I rather incline towards 'conceptualism', in line with my view of colour perception - I don't think that we can represent objects and properties for which we have no concepts, not even in perceptual experience. In this sense I differ from those who defend 'non-conceptual content' like Michael Tye and Chris Peacocke.

I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don't regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology.

I do have quite a lot of sympathy for Fodor's picture of concepts as information-free atomic entities which get locked onto their referents causally, and to that extent they needn't involve anything much in the way of learning. But even so it seems perverse to call them 'innate'. Here we see again the oddity of treating 'not learned' as sufficient for innate.

I don't think that we are capable of anything like this many possible colour responses. Instead I argue that the perception of colour differences between two surfaces viewed side-by-side is a gestalt phenomenon.

A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

In truth a clear-headed physicalist shouldn't be thinking any of these dualist thoughts. If pains are one and the same as C-fibres firing, then there really isn't any possibility of having 'one' without the 'other'. Once you properly appreciates physicalism, this dissociation should cease to appear possible - C-fibres with pains should strike you as no more possible than squares without rectangles.

Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn't made any better by your not being around to notice how bad it is.