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By definition, zombies would be behaviourally and physically just like us, but not conscious. If a zombie world is possible, then physicalism is false. Just as importantly, the seductive conception of phenomenal consciousness embodied by the zombie idea is fundamentally misconceived. One of this book's two main aims is to bring out the incoherence of the zombie idea with the help of an intuitively appealing argument (the 'sole-pictures argument'). The other is to develop a fresh approach to understanding phenomenal consciousness by exploiting two key notions: that of a 'basic package' of capacities which is necessary and sufficient for perception in the full sense; and that of 'direct activity', which, when combined with the basic package, is necessary and sufficient for perceptual consciousness. These definitions may apply to quite humble creatures, and even to suitably constructed artefacts. I am grateful to colleagues and students at Nottingham for stimulating discussions of these topics over many years; to Ned Block, Peter Carruthers, and David Chalmers, who kindly read the whole or parts of a draft and generously offered very helpful comments and suggestions; and to OUP's two anonymous readers for their constructive suggestions. I would specially like to thank Bill Fish for acute detailed comments on the entire draft, and Janet, my wife, for unfailing encouragement and support. R. K. April 2005 'Ha!' you may be thinking, 'Functionalism. Read no further. Functionalists are a bunch of circle-squarers.' But even if you choose to describe my position as a variety of functionalism, it is not open to the usual objections. One of these is that functionalism leaves open the logical possibility of zombies (as I argued, regrettably, in Kirk 1974b) while here I am trying to make clear that, and how, zombies are not even conceivable in any useful sense. Further, unlike some varieties of functionalism, my position does not require mental concepts to be definable in terms of functions. Also unlike some varieties, it requires us to take account of the nature and causal character of the behaver's internal processing. These features enable my approach to deal with what many regard as a fatal objection to all forms of functionalism: that they treat 'intrinsic' properties as if they were relational. Chapter 10 confronts that and the other objections that have been and may be expected to be raised to the account offered here. You may reasonably challenge my reliance on everyday or 'folk' psychological concepts. Some will surely fall into disuse with the progress of scientific psychology, to be superseded by concepts better attuned to our accumulating scientific knowledge. However, the concepts I actually depend on for the central notions of 'deciders' and 'direct activity' are ones for which I don't know of any promising potential substitutes. Much of the work of refining our folk concepts has been focused on specifically human cognition, while I am aiming at something more general. You will have to decide whether there is a se...

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The primary purpose of the present study was to investigate age differences in goal concordance, time use, and Well-Being. Past research has found that despite age-related decline in life circumstances (e.g., health), the Well-Being of older adults is as high as young adults. The present study used a novel approach to explore the Paradox of Well-Being. One hundred and seventy-seven adults participated in the study. They first generated their three most important personal strivings and rated levels of goal concordance for external, introjected, identified, and intrinsic reasons. Then, they reported their actual and ideal time use in 10 categories of activities in the past 24 hours. Finally, Well-Being was assessed by the Flourishing Scale and the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (Diener, Wirtz, et al., 2010). Older adults did not differ from young adults in overall Well-Being. However, they held higher levels of goal concordance and were more likely to spend time in spirituality and religion-related activities than young adults. The relationships between goal concordance, time use, and Well-Being were examined separately for young and older adults. Implications were discussed to improve Well-Being for young and older adults.

The primary purposes of the present study were to examine age differences in adaptive decision making and to evaluate the role of numeracy in mediating the relationship between age and adaptive decision making. Adaptive decision making was assessed by the Cups task (Levin, Weller, Pederson, & Harshman, 2007). Forty-six younger (18 to 24 years old) and 37 older adults (61 to 89 years old) completed the Cups task. In addition, the Numeracy Scale (Lipkus, Samsa, & Rimer, 2001) was used to measure individual numeric ability. Adaptive decision making was operationalized by the Expected Value sensitivity (i.e., the product of probability and outcome magnitudes) across the gain and the loss domains. Older adults had significantly lower Expected Value sensitivity than young adults. In addition, older adults demonstrated significantly lower numeracy than younger adults. Finally, numeracy partially mediated the relationship between age and adaptive decision making. It is suggested that older adults’ declined decision making may be partially due to their declined numeric abilities. Implications were discussed in numeracy education and public policies concerning older adults.