Seeing motion and apparent motion

In apparent motion experiments, participants are presented with what is in fact a succession of two brief stationary stimuli at two different locations, but they report an impression of movement. Philosophers have recently debated whether apparent motion provides evidence in favour of a particular account of the nature of temporal experience. I argue that the existing discussion in this area is premised on a mistaken view of the phenomenology of apparent motion and, as a result, the space of possible philosophical positions has not yet been fully explored. In particular, I argue that the existence of apparent motion is compatible with an account of the nature of temporal experience that involves a version of direct realism. In doing so, I also argue against two other claims often made about apparent motion, viz. that apparent motion is the psychological phenomenon that underlies motion experience in the cinema, and that apparent motion is subjectively indistinguishable from real motion

Verbs, times and objects

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of the influential verb typology developed by Zeno Vendler for recent debates in the philosophy of perception. Section one explains the verb typology and explains how Vendler applies it to different perceptual notions. Section two identifies various questions that arise from observations in Vendler’s paper that suggest that there is a match between the temporal properties of perceptual verb objects and the complex verb phrases of which they are a part. Subsequent discussion focuses on just one of these questions. Section three identifies and rejects a simple proposal about how to answer this question. Section four develops a ‘limited matching’ account. In the visual perception of events and processes there seems to be a match between the temporal duration, order and location of the events and processes which are the objects of perception and the subject’s perceiving them. But this matching is absent in cases of the perception of primary substances; objects which manifestly endure over time. Section five identifies and responds to some criticisms of this matching account. The conclusion notes some consequences of the discussion for contemporary debates about the temporal characteristics of perception

Inconsistent boundaries

Research on this paper was supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund, Royal Society of New Zealand.Mereotopology is a theory of connected parts. The existence of boundaries, as parts of everyday objects, is basic to any such theory; but in classical mereotopology, there is a problem: if boundaries exist, then either distinct entities cannot be in contact, or else space is not topologically connected (Varzi in Noûs 31:26–58, 1997). In this paper we urge that this problem can be met with a paraconsistent mereotopology, and sketch the details of one such approach. The resulting theory focuses attention on the role of empty parts, in delivering a balanced and bounded metaphysics of naive space.PostprintPeer reviewe

Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to Higgs boson production in association with a photon via weak-boson fusion at the LHC

Higgs boson production in association with a hard central photon and two forward tagging jets is expected to provide valuable information on Higgs boson couplings in a range where it is difficult to disentangle weak-boson fusion processes from large QCD backgrounds. We present next-to-leading order QCD corrections to Higgs production in association with a photon via weak-boson fusion at a hadron collider in the form of a flexible parton-level Monte Carlo program. The QCD corrections to integrated cross sections are found to be small for experimentally relevant selection cuts, while the shape of kinematic distributions can be distorted by up to 20% in some regions of phase space. Residual scale uncertainties at next-to-leading order are at the few-percent level.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

Do we (seem to) perceive passage?

I examine some recent claims put forward by L. A. Paul, Barry Dainton and Simon Prosser, to the effect that perceptual experiences of movement and change involve an (apparent) experience of ‘passage’, in the sense at issue in debates about the metaphysics of time. Paul, Dainton and Prosser all argue that this supposed feature of perceptual experience – call it a phenomenology of passage – is illusory, thereby defending the view that there is no such a thing as passage, conceived of as a feature of mind-independent reality. I suggest that in fact there is no such phenomenology of passage in the first place. There is, however, a specific structural aspect of the phenomenology of perceptual experiences of movement and change that can explain how one might mistakenly come to the belief that such experiences do involve a phenomenology of passage

A Storage Ring based Option for the LHeC

The LHeC aims at the generation of hadron-lepton collisions with center of mass energies in the TeV scale and luminosities of the order of $10^{32}-10^{33} cm^{-2} sec^{-1}$ by taking advantage of the existing LHC 7 TeV proton ring and adding a high energy electron accelerator. This paper presents technical considerations and potential parameter choices for such a machine and outlines some of the challenges arising when an electron storage ring based option, constructed within the existing infrastructure of the LHC, is chosen