477,263 research outputs found
The Philosophy of Perception: An explanation of Realism, Idealism and the Nature of Reality
This paper investigates the nature of reality by looking at the philosophical debate between realism and idealism and at scientific investigations in quantum physics and at recent studies of animal senses, neurology and cognitive psychology. The concept of perceptual relativity is examined and this involves looking at sense perception in other animals and various examples of perceptual relativity in science. It will be concluded that the universe is observer dependent and that there is no reality independent of the observer, which is knowable to the observer. The paper concludes by an investigation of what an observer dependent universe would be like and that recognition of an observer dependent world would lead to a more open minded and tolerant world
Accounting for the Specious Present: A Defense of Enactivism
I argue that conscious visual experience is essentially a non-representational demonstration of a skill. The explication and defense of this position depends on both phenomenological and empirical considerations. The central phenomenological claim is this: as a matter of human psychology, it is impossible to produce a conscious visual experience of a mind-independent object that is sufficiently like typical cases, without including concomitant proprioceptive sensations of the sort of extra-neural behavior that allows us to there and then competently detect such objects. I then argue that this view, which is a version of enactivism, best explains the temporality of conscious experienceâwhat is often called the specious present
Invisible Collisions
This activity relates an elastic collision to the change in a satelliteâs or spacecraftâs speed and direction resulting from a planetary fly-by, often called a âgravity assistâ maneuver. Both hands-on and online interactive methods are used to explore these topics. Educational levels: High school
Exploring the mathematics of motion through construction and collaboration
In this paper we give a detailed account of the design principles and construction of activities designed for learning about the relationships between position, velocity and acceleration, and corresponding kinematics graphs. Our approach is model-based, that is, it focuses attention on the idea that students constructed their own models â in the form of programs â to formalise and thus extend their existing knowledge. In these activities, students controlled the movement of objects in a programming environment, recording the motion data and plotting corresponding position-time and velocity-time graphs. They shared their findings on a specially-designed web-based collaboration system, and posted cross-site challenges to which others could react. We present learning episodes that provide evidence of students making discoveries about the relationships between different representations of motion. We conjecture that these discoveries arose from their activity in building models of motion and their participation in classroom and online communities
New Horizons: Orbit and Spin
A whole-body activity that explores the relative sizes, distances, orbit, and spin of the Sun, Earth and Moon. Educational levels: Intermediate elementary
The Paradox of Thought: A Proof of Godâs Existence from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
This paper uses a paradox inherent in any solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness to argue for Godâs existence. The paper assumes we are âthought machinesâ, reading the state of a relevant physical medium and then outputting corresponding thoughts. However, the existence of such a thought machine is impossible, since it needs an infinite number of point-representing sensors to map the physical world to conscious thought. This paper shows that these sensors cannot exist, and thus thought cannot come solely from our physical world. The only possible explanation is something outside, argued to be God
Bodily awareness and novel multisensory features
According to the decomposition thesis, perceptual experiences resolve without remainder into their different modality-specific components. Contrary to this view, I argue that certain cases of multisensory integration give rise to experiences representing features of a novel type. Through the coordinated use of bodily awarenessâunderstood here as encompassing both proprioception and kinaesthesisâand the exteroceptive sensory modalities, one becomes perceptually responsive to spatial features whose instances couldnât be represented by any of the contributing modalities functioning in isolation. I develop an argument for this conclusion focusing on two cases: 3D shape perception in haptic touch and experiencing an objectâs egocentric location in crossmodally accessible, environmental space
The Justified Ontology of Time
What are we justified in asserting when constructing an ontology of time? I believe a version of Presentism to be the only justified theory. âJustifiedâ here refers exclusively to a basis of empirical and epistemological evidence. What can we assert about the metaphysics of time when we start from a justificationist epistemology? Putnam and Rietdijk argue that the relativity of simultaneity supports Eternalism. My investigation examines the strength of justification Eternalism attains from the special theory of relativity (STR) and will argue that Eternalism is not justified by STR. I will also suggest that an alternative metaphysical theory of time, Point Presentism, attains justification from STR
Understanding and Affecting Student Reasoning About Sound Waves
Student learning of sound waves can be helped through the creation of
group-learning classroom materials whose development and design rely on
explicit investigations into student understanding. We describe reasoning in
terms of sets of resources, i.e. grouped building blocks of thinking that are
commonly used in many different settings. Students in our university physics
classes often used sets of resources that were different from the ones we wish
them to use. By designing curriculum materials that ask students to think about
the physics from a different view, we bring about improvement in student
understanding of sound waves. Our curriculum modifications are specific to our
own classes, but our description of student learning is more generally useful
for teachers. We describe how students can use multiple sets of resources in
their thinking, and raise questions that should be considered by both
instructors and researchers.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, 28 references, 7 notes. Accepted for
publication in the International Journal of Science Educatio
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