creature: physically and behaviorally identical to you with nobody home — and the inference from conceiving it to its being possible.

The Phenomenal Concept Strategy — The physicalist’s most developed reply to those arguments: concede the gap between our concepts and deny any gap in the world.

Higher-Order Thought Theories — Rosenthal’s account of what makes a mental state conscious — not anything intrinsic to the state, but a further thought directed at it.

Representation, intentionality, and meaning

Intentionality — Brentano’s mark of the mental: every mental state points beyond itself toward an object, while a rock points at nothing.

Intentionalism — The thesis that what an experience is like consists in what it represents — the strong version identifying the two outright, the weak version only tying them together.

Vehicle and Content — The distinction between the physical thing doing the representing and what it represents — and the confusions that follow from collapsing the two.

Information and Meaning — Shannon information names a statistical relation; meaning names aboutness that can be false. A system can carry the first without any of the second.

Teleosemantics — The family of theories that grounds content in what a mechanism was selected to do — which is what allows a representation to get things wrong.

Semantic Externalism — Putnam’s and Burge’s result that what your thoughts are about depends on your environment and your community, not merely on what sits inside your head.

Reference — The relation between a word and what it is about, why the naive label picture collapses under Frege and Russell, and what survives the wreckage.

Derived and Original Intentionality — Searle’s distinction between things that reach toward the world in their own right and things that mean something only because we use them so.

Machines, computation, and artificial minds

The Turing Test — Turing’s substitution of a game he could actually run for a question he judged meaningless — and what a machine that wins it has really shown.

The Chinese Room — Searle’s man following a rulebook, producing fluent Chinese and understanding none of it: syntax without semantics.

Computation and the Church-Turing Thesis — What the thesis actually claims about computability, and the several further steps needed to get from it to a computational theory of mind.

The Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle — Deutsch’s physical strengthening of that thesis — and why it looks like exactly the bridge the computationalist has always needed.

Simulation and Realization — A simulated storm wets nothing; a simulated calculator really calculates. The label settles nothing — the question is which powers the implementation actually has.

The Symbol Grounding Problem — Harnad’s dictionary-go-round: if symbols are defined only by other symbols, nothing in the system ever touches the world.

Carbon Chauvinism — The charge that a view ties mind too tightly to biological matter — and the substrate question the accusation marks out.

Positions on the metaphysics of mind

Dualism — The claim that a complete physical account of the world leaves something out, in its substance and property versions.

Physicalism — One world, causally closed, with experience and meaning inside it rather than standing outside it as a second realm.

Identity Theory — The first serious physicalist theory of mind: mental states are brain states, numerically identical — one thing described two ways.

Functionalism — Mental states identified by what they do rather than what they are made of — the view multiple realizability made irresistible.

Behaviorism — The attempt to make psychology a science by eliminating the inner entirely, and the pressures it could not survive.

Panpsychism — Consciousness as fundamental and everywhere — and the combination problem that may be as hard as the problem the view was meant to solve.

Reduction and Elimination — The difference between telling you what something consists in and telling you it was never there — the distinction almost everything turns on.

The self, the body, and inner life

The Self — Ego theory or bundle theory: a persisting subject standing behind the experiences, or an organized bundle with no owner at all.

Inner Speech — The silent voice running through ordinary thinking — the most apparently private region of the mind, and the question of whether anything about it is private.

Embodiment — The thesis that a mind cannot be understood by internal organization alone, because content requires real causal-historical engagement with an environment.