Ugly carpets don't do much for me, but I'm sympathetic to your thought that there may be knowledge that is carried by non-verbal representations. For example, animals without language can I think nevertheless have perceptual knowledge. Even my old chow chow dog Mishka, not an Einstein even by canine standards, knew when there was food it his bowl.

If I am committed to tolerating all of other people's views, then I am committed to tolerating their intolerance views. What your question shows is that if what I care about is tolerance generally, and not just my own tolerance, then I should be more discriminating.

I'm with Alex: I can imagine a mountain made of pure gold without that mountain existing, even a little bit. But it may well be that my act of imagination entails that there must exist something else, namely that cause of that act. Surprsingly perhaps, Descartes used this line of thought for one of his arguments for the existence of God. He had an idea of God, and he took that the idea must have a cause, and that the only possible cause in this case is God Himself. Why? Because a cause must have at least as much 'reality' as its effect, and only God has as much reality as the idea of God. Not, it must be said, a very convincing argument to modern eyes: why can't 'big' ideas have small causes?

It's only a rough analogy, but just as the fact that we can see things without understanding how vision works does not remove the interest of a theory of vision, so I would say that the fact that we can know things without understanding the nature of truth does not remove the interest of a theory of truth. Maybe discovering a good theory of truth would not help us discover more ordinary truths, but the fortunately the value of philosophy does not depend entirely on it technological applications.

Most philosophers would I think say that what makes you the same person over time is not that there is any one thing present at each time in your life, but rather that there is the right pattern of change and the relations between different life stages. Just which patterns and relations make for a single person and which do not is controversial, but some of the relevant factors seem to be that, in a single person, features of later stages are caused by features of earlier stages in suitably normal ways. If you think about non-human cases, it seems pretty clear that identity over time does not require any 'golden kernel' present at each time. Thus we are happy to talk about a single tree that has been alive for many years, even if there were not a single atom in the tree today that was in that tree ten years ago.

I don't think so, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

Much of our mental life is involuntary. For just one example, we can't straightforwardly decide what to believe. Thus if you don't believe p and I offer you a big reward if you start believing p, you can't just do it for the money. So it's not suprising that we can't stop thinking about X just because we want to. But the desire not to think about X may be worse than ineffective: it may actually be counterproductive. When we think about not wanting to think about X, that brings X to mind, so it sometimes has the opposite of its intended effect.

I agree with Alex that our best hypotheses may well not capture the actual laws of nature, and that physicists strive for unification, and I think there is a third aspect to this question. In spite of what the 20th century philosopher of science Karl Popper maintained, science depends on induction, on making inferences about the unobserved on the basis of the observed. And as the great eighteenth century philosopher David Hume observed, this depends on some kind of assumption of the uniformity of nature. Hume notoriously argued that we can have no good reason for this assumption, and that is very close to the point that we have no good reason for assuming that the laws of physics are the same in those parts of the universe we have observed as they are in those parts we have not observed. But without making something like that assumption, science would be impossible. To put it differently, to leave open the possibility that laws might be different elsewhere is, if taken to an extreme, not just to...

I don't think it does. I have the power to determine which toy my child will play with, say because I could remove all but one from the playpen, but I decide to leave lots of toys there and let my child choose. Having power doesn't mean excercising it, and if I hold back in this way I seem to allow for free will. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has argued for an even stronger claim. Suppose that there is a powerful demon who has a plan for me, but waits to see what I choose and will only interfere if my choices goes against his plan. In the event, everything I choose happens to fit with his plan, so he never interferes. Frankfurt claims that here I am excercising my free will, even though it is false that I could have behaved differently. What counts is the absence of interference, not the absence of the power to interfere.

There seems to be nothing incoherent in the idea of a mechanism that 'clones' structural features of one person's brain and produces another person with similar personality and dispositions (cf. the transporter on Star Trek ). But there is no evidence whatever that such a mechanism actually exists.