title: Electric Callboy

text: On 8 July 2022, the band released a song called "Fckboi", with the American metalcore band Conquer Divide. On 19 August 2022, the band released the song "Hurrikan". The release date for the album was changed to 16 September 2022.


title: Electric Callboy

text: "Tekkno" entered the German charts at No. 1 in the first week after release, the highest ranking any record of Electric Callboy achieved. In the following week, they had to postpone their UK/France Tour as well as cancelling their participation on the US Level-Up tour with Attack Attack! due to their singer Nico Sallach having a jaw and middle ear infection.


title: Electric Callboy

text: The band's musical style can be described as electronicore, metalcore, melodic metalcore, post-hardcore, comedy rock, dubstep, electro, and EDM. The musicians named bands like Asking Alexandria and Attack Attack! as their musical influences. Their singer stated that the musicians don't feel like being a part of the "hardcore music scene".


title: Electric Callboy

text: The lyrics deal with themes such as getting drunk, parties, and sex. The band call their music "Porno Metal". In an interview with the German "FUZE" magazine, vocalist Sebastian Biesler meant that the lyrics only use clichés in a satirical way. In "German Metal Hammer" magazine, the reviewer gave the band a positive critique. He wrote, "this is why Eskimo Callboy is fun because they dismiss themselves and let ruling the fun".


title: Lisa Ray

text: Lisa Rani Ray (born 4 April 1972) is a Canadian actress and model who has also worked internationally. Ray began her modelling career in India in the early 1990s, appearing for leading Indian brands like Bombay Dyeing and Lakmé. She made her acting debut in 1996 in the Tamil film "Nethaji." Her first Bollywood appearance was in 2001, in the offbeat romantic thriller "Kasoor". Through her acting career, Ray has demonstrated a penchant for issue-oriented portrayals, most notably in the 2005 Oscar nominated Canadian film "Water" and the award-winning South African feature "The World Unseen", described by a reviewer as "one of the best-conceived queer films of the past year."


title: Lisa Ray

text: In 2009, Ray was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable form of blood cancer. She began writing "The Yellow Diaries," a blog about her experiences of having cancer. Her writing and columns have since regularly appeared in multiple major publications. Ray remains an active advocate of stem-cell therapy and has participated in several successful fundraisers and cancer awareness campaigns.


title: Lisa Ray

text: In 2011, Ray began hosting a popular travel show on Discovery Channel India alongside appearing as host and judge in Food Network's highest rated show, "Top Chef Canada".


title: Lisa Ray

text: In 2016, Ray opened an Instagram account dedicated to poetry. In March 2019, Ray participated as a panelist on the 2019 edition of "Canada Reads" where she advocated for David Chariandy's award-winning second novel, "Brother."


title: Lisa Ray

text: Ray was born in Toronto to a Bengali father and a Polish mother and grew up in the suburb of Etobicoke. She spoke Polish with her maternal grandmother and watched movies of Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray with her cinephile dad. During her childhood she spent some time in Calcutta.


title: Lisa Ray

text: She excelled academically, doing five years of high school in four, while attending three different high schools: Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, Richview Collegiate Institute and Silverthorn Collegiate Institute.


title: Lisa Ray

text: Ray's modelling career began when she was "discovered" during a family vacation in India while still in her teens. An advertisement for Bombay Dyeing where she appeared in a black swimsuit opposite Karan Kapoor earned Ray her first taste of public attention. A subsequent meeting with Maureen Wadia, editor of Indian fashion magazine Gladrags, resulted in an iconic swimsuit cover that catapulted Ray to nationwide fame in India. "Most of my most fulfilling professional moments came to me via serendipity", Ray later wrote.


title: Lisa Ray

text: By the time the Gladrags cover broke, Ray was already back in Toronto ready to begin university. Her plans were thwarted after a tragic auto accident that would consign her mother to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Ray returned to India and went on to become one of the country's first supermodels, and the face of Lakmé and Bombay Dyeing. Ray would later acknowledge this coinciding of professional triumph and personal tragedy as a recurring theme in her life. "I have come to recognise that every major turning point in my life is preceded by pain", she wrote in Femina in 2016.


title: Lisa Ray

text: As one of India's most successful cover models, Ray would subsequently lend her face to iconic global brands such as L’Oréal, MasterCard, De Beers and Rado. A "Times of India" poll named her the "ninth most beautiful woman of the millennium," the only model in the top ten. She co-anchored the TV show Star Biz on Star Movies and appeared in a music video for "Afreen Afreen", an iconic ghazal written by renowned lyricist Javed Akhtar, and composed and performed by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.


title: Lisa Ray

text: After turning down a number of roles, Ray made her Indian Film Industry debut in 2001 with the Hindi film "Kasoor," opposite Aftab Shivdasani, in which her voice was dubbed by Divya Dutta, because she could not speak Hindi. In spite of that, her performance received positive reviews. Her work in the film also caught the eye of Deepa Mehta, who cast her in the romantic Indian-Canadian romp "Bollywood/Hollywood" in 2002.


title: Lisa Ray

text: Realizing that acting was something that she wanted to pursue more seriously, Ray moved to London to concentrate on a career in the performing arts. While there, Ray studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama, the London Centre for Theatre Studies, the Desmond Jones school of Physical Theatre, and BADA. She graduated from the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA), in 2004, with a post-graduate degree in acting. While studying, Ray made a conscious effort to not accept any film offers until she had graduated. However, while still at ALRA, she received another call from Deepa Mehta, who made her an offer she simply could not refuse—the lead role of Kalyani in Mehta's much-anticipated, and eventually highly controversial, feature, "Water". In the film, Lisa spoke her lines in Hindi, although her voice was dubbed in the final cut. Water released in 2005 to both national and global critical acclaim, with the venerable Roger Ebert describing it as "lovely in the way Satyajit Ray's films are lovely",


title: Lisa Ray

text: Ray has since worked in productions from Canada, Europe, and the United States. Past roles include a farm girl in "All Hat", a school teacher in "A Stone's Throw," and a housewife in 1950s-apartheid South Africa in "The World Unseen." In 2008 Ray starred, alongside Sheetal Sheth and Amber Rose Revah, in the Shamim Sarif directed British romantic comedy "I Can't Think Straight" that went on to win awards in queer film festivals worldwide, including Dallas OUT TAKES, Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film festival.


title: Lisa Ray

text: After graduation, Ray based herself out of Milan, Paris, and New York from 2004 to 2008, returning to Toronto upon her mother's death in late 2008. In 2007, Ray completed filming for "Kill Kill Faster Faster", which is a contemporary film noir inspired by the critically acclaimed novel of the same name, by Joel Rose. She guest-starred in a 2009 episode of the USA Network series "Psych", and appeared in Woody Harrelson starrer Canadian-American superhero film "Defendor". Also in 2009, she starred in the Deepa and Dilip Mehta comedy "Cooking with Stella".


title: Lisa Ray

text: Appearing at the 2009 "Toronto International Film Festival" in support of the film, Ray revealed that she had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.


title: Lisa Ray

text: On Christmas in 2009, Ray received a stem cell transplant to treat her rare cancer. In April 2010, she announced she was cancer-free due to the transplant. She gave a candid interview on her personal cancer trauma and surviving it, appearing on the cover of the 2010 anniversary issue of the Indian men's luxury magazine "The Man".


title: Lisa Ray

text: 2010 saw Ray in UniGlobe Entertainment's cancer docu-drama titled "1 a Minute". The documentary was made by Namrata Singh Gujral and featured cancer survivors Olivia Newton-John, Diahann Carroll, Melissa Etheridge, Mumtaz, Bárbara Mori and Jaclyn Smith, as well as William Baldwin, Daniel Baldwin, and Priya Dutt, whose lives have been touched by cancer. The feature was narrated by Kelly McGillis.


title: Lisa Ray

text: On 5 July 2010, Ray hosted an informal lunch for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during their visit to Toronto.


title: Lisa Ray

text: In 2011, Ray acted in the stage play "Taj", opposite Kabir Bedi at Luminato Festival, Toronto's International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Written by Canadian playwright John Murrell, "Taj" combined poetry, music, theatre, and the Indian classical dance form kathak. The production was described by "The Globe and Mail" critic Deirdre Kelly "as luminous and poignant as the building that inspired it".


title: Lisa Ray

text: In the same year, Ray appeared in Craig Goodwill's award-winning fantasy drama film "Patch Town", and a season 4 episode of Canadian Television period crime drama series "Murdoch Mysteries", titled "The Black Hand".


title: Lisa Ray

text: She presented the 2011 IIFA Awards in Toronto, and was a co-presenter the 2011 Giller Prize along with singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado and roots rock guitarist Robbie Robertson.


title: Lisa Ray

text: Also in 2011, Ray appeared as host and travel guide on "Oh My Gold", a five part series on Discovery Travel & Living, now TLC India.


title: Lisa Ray

text: In 2012, Ray began hosting season two of "Top Chef Canada", Food Network Canada's highest rated series. The season premiered in March 2012.


title: Lisa Ray

text: Speaking to "The Telegraph" in 2012, Ray remarked, "I think every film that I’ve done so far has been a turning point because I experimented with each one and grew professionally. The movies I chose, dealt with a lot of thought-provoking subjects.


title: Lisa Ray

text: In 2016, Ray starred in Ram Gopal Varma's "Veerappan". She also played a crucial supporting role in 2017’s , the official Bollywood adaptation of supernatural horror film "Oculus".


title: Lisa Ray

text: Since 2019, Ray has appeared as part of an ensemble cast in the Amazon Prime Video web series "Four More Shots Please!". After a successful first season aired in over 200 countries and regions, the series returned for a second season in 2020 and a third season in 2022.


title: Lisa Ray

text: On 23 June 2009, Ray was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells known as plasma cells, which produce antibodies. It is a rare disease. In April 2010, she announced that she was cancer-free, after an autologous stem cell transplant using her own stem cells. As multiple myeloma is an incurable disease, Ray is not completely cured of the disease.


title: Lisa Ray

text: In February 2012, Ray announced her engagement to management consultant Jason Dehni. On 20 October 2012, Ray and Dehni (then a banking executive) were married in California's Napa Valley.


title: Lisa Ray

text: In September 2018, Ray announced that she and her husband became parents to twin daughters Sufi and Soleil via surrogacy, in June 2018.


title: Cornea

text: The cornea is the transparent front part of the eye that covers the iris, pupil, and anterior chamber. Along with the anterior chamber and lens, the cornea refracts light, accounting for approximately two-thirds of the eye's total optical power. In humans, the refractive power of the cornea is approximately 43 dioptres. The cornea can be reshaped by surgical procedures such as LASIK.


title: Cornea

text: While the cornea contributes most of the eye's focusing power, its focus is fixed. Accommodation (the refocusing of light to better view near objects) is accomplished by changing the geometry of the lens. Medical terms related to the cornea often start with the prefix ""kerat-"" from the Greek word κέρας, "horn".


title: Cornea

text: The cornea has unmyelinated nerve endings sensitive to touch, temperature and chemicals; a touch of the cornea causes an involuntary reflex to close the eyelid. Because transparency is of prime importance, the healthy cornea does not have or need blood vessels within it. Instead, oxygen dissolves in tears and then diffuses throughout the cornea to keep it healthy. Similarly, nutrients are transported via diffusion from the tear fluid through the outside surface and the aqueous humour through the inside surface. Nutrients also come via neurotrophins supplied by the nerves of the cornea. In humans, the cornea has a diameter of about 11.5 mm and a thickness of 0.5–0.6 mm in the center and 0.6–0.8 mm at the periphery. Transparency, avascularity, the presence of immature resident immune cells, and immunologic privilege makes the cornea a very special tissue.


title: Cornea

text: The human cornea borders with the sclera at the corneal limbus. In lampreys, the cornea is solely an extension of the sclera, and is separate from the skin above it, but in more advanced vertebrates it is always fused with the skin to form a single structure, albeit one composed of multiple layers. In fish, and aquatic vertebrates in general, the cornea plays no role in focusing light, since it has virtually the same refractive index as water.


title: Cornea

text: The human cornea has five layers (possibly six, if the Dua's layer is included). Corneas of other primates have five known layers. The corneas of cats, dogs, wolves, and other carnivores only have four. From the anterior to posterior the layers of the human cornea are:


title: Cornea

text: The cornea is one of the most sensitive tissues of the body, as it is densely innervated with sensory nerve fibres via the ophthalmic division of the trigeminal nerve by way of 70–80 long ciliary nerves. Research suggests the density of pain receptors in the cornea is 300–600 times greater than skin and 20–40 times greater than dental pulp, making any injury to the structure excruciatingly painful.


title: Cornea

text: The ciliary nerves run under the endothelium and exit the eye through holes in the sclera apart from the optic nerve (which transmits only optic signals). The nerves enter the cornea via three levels; "scleral, episcleral and conjunctival". Most of the bundles give rise by subdivision to a network in the stroma, from which fibres supply the different regions. The three networks are, "midstromal, subepithelial/sub-basal, and epithelial." The receptive fields of each nerve ending are very large, and may overlap.


title: Cornea

text: Corneal nerves of the subepithelial layer terminate near the superficial epithelial layer of the cornea in a logarithmic spiral pattern. The density of epithelial nerves decreases with age, especially after the seventh decade.


title: Cornea

text: The optical component is concerned with producing a reduced inverted image on the retina. The eye's optical system consists of not only two but four surfaces—two on the cornea, two on the lens. Rays are refracted toward the midline. Distant rays, due to their parallel nature, converge to a point on the retina. The cornea admits light at the greatest angle. The aqueous and vitreous humors both have a refractive index of 1.336-1.339, whereas the cornea has a refractive index of 1.376. Because the change in refractive index between cornea and aqueous humor is relatively small compared to the change at the air–cornea interface, it has a negligible refractive effect, typically -6 dioptres. The cornea is considered to be a positive meniscus lens. In some animals, such as species of birds, chameleons and a species of fish, the cornea can also focus.


title: Cornea

text: Upon death or removal of an eye the cornea absorbs the aqueous humor, thickens, and becomes hazy. Transparency can be restored by putting it in a warm, well-ventilated chamber at 31 °C (88 °F, the normal temperature), allowing the fluid to leave the cornea and become transparent. The cornea takes in fluid from the aqueous humor and the small blood vessels of the limbus, but a pump ejects the fluid immediately upon entry. When energy is deficient the pump may fail, or function too slowly to compensate, leading to swelling. This arises at death, but a dead eye can be placed in a warm chamber with a reservoir of sugar and glycogen that generally keeps the cornea transparent for at least 24 hours.


title: Cornea

text: The endothelium controls this pumping action, and as discussed above, damage thereof is more serious, and is a cause of opaqueness and swelling. When damage to the cornea occurs, such as in a viral infection, the collagen used to repair the process is not regularly arranged, leading to an opaque patch (leukoma).


title: Cornea

text: Various refractive eye surgery techniques change the shape of the cornea in order to reduce the need for corrective lenses or otherwise improve the refractive state of the eye. In many of the techniques used today, reshaping of the cornea is performed by photoablation using the excimer laser.


title: Cornea

text: There are also synthetic corneas (keratoprostheses) in development. Most are merely plastic inserts, but there are also those composed of biocompatible synthetic materials that encourage tissue ingrowth into the synthetic cornea, thereby promoting biointegration. Other methods, such as magnetic deformable membranes and optically coherent transcranial magnetic stimulation of the human retina are still in very early stages of research.


title: Cornea

text: Orthokeratology is a method using specialized hard or rigid gas-permeable contact lenses to transiently reshape the cornea in order to improve the refractive state of the eye or reduce the need for eyeglasses and contact lenses.


title: Cornea

text: In 2009, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical center demonstrated that stem cell collected from human corneas can restore transparency without provoking a rejection response in mice with corneal damage. For corneal epithelial diseases such as Stevens Johnson Syndrome, persistent corneal ulcer etc., the autologous contralateral (normal) suprabasal limbus derived in vitro expanded corneal limbal stem cells are found to be effective as amniotic membrane based expansion is controversial. For endothelial diseases, such as bullous keratopathy, cadaver corneal endothelial precursor cells have been proven to be efficient. Recently emerging tissue engineering technologies are expected to be capable of making one cadaver-donor's corneal cells be expanded and be usable in more than one patient's eye.


title: Cornea

text: The majority of ocular therapeutic agents are administered to the eye via the topical route. Cornea is one of the main barriers for drug diffusion because of its highly impermeable nature. Its continuous irrigation with a tear fluid also results in poor retention of the therapeutic agents on the ocular surface. Poor permeability of the cornea and quick wash out of therapeutic agents from ocular surface result in very low bioavailability of the drugs administered via topical route (typically less than 5%). Poor retention of formulations on ocular surfaces could potentially be improved with the use of mucoadhesive polymers. Drug permeability through the cornea could be facilitated with addition of penetration enhancers into topical formulations.


title: Cornea

text: If the corneal stroma develops visually significant opacity, irregularity, or edema, a cornea of a deceased donor can be transplanted. Because there are no blood vessels in the cornea, there are also few problems with rejection of the new cornea.


title: Cornea

text: When a cornea is needed for transplant, as from an eye bank, the best procedure is to remove the cornea from the eyeball, preventing the cornea from absorbing the aqueous humor.


title: Cornea

text: There is a global shortage of corneal donations, severely limiting the availability of corneal transplants across most of the world. A 2016 study found that 12.7 million visually impaired people were in need of a corneal transplant, with only 1 cornea available for every 70 needed. Many countries have years-long waitlists for corneal transplant surgery due to the shortage of donated corneas. Only a handful of countries consistently have a large enough supply of donated corneas to meet local demand without a waitlist, including the United States, Italy, and Sri Lanka.


title: Piece of Mind

text: Piece of Mind is the fourth studio album by English heavy metal band Iron Maiden. It was released on 16 May 1983 in the United Kingdom by EMI Records and in the United States by Capitol Records. It was the first album to feature drummer Nicko McBrain, who had recently left the band Trust and has been Iron Maiden's drummer ever since.


title: Piece of Mind

text: "Piece of Mind" was a mostly critical and commercial success, reaching number three on the UK Albums Chart and achieving platinum certification in the UK and North America.


title: Piece of Mind

text: In December 1982, drummer Clive Burr ended his association with the band due to personal and tour schedule problems and was replaced by Nicko McBrain, previously of French band Trust, as well as Pat Travers and Streetwalkers. Soon afterwards, the band went to Jersey to compose the songs, taking over the hotel Le Chalet (as it was out of season) and rehearsing in its restaurant. In February, the band journeyed for the first time to the Bahamas to record the album at Nassau's Compass Point Studios. Recordings were finished in March, and the album was later mixed at Electric Lady Studios in New York City.


title: Piece of Mind

text: This is the first of four Iron Maiden albums that were not named after a song featured on the album itself (though the lyrics in the song "Still Life" contain the expression "peace of mind"). Originally, the release's working title was "Food for Thought"—once the band had decided that Eddie would be lobotomised on the front cover—until the band came up with the title "Piece of Mind" in a pub in Jersey during the album's writing stage.


title: Piece of Mind

text: Included in the liner notes is a slightly altered version of a passage from the "Book of Revelation", which reads,


title: Piece of Mind

text: The actual text (from Chapter 21, Verse 4) is nearly identical, except that it reads, "neither shall there be any more pain" rather than "brain", which was added as a pun on the album's title.


title: Piece of Mind

text: In a lower corner on the back side of the album cover, there is this message: "No synthesizers or ulterior motives".


title: Piece of Mind

text: Lyrically, the album largely reflects the group's literary interests, such as "To Tame a Land", inspired by Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel "Dune"; "Sun and Steel", based on the life of samurai Miyamoto Musashi and its title taken from Yukio Mishima's 1968 essay; "Still Life", influenced by Ramsey Campbell's 1964 short story "The Inhabitant of the Lake", and "The Trooper", inspired by Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854). Film influences are also present, such as "Where Eagles Dare", based on the Brian G. Hutton 1968 film, scripted by Alistair MacLean, and "Quest for Fire", based on the 1981 film by Jean-Jacques Annaud. On top of this, "Revelations", written by Dickinson, includes lines from G. K. Chesterton's hymn "O God of Earth and Altar", while the remainder of the song is influenced by Aleister Crowley. More exotic influences include Greek mythology, albeit slightly altered, for "Flight of Icarus". "To Tame a Land" was meant to be entitled "Dune" after the novel, but after seeking permission from Frank Herbert's agents, the band received a message which stated, "Frank Herbert doesn't like rock bands, particularly heavy rock bands, and especially bands like Iron Maiden" and were forced to change the name.


title: Piece of Mind

text: At the beginning of the sixth track, "Still Life", the band included a hidden message which could only be understood by playing the song backwards. This was a joke and an intended swing back at the critics who had accused Iron Maiden of being Satanic. The backwards-message consists of drummer Nicko McBrain mimicking actor John Bird's impression of Idi Amin, uttering the following phrase "What ho said the t'ing with the three 'bonce', don't meddle with things you don't understand...", followed by a belch. The phrase itself is taken from the satirical album "The Collected Broadcasts of Idi Amin" (1975) by Bird and Alan Coren. ""What ho"" and ""What ho said the t'ing"" are phrases that also crop up regularly on McBrain's "Listen With Nicko!" tracks from "The First Ten Years" collection.


title: Piece of Mind

text: According to McBrain, "We were sick and tired of being labelled as Devil worshippers and all this bollocks by these fucking morons in the States, so we thought, 'Right, you want to take the piss? We'll show you how to take the bleeding piss, my son!' And one of the boys taped me in the middle of this Idi Amin routine I used to do when I'd had a few drinks. I remember it distinctly ended with the words, 'Don't meddle wid t'ings yo don't understand.' We thought, if people were going to be stupid about this sort of thing, we might as well give them something to be really stupid about, you know?"


title: Piece of Mind

text: Preceded by the single "Flight of Icarus" on 28 April, "Piece of Mind" was released on 28 May 1983. It peaked at No. 3 in the UK and spent eighteen weeks on the chart.


title: Piece of Mind

text: In North America, the album became the band's highest charting thus far, peaking at No.14 in the "Billboard" 200. By July, "Piece of Mind" was certified gold by the RIAA, rising up to platinum status in 1986. In 1995, the album achieved platinum status in the UK.


title: Piece of Mind

text: In 1983, "Kerrang!" published a poll of the greatest metal albums of all time, with "Piece of Mind" ranking No.1 and "The Number of the Beast" at No.2. Reviews were mostly positive, with Sputnikmusic hailing it "easily an album that belongs in your collection" (although they argue that "the likes of "Powerslave" [1984], "Somewhere in Time" [1986], and "Brave New World" [2000] would overtake it"). AllMusic described it as "essential for anyone with even the most basic interest in heavy metal", although "the second half dips a bit from the first". In a mixed review from Rolling Stone, "Both "Piece of Mind" and "Powerslave" proceed in kind, albeit with diminished melodic interest..."


title: Piece of Mind

text: The supporting tour titled the World Piece Tour opened at Hull City Hall on 2 May. The tour concluded on 18 December, and its 139 concerts included a televised performance at Westfalenhalle in Dortmund.


title: Piece of Mind

text: In 2010, Maiden uniteD, featuring lead singer Damian Wilson, released an all-acoustic reinterpretation of the album entitled "Mind the Acoustic Pieces".


title: Piece of Mind

text: Two songs were covered for the 2008 tribute album "": "The Trooper" by Coheed and Cambria and "To Tame a Land" by Dream Theater. The latter was also included in the special edition of Dream Theater's 2009 album "Black Clouds & Silver Linings".


title: Piece of Mind

text: "The Trooper" has been covered by Finnish doom/death metal band Sentenced on their 1994 EP "The Trooper", the American heavy metal band Iced Earth on the "tour edition" of their 2011 album, "Dystopia", the death metal band Vital Remains on the 1998 tribute album "A Call to Irons", Christian hard rock band Stryper on the album, "The Covering", in 2011, and Swedish lounge act Hellsongs on their 2008 album, "Hymns in the Key of 666".


title: Piece of Mind

text: "Where Eagles Dare" has been covered by Fozzy on their second album, "Happenstance", in 2002. Fozzy have also covered "The Prisoner" (from "The Number of the Beast") on their debut, "Fozzy". The song was also covered by Faroese viking metal band Týr on their 2013 album "Valkyrja", and Deliverance on their 2013 album "Hear What I Say!".


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive physicalist or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, especially in the fields of sociobiology, computer science (specifically, artificial intelligence), evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences. Reductive physicalists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states. Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the mind is not a separate substance, mental properties supervene on physical properties, or that the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science. Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues; however, they are far from being resolved. Modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities and the intentionality of mental states and properties can be explained in naturalistic terms.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: However, a number of issues have been recognized with non-reductive physicalism. First, it is irreconcilable with self-identity over time. Secondly, intentional states of consciousness do not make sense on non-reductive physicalism. Thirdly, free will is impossible to reconcile with either reductive or non-reductive physicalism. Fourthly, it fails to properly explain the phenomenon of mental causation.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The mind–body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how—or even if—minds are affected by and can affect the body.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Perceptual experiences depend on stimuli that arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world, and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: A related problem is how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) cause that individual's neurons to fire and muscles to contract. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from the time of René Descartes.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter (or body). It begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical. One of the earliest known formulations of mind–body dualism was expressed in the eastern Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy (c. 650 BCE), which divided the world into purusha (mind/spirit) and prakriti (material substance). Specifically, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali presents an analytical approach to the nature of the mind.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato who suggested that humans' "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body. However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a "res cogitans". Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. He was therefore the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it still exists today.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The most frequently used argument in favor of dualism appeals to the common-sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from inanimate matter. If asked what the mind is, the average person would usually respond by identifying it with their self, their personality, their soul, or another related entity. They would almost certainly deny that the mind simply is the brain, or vice versa, finding the idea that there is just one ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic or unintelligible. Modern philosophers of mind think that these intuitions are misleading, and that critical faculties, along with empirical evidence from the sciences, should be used to examine these assumptions and determine whether there is any real basis to them.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The mental and the physical seem to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties. Mental events have a subjective quality, whereas physical events do not. So, for example, one can reasonably ask what a burnt finger feels like, or what a blue sky looks like, or what nice music sounds like to a person. But it is meaningless, or at least odd, to ask what a surge in the uptake of glutamate in the dorsolateral portion of the prefrontal cortex feels like.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events "qualia" or "raw feels". There are qualia involved in these mental events that seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical. David Chalmers explains this argument by stating that we could conceivably know all the objective information about something, such as the brain states and wavelengths of light involved with seeing the color red, but still not know something fundamental about the situation – what it is like to see the color red.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: If consciousness (the mind) can exist independently of physical reality (the brain), one must explain how physical memories are created concerning consciousness. Dualism must therefore explain how consciousness affects physical reality. One possible explanation is that of a miracle, proposed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, where all mind–body interactions require the direct intervention of God.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Another argument that has been proposed by C. S. Lewis is the Argument from Reason: if, as monism implies, all of our thoughts are the effects of physical causes, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if monism is correct, there would be no way of knowing this—or anything else—we could not even suppose it, except by a fluke.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The zombie argument is based on a thought experiment proposed by Todd Moody, and developed by David Chalmers in his book "The Conscious Mind". The basic idea is that one can imagine one's body, and therefore conceive the existence of one's body, without any conscious states being associated with this body. Chalmers' argument is that it seems possible that such a being could exist because all that is needed is that all and only the things that the physical sciences describe about a zombie must be true of it. Since none of the concepts involved in these sciences make reference to consciousness or other mental phenomena, and any physical entity can be by definition described scientifically via physics, the move from conceivability to possibility is not such a large one. Others such as Dennett have argued that the notion of a philosophical zombie is an incoherent, or unlikely, concept. It has been argued under physicalism that one must either believe that anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombie—following from the assertion that one's own conviction about being (or not being) a zombie is a product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's. This argument has been expressed by Dennett who argues that "Zombies think they are conscious, think they have qualia, think they suffer pains—they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition) in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!"


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first espoused by Descartes in the "Meditations". In the 20th century, its major defenders have been Karl Popper and John Carew Eccles. It is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Descartes's argument for this position can be summarized as follows: Seth has a clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking thing that has no spatial extension (i.e., it cannot be measured in terms of length, weight, height, and so on). He also has a clear and distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended, subject to quantification and not able to think. It follows that mind and body are not identical because they have radically different properties.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Seth's mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) have causal effects on his body and vice versa: A child touches a hot stove (physical event) which causes pain (mental event) and makes her yell (physical event), this in turn provokes a sense of fear and protectiveness in the caregiver (mental event), and so on.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Descartes' argument depends on the premise that what Seth believes to be "clear and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. Many contemporary philosophers doubt this. For example, Joseph Agassi suggests that several scientific discoveries made since the early 20th century have undermined the idea of privileged access to one's own ideas. Freud claimed that a psychologically-trained observer can understand a person's unconscious motivations better than the person himself does. Duhem has shown that a philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than that person herself does, while Malinowski has shown that an anthropologist can know a person's customs and habits better than the person whose customs and habits they are. He also asserts that modern psychological experiments that cause people to see things that are not there provide grounds for rejecting Descartes' argument, because scientists can describe a person's perceptions better than the person herself can.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Psychophysical parallelism, or simply parallelism, is the view that mind and body, while having distinct ontological statuses, do not causally influence one another. Instead, they run along parallel paths (mind events causally interact with mind events and brain events causally interact with brain events) and only seem to influence each other. This view was most prominently defended by Gottfried Leibniz. Although Leibniz was an ontological monist who believed that only one type of substance, the monad, exists in the universe, and that everything is reducible to it, he nonetheless maintained that there was an important distinction between "the mental" and "the physical" in terms of causation. He held that God had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies would be in harmony with each other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established harmony.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Occasionalism is the view espoused by Nicholas Malebranche as well as Islamic philosophers such as Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali that asserts all supposedly causal relations between physical events, or between physical and mental events, are not really causal at all. While body and mind are different substances, causes (whether mental or physical) are related to their effects by an act of God's intervention on each specific occasion.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Property dualism is the view that the world is constituted of one kind of substance – the physical kind – and there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. It is the view that non-physical, mental properties (such as beliefs, desires and emotions) inhere in some physical bodies (at least, brains). Sub-varieties of property dualism include:


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Dual aspect theory or dual-aspect monism is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. (Thus it is a mixed position, which is monistic in some respects). In modern philosophical writings, the theory's relationship to neutral monism has become somewhat ill-defined, but one proffered distinction says that whereas neutral monism allows the context of a given group of neutral elements and the relationships into which they enter to determine whether the group can be thought of as mental, physical, both, or neither, dual-aspect theory suggests that the mental and the physical are manifestations (or aspects) of some underlying substance, entity or process that is itself neither mental nor physical as normally understood. Various formulations of dual-aspect monism also require the mental and the physical to be complementary, mutually irreducible and perhaps inseparable (though distinct).


title: Philosophy of mind

text: This is a philosophy of mind that regards the degrees of freedom between mental and physical well-being as not synonymous thus implying an experiential dualism between body and mind. An example of these disparate degrees of freedom is given by Allan Wallace who notes that it is "experientially apparent that one may be physically uncomfortable—for instance, while engaging in a strenuous physical workout—while mentally cheerful; conversely, one may be mentally distraught while experiencing physical comfort". Experiential dualism notes that our subjective experience of merely seeing something in the physical world seems qualitatively different from mental processes like grief that comes from losing a loved one. This philosophy is a proponent of causal dualism, which is defined as the dual ability for mental states and physical states to affect one another. Mental states can cause changes in physical states and vice versa.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: However, unlike cartesian dualism or some other systems, experiential dualism does not posit two fundamental substances in reality: mind and matter. Rather, experiential dualism is to be understood as a conceptual framework that gives credence to the qualitative difference between the experience of mental and physical states. Experiential dualism is accepted as the conceptual framework of Madhyamaka Buddhism.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Madhayamaka Buddhism goes further, finding fault with the monist view of physicalist philosophies of mind as well in that these generally posit matter and energy as the fundamental substance of reality. Nonetheless, this does not imply that the cartesian dualist view is correct, rather Madhyamaka regards as error any affirming view of a fundamental substance to reality.In denying the independent self-existence of all the phenomena that make up the world of our experience, the Madhyamaka view departs from both the substance dualism of Descartes and the substance monism—namely, physicalism—that is characteristic of modern science. The physicalism propounded by many contemporary scientists seems to assert that the real world is composed of physical things-in-themselves, while all mental phenomena are regarded as mere appearances, devoid of any reality in and of themselves. Much is made of this difference between appearances and reality.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Indeed, physicalism, or the idea that matter is the only fundamental substance of reality, is explicitly rejected by Buddhism.In the Madhyamaka view, mental events are no more or less real than physical events. In terms of our common-sense experience, differences of kind do exist between physical and mental phenomena. While the former commonly have mass, location, velocity, shape, size, and numerous other physical attributes, these are not generally characteristic of mental phenomena. For example, we do not commonly conceive of the feeling of affection for another person as having mass or location. These physical attributes are no more appropriate to other mental events such as sadness, a recalled image from one's childhood, the visual perception of a rose, or consciousness of any sort. Mental phenomena are, therefore, not regarded as being physical, for the simple reason that they lack many of the attributes that are uniquely characteristic of physical phenomena. Thus, Buddhism has never adopted the physicalist principle that regards only physical things as real.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: In contrast to dualism, monism does not accept any fundamental divisions. The fundamentally disparate nature of reality has been central to forms of eastern philosophies for over two millennia. In Indian and Chinese philosophy, monism is integral to how experience is understood. Today, the most common forms of monism in Western philosophy are physicalist. Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance is physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best science. However, a variety of formulations (see below) are possible. Another form of monism, idealism, states that the only existing substance is mental. Although pure idealism, such as that of George Berkeley, is uncommon in contemporary Western philosophy, a more sophisticated variant called panpsychism, according to which mental experience and properties may be at the foundation of physical experience and properties, has been espoused by some philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and David Ray Griffin.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Phenomenalism is the theory that representations (or sense data) of external objects are all that exist. Such a view was briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell and many of the logical positivists during the early 20th century. A third possibility is to accept the existence of a basic substance that is neither physical nor mental. The mental and physical would then both be properties of this neutral substance. Such a position was adopted by Baruch Spinoza and was popularized by Ernst Mach in the 19th century. This neutral monism, as it is called, resembles property dualism.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the first half. In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of introspectionism. Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject to careful examination for accuracy and cannot be used to form predictive generalizations. Without generalizability and the possibility of third-person examination, the behaviorists argued, psychology cannot be scientific. The way out, therefore, was to eliminate the idea of an interior mental life (and hence an ontologically independent mind) altogether and focus instead on the description of observable behavior.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism (sometimes called logical behaviorism) was developed. This is characterized by a strong verificationism, which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental life pointless. For the behaviorist, mental states are not interior states on which one can make introspective reports. They are just descriptions of behavior or dispositions to behave in certain ways, made by third parties to explain and predict another's behavior.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Philosophical behaviorism has fallen out of favor since the latter half of the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of cognitivism.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Type physicalism (or type-identity theory) was developed by Jack Smart and Ullin Place as a direct reaction to the failure of behaviorism. These philosophers reasoned that, if mental states are something material, but not behavioral, then mental states are probably identical to internal states of the brain. In very simplified terms: a mental state "M" is nothing other than brain state "B". The mental state "desire for a cup of coffee" would thus be nothing more than the "firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions".


title: Philosophy of mind

text: On the other hand, even granted the above, it does not follow that identity theories of all types must be abandoned. According to token identity theories, the fact that a certain brain state is connected with only one mental state of a person does not have to mean that there is an absolute correlation between types of mental state and types of brain state. The type–token distinction can be illustrated by a simple example: the word "green" contains four types of letters (g, r, e, n) with two tokens (occurrences) of the letter "e" along with one each of the others.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The idea of token identity is that only particular occurrences of mental events are identical with particular occurrences or tokenings of physical events. Anomalous monism (see below) and most other non-reductive physicalisms are token-identity theories. Despite these problems, there is a renewed interest in the type identity theory today, primarily due to the influence of Jaegwon Kim.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the inadequacies of the identity theory. Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind. At about the same time or slightly after, D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of functionalism that analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of functional roles. Finally, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Gilbert Harman. Another one, psychofunctionalism, is an approach adopted by the naturalistic philosophy of mind associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Mental states are characterized by their causal relations with other mental states and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. Functionalism abstracts away from the details of the physical implementation of a mental state by characterizing it in terms of non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is characterized scientifically by its functional role in filtering blood and maintaining certain chemical balances.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Non-reductionist philosophers hold firmly to two essential convictions with regard to mind–body relations: 1) Physicalism is true and mental states must be physical states, but 2) All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to behavior, brain states or functional states. Hence, the question arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism is an attempt to formulate such a physicalism. He "thinks that when one runs across what are traditionally seen as absurdities of Reason, such as akrasia or self-deception, the personal psychology framework is not to be given up in favor of the subpersonal one, but rather must be enlarged or extended so that the rationality set out by the principle of charity can be found elsewhere."


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Davidson uses the thesis of supervenience: mental states supervene on physical states, but are not reducible to them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence: there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physical–causal reducibility between the mental and physical without ontological reducibility.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Non-reductive physicalism, however, is irreconcilable with self-identity over time. The brain goes on from one moment of time to another; the brain thus has identity through time. But its states of awareness do not go on from one moment to the next. There is no enduring self – no “I” (capital-I) that goes on from one moment to the next. An analogy of the self or the “I” would be the flame of a candle. The candle and the wick go on from one moment to the next, but the flame does not go on. There is a different flame at each moment of the candle’s burning. The flame displays a type of continuity in that the candle does not go out while it is burning, but there is not really any identity of the flame from one moment to another over time. The scenario is similar on non-reductive physicalism with states of awareness. Every state of the brain at different times has a different state of awareness related to it, but there is no enduring self or “I” from one moment to the next. Similarly, it is an illusion that one is the same individual who walked into class this morning. In fact, one is not the same individual because there is no personal identity over time. If one does exist and one is the same individual who entered into class this morning, then a non-reductive physicalist view of the self should be dismissed.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Because non-reductive physicalist theories attempt to both retain the ontological distinction between mind and body and try to solve the "surfeit of explanations puzzle" in some way; critics often see this as a paradox and point out the similarities to epiphenomenalism, in that it is the brain that is seen as the root "cause" not the mind, and the mind seems to be rendered inert.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Epiphenomenalism regards one or more mental states as the byproduct of physical brain states, having no influence on physical states. The interaction is one-way (solving the "surfeit of explanations puzzle") but leaving us with non-reducible mental states (as a byproduct of brain states) – causally reducible, but ontologically irreducible to physical states. Pain would be seen by epiphenomenalists as being caused by the brain state but as not having effects on other brain states, though it might have effects on other mental states (i.e. cause distress).


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Weak emergentism is a form of "non-reductive physicalism" that involves a layered view of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity and each corresponding to its own special science. Some philosophers hold that emergent properties causally interact with more fundamental levels, while others maintain that higher-order properties simply supervene over lower levels without direct causal interaction. The latter group therefore holds a less strict, or "weaker", definition of emergentism, which can be rigorously stated as follows: a property P of composite object O is emergent if it is metaphysically impossible for another object to lack property P if that object is composed of parts with intrinsic properties identical to those in O and has those parts in an identical configuration.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Sometimes emergentists use the example of water having a new property when Hydrogen H and Oxygen O combine to form HO (water). In this example there "emerges" a new property of a transparent liquid that would not have been predicted by understanding hydrogen and oxygen as gases. This is analogous to physical properties of the brain giving rise to a mental state. Emergentists try to solve the notorious mind–body gap this way. One problem for emergentism is the idea of "causal closure" in the world that does not allow for a mind-to-body causation.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: If one is a materialist and believes that all aspects of our common-sense psychology will find reduction to a mature cognitive neuroscience, and that non-reductive materialism is mistaken, then one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative materialism.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: There are several varieties of eliminative materialism, but all maintain that our common-sense "folk psychology" badly misrepresents the nature of some aspect of cognition. Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland argue that while folk psychology treats cognition as fundamentally sentence-like, the non-linguistic vector/matrix model of neural network theory or connectionism will prove to be a much more accurate account of how the brain works.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The Churchlands often invoke the fate of other, erroneous popular theories and ontologies that have arisen in the course of history. For example, Ptolemaic astronomy served to explain and roughly predict the motions of the planets for centuries, but eventually this model of the solar system was eliminated in favor of the Copernican model. The Churchlands believe the same eliminative fate awaits the "sentence-cruncher" model of the mind in which thought and behavior are the result of manipulating sentence-like states called "propositional attitudes". Sociologist Jacy Reese Anthis argues for eliminative materialism on all faculties of mind, including consciousness, stating, "The deepest mysteries of the mind are within our reach."


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Some philosophers take an epistemic approach and argue that the mind–body problem is currently unsolvable, and perhaps will always remain unsolvable to human beings. This is usually termed New mysterianism. Colin McGinn holds that human beings are cognitively closed in regards to their own minds. According to McGinn human minds lack the concept-forming procedures to fully grasp how mental properties such as consciousness arise from their causal basis. An example would be how an elephant is cognitively closed in regards to particle physics.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: A more moderate conception has been expounded by Thomas Nagel, which holds that the mind–body problem is currently unsolvable at the present stage of scientific development and that it might take a future scientific paradigm shift or revolution to bridge the explanatory gap. Nagel posits that in the future a sort of "objective phenomenology" might be able to bridge the gap between subjective conscious experience and its physical basis.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Each attempt to answer the mind–body problem encounters substantial problems. Some philosophers argue that this is because there is an underlying conceptual confusion. These philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers in the tradition of linguistic criticism, therefore reject the problem as illusory. They argue that it is an error to ask how mental and biological states fit together. Rather it should simply be accepted that human experience can be described in different ways—for instance, in a mental and in a biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the one in terms of the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong contexts. This is the case, for instance, if one searches for mental states of the brain. The brain is simply the wrong context for the use of mental vocabulary—the search for mental states of the brain is therefore a category error or a sort of fallacy of reasoning.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter Hacker. However, Hilary Putnam, the originator of functionalism, has also adopted the position that the mind–body problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved according to the manner of Wittgenstein.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or physical) world. Such a position faces the problem that the mind has certain properties that no other material thing seems to possess. Physicalism must therefore explain how it is possible that these properties can nonetheless emerge from a material thing. The project of providing such an explanation is often referred to as the "naturalization of the mental". Some of the crucial problems that this project attempts to resolve include the existence of qualia and the nature of intentionality.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Many mental states seem to be experienced subjectively in different ways by different individuals. And it is characteristic of a mental state that it has some experiential "quality", e.g. of pain, that it hurts. However, the sensation of pain between two individuals may not be identical, since no one has a perfect way to measure how much something hurts or of describing exactly how it feels to hurt. Philosophers and scientists therefore ask where these experiences come from. The existence of cerebral events, in and of themselves, cannot explain why they are accompanied by these corresponding qualitative experiences. The puzzle of why many cerebral processes occur with an accompanying experiential aspect in consciousness seems impossible to explain.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Yet it also seems to many that science will eventually have to explain such experiences. This follows from an assumption about the possibility of reductive explanations. According to this view, if an attempt can be successfully made to explain a phenomenon reductively (e.g., water), then it can be explained why the phenomenon has all of its properties (e.g., fluidity, transparency). In the case of mental states, this means that there needs to be an explanation of why they have the property of being experienced in a certain way.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger criticized the ontological assumptions underpinning such a reductive model, and claimed that it was impossible to make sense of experience in these terms. This is because, according to Heidegger, the nature of our subjective experience and its "qualities" is impossible to understand in terms of Cartesian "substances" that bear "properties". Another way to put this is that the very concept of qualitative experience is incoherent in terms of—or is semantically incommensurable with the concept of—substances that bear properties.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: This problem of explaining introspective first-person aspects of mental states and consciousness in general in terms of third-person quantitative neuroscience is called the explanatory gap. There are several different views of the nature of this gap among contemporary philosophers of mind. David Chalmers and the early Frank Jackson interpret the gap as ontological in nature; that is, they maintain that qualia can never be explained by science because physicalism is false. There are two separate categories involved and one cannot be reduced to the other. An alternative view is taken by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn. According to them, the gap is epistemological in nature. For Nagel, science is not yet able to explain subjective experience because it has not yet arrived at the level or kind of knowledge that is required. We are not even able to formulate the problem coherently. For McGinn, on other hand, the problem is one of permanent and inherent biological limitations. We are not able to resolve the explanatory gap because the realm of subjective experiences is cognitively closed to us in the same manner that quantum physics is cognitively closed to elephants. Other philosophers liquidate the gap as purely a semantic problem. This semantic problem, of course, led to the famous ""Qualia Question"", which is: "Does Red cause Redness"?


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards ("about") or be in relation with something in the external world. This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen. It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was a historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual objects, in particular how perceptual experience relates to appearances and beliefs about the world. The main contemporary views within philosophy of perception include naive realism, enactivism and representational views.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to examination and description by the natural sciences. Since mental processes are intimately related to bodily processes (e.g., embodied cognition theory of mind), the descriptions that the natural sciences furnish of human beings play an important role in the philosophy of mind. There are many scientific disciplines that study processes related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology, computer science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology, and psychology.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The theoretical background of biology, as is the case with modern natural sciences in general, is fundamentally materialistic. The objects of study are, in the first place, physical processes, which are considered to be the foundations of mental activity and behavior. The increasing success of biology in the explanation of mental phenomena can be seen by the absence of any empirical refutation of its fundamental presupposition: "there can be no change in the mental states of a person without a change in brain states."


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Within the field of neurobiology, there are many subdisciplines that are concerned with the relations between mental and physical states and processes: Sensory neurophysiology investigates the relation between the processes of perception and stimulation. Cognitive neuroscience studies the correlations between mental processes and neural processes. Neuropsychology describes the dependence of mental faculties on specific anatomical regions of the brain. Lastly, evolutionary biology studies the origins and development of the human nervous system and, in as much as this is the basis of the mind, also describes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of mental phenomena beginning from their most primitive stages. Evolutionary biology furthermore places tight constraints on any philosophical theory of the mind, as the gene-based mechanism of natural selection does not allow any giant leaps in the development of neural complexity or neural software but only incremental steps over long time periods.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The methodological breakthroughs of the neurosciences, in particular the introduction of high-tech neuroimaging procedures, has propelled scientists toward the elaboration of increasingly ambitious research programs: one of the main goals is to describe and comprehend the neural processes which correspond to mental functions (see: neural correlate). Several groups are inspired by these advances.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such things as computers. From the beginning, computer programmers have been able to develop programs that permit computers to carry out tasks for which organic beings need a mind. A simple example is multiplication. It is not clear whether computers could be said to have a mind. Could they, someday, come to have what we call a mind? This question has been propelled into the forefront of much philosophical debate because of investigations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Within AI, it is common to distinguish between a modest research program and a more ambitious one: this distinction was coined by John Searle in terms of a weak AI and strong AI. The exclusive objective of "weak AI", according to Searle, is the successful simulation of mental states, with no attempt to make computers become conscious or aware, etc. The objective of strong AI, on the contrary, is a computer with consciousness similar to that of human beings. The program of strong AI goes back to one of the pioneers of computation Alan Turing. As an answer to the question "Can computers think?", he formulated the famous Turing test. Turing believed that a computer could be said to "think" when, if placed in a room by itself next to another room that contained a human being and with the same questions being asked of both the computer and the human being by a third party human being, the computer's responses turned out to be indistinguishable from those of the human. Essentially, Turing's view of machine intelligence followed the behaviourist model of the mind—intelligence is as intelligence does. The Turing test has received many criticisms, among which the most famous is probably the Chinese room thought experiment formulated by Searle.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia) of computers or robots still remains open. Some computer scientists believe that the specialty of AI can still make new contributions to the resolution of the "mind–body problem". They suggest that based on the reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in all computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered that help us to understand the reciprocal influences between the human mind and the brain (wetware).


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly. It uses generally empirical methods to investigate concrete mental states like joy, fear or obsessions. Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs and outputs to the human organism.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: An example of this is the psychology of perception. Scientists working in this field have discovered general principles of the perception of forms. A law of the psychology of forms says that objects that move in the same direction are perceived as related to each other. This law describes a relation between visual input and mental perceptual states. However, it does not suggest anything about the nature of perceptual states. The laws discovered by psychology are compatible with all the answers to the mind–body problem already described.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does, and how it works. It includes research on intelligence and behavior, especially focusing on how information is represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such as perception, language, memory, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous systems (human or other animals) and machines (e.g. computers). Cognitive science consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education. It spans many levels of analysis, from low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. Over the years, cognitive science has evolved from a representational and information processing approach to explaining the mind to embrace an embodied perspective of it. Accordingly, bodily processes play a significant role in the acquisition, development, and shaping of cognitive capabilities. For instance, Rowlands (2012) argues that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. The position is taken that the "classical sandwich" of cognition sandwiched between perception and action is artificial; cognition has to be seen as a product of a strongly coupled interaction that cannot be divided this way.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: In the field of near-death research, the following phenomenon, among others, occurs: For example, during some brain operations the brain is artificially and measurably deactivated. Nevertheless, some patients report during this phase that they have perceived what is happening in their surroundings, i.e. that they have had consciousness. Patients also report experiences during a cardiac arrest. There is the following problem: As soon as the brain is no longer supplied with blood and thus with oxygen after a cardiac arrest, the brain ceases its normal operation after about 15 seconds, i.e. the brain falls into a state of unconsciousness.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Most of the discussion in this article has focused on one style or tradition of philosophy in modern Western culture, usually called analytic philosophy (sometimes described as Anglo-American philosophy). Many other schools of thought exist, however, which are sometimes subsumed under the broad (and vague) label of continental philosophy. In any case, though topics and methods here are numerous, in relation to the philosophy of mind the various schools that fall under this label (phenomenology, existentialism, etc.) can globally be seen to differ from the analytic school in that they focus less on language and logical analysis alone but also take in other forms of understanding human existence and experience. With reference specifically to the discussion of the mind, this tends to translate into attempts to grasp the concepts of thought and perceptual experience in some sense that does not merely involve the analysis of linguistic forms.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", first published in 1781 and presented again with major revisions in 1787, represents a significant intervention into what will later become known as the philosophy of mind. Kant's first critique is generally recognized as among the most significant works of modern philosophy in the West. Kant is a figure whose influence is marked in both continental and analytic/Anglo-American philosophy. Kant's work develops an in-depth study of transcendental consciousness, or the life of the mind as conceived through the universal categories of understanding.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Philosophy of Mind" (frequently translated as "Philosophy of Spirit" or Geist), the third part of his "Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences", Hegel discusses three distinct types of mind: the "subjective mind/spirit", the mind of an individual; the "objective mind/spirit", the mind of society and of the State; and the "Absolute mind/spirit", the position of religion, art, and philosophy. See also Hegel's "The Phenomenology of Spirit". Nonetheless, Hegel's work differs radically from the style of Anglo-American philosophy of mind.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: In 1896, Henri Bergson made in "Matter and Memory" "Essay on the relation of body and spirit" a forceful case for the ontological difference of body and mind by reducing the problem to the more definite one of memory, thus allowing for a solution built on the "empirical test case" of aphasia.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: In modern times, the two main schools that have developed in response or opposition to this Hegelian tradition are phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, focuses on the contents of the human mind (see noema) and how processes shape our experiences. Existentialism, a school of thought founded upon the work of Søren Kierkegaard, focuses on Human predicament and how people deal with the situation of being alive. Existential-phenomenology represents a major branch of continental philosophy (they are not contradictory), rooted in the work of Husserl but expressed in its fullest forms in the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See Heidegger's "Being and Time", Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception", Sartre's "Being and Nothingness", and Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex".


title: Philosophy of mind

text: There are countless subjects that are affected by the ideas developed in the philosophy of mind. Clear examples of this are the nature of death and its definitive character, the nature of emotion, of perception and of memory. Questions about what a person is and what his or her identity have to do with the philosophy of mind. There are two subjects that, in connection with the philosophy of the mind, have aroused special attention: free will and the self.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: In the context of philosophy of mind, the problem of free will takes on renewed intensity. This is the case for materialistic determinists. According to this position, natural laws completely determine the course of the material world. Mental states, and therefore the will as well, would be material states, which means human behavior and decisions would be completely determined by natural laws. Some take this reasoning a step further: people cannot determine by themselves what they want and what they do. Consequently, they are not free.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: This argumentation is rejected, on the one hand, by the compatibilists. Those who adopt this position suggest that the question "Are we free?" can only be answered once we have determined what the term "free" means. The opposite of "free" is not "caused" but "compelled" or "coerced". It is not appropriate to identify freedom with indetermination. A free act is one where the agent could have done otherwise if it had chosen otherwise. In this sense a person can be free even though determinism is true. The most important compatibilist in the history of the philosophy was David Hume. More recently, this position is defended, for example, by Daniel Dennett.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: On the other hand, there are also many incompatibilists who reject the argument because they believe that the will is free in a stronger sense called libertarianism. These philosophers affirm the course of the world is either a) not completely determined by natural law where natural law is intercepted by physically independent agency, b) determined by indeterministic natural law only, or c) determined by indeterministic natural law in line with the subjective effort of physically non-reducible agency. Under Libertarianism, the will does not have to be deterministic and, therefore, it is potentially free. Critics of the second proposition (b) accuse the incompatibilists of using an incoherent concept of freedom. They argue as follows: if our will is not determined by anything, then we desire what we desire by pure chance. And if what we desire is purely accidental, we are not free. So if our will is not determined by anything, we are not free.


title: Philosophy of mind

text: The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the concept of "self". If by "self" or "I" one refers to an essential, immutable nucleus of the "person", some modern philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett believe that no such thing exists. According to Dennett and other contemporaries, the self is considered an illusion. The idea of a self as an immutable essential nucleus derives from the idea of an immaterial soul. Such an idea is unacceptable to modern philosophers with physicalist orientations and their general skepticism of the concept of "self" as postulated by David Hume, who could never catch himself "not" doing, thinking or feeling anything. However, in the light of empirical results from developmental psychology, developmental biology and neuroscience, the idea of an essential inconstant, material nucleus—an integrated representational system distributed over changing patterns of synaptic connections—seems reasonable.


title: Oarfish

text: Oarfish are huge, greatly elongated, pelagic lampriform fish belonging to the small family Regalecidae. Found in areas spanning from temperate ocean zones to tropical ones, yet rarely seen, the oarfish family contains three species in two genera. One of these, the giant oarfish ("Regalecus glesne"), is the longest bony fish alive, growing up to in length.


title: Oarfish

text: The common name "oarfish" is thought to be in reference either to their highly compressed and elongated bodies, or to the now discredited belief that the fish "row" themselves through the water with their pelvic fins. The family name Regalecidae is derived from the Latin "regalis", meaning "royal". The occasional beachings of oarfish after storms, and their habit of lingering at the surface when sick or dying, make oarfish a probable source of many sea serpent tales.


title: Oarfish

text: Although the larger species are considered game fish and are fished commercially to a minor extent, oarfish are rarely caught alive; their flesh is not well regarded for eating due to its gelatinous consistency.


title: Oarfish

text: The dorsal fin originates from above the (relatively large) eyes and runs the entire length of the fish. Of the approximately 400 dorsal fin rays, the first 10 to 13 are elongated to varying degrees, forming a trailing crest embellished with reddish spots and flaps of skin at the ray tips. The pelvic fins are similarly elongated and adorned, reduced to one to five rays each. The pectoral fins are greatly reduced and situated low on the body. The anal fin is completely absent and the caudal fin may be reduced or absent, as well, with the body tapering to a fine point. All fins lack true spines. At least one account, from researchers in New Zealand, described the oarfish as giving off "electric shocks" when touched.


title: Oarfish

text: Like other members of its order, the oarfish has a small yet highly protrusible oblique mouth with no visible teeth. The body is scaleless and the skin is covered with easily abraded, silvery ganoine. In the streamer fish ("Agrostichthys parkeri"), the skin is clad with hard tubercles. All species lack gas bladders and the number of gill rakers is variable.


title: Oarfish

text: Oarfish coloration is also variable; the flanks are commonly covered with irregular bluish to blackish streaks, black dots, and squiggles. These markings quickly fade following death. It is probable that these markings are bioluminescent in the deep sea.


title: Oarfish

text: The giant oarfish is by far the largest member of the family at a published total length of —with unconfirmed reports of and specimens—and in weight. The streamer fish is known to reach 3 m (10 ft) in length, while the largest recorded specimen of "Regalecus russelii" measured 5.4 m (18 ft).


title: Oarfish

text: In some oarfishes found, end of tails may appear stump-like; this is likely the consequence of self-amputation that is thought to be a defense mechanism against predators.


title: Oarfish

text: Hyperostoic bone growth has been documented in several specimen of oarfish that have washed up on the coast of California. Hyperossified pterygiophores have been discovered to run along the entire dorsal length of oarfish. The function of this is to both provide structural support to the spine of oarfish during undulations (tail movement used for locomotion) and to remodel spines to prevent stress fractures that could occur from too much movement. It has also been hypothesized that this hyper ossification acts as a lever for the oarfish dorsal fins, which contributes to the organism's buoyancy. Unlike many deep-sea fish, oarfish have no swim bladders for maintaining depth in the water column. It is likely that this lack of a swim bladder forces more frequent tail undulations as the main mode of depth regulation in oarfish.


title: Oarfish

text: Through the analysis of the mitochondrial genome of "Regalicus glesne", the phylogenetic placement of the Giant Oarfish was further verified. Oarfish are considered Lampriformes (an phylogenetic order), and they have been placed here due to their morphology. However, analysis of the mitochondrial genome of an "R. glesne" specimen clusters the species with "Trachipterus trachypterus" and "Zu cristatus," two other Lampriformes. These three species were clustered together due to similarity in genetic sequence and morphology, which further supports the phylogeny and evolution of Lampriformes.


title: Oarfish

text: The oarfish is thought to inhabit the epipelagic to mesopelagic ocean layers, ranging from 200 meters (660 ft) to 1,000 meters (3,300 ft) and is rarely seen on the surface. A few have been found still barely alive, but usually if one floats to the surface, it dies. At the depths the oarfish live, there are few or no currents. As a result, they build little muscle mass and they cannot survive in shallower turbulent water.


title: Oarfish

text: The members of the family are known to have a worldwide range. They have wide, tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate distributions. The oarfish typically reside in the mesopelagic area of the sea. However, human encounters with live oarfish are rare, and distribution information is collated from records of oarfish caught or washed ashore.


title: Oarfish

text: Oarfish were first described in 1772. Rare encounters with divers and accidental catches have supplied what little is known of oarfish ethology (behavior) and ecology. Oarfish are solitary animals and may frequent significant depths up to .


title: Oarfish

text: An oarfish measuring and was reported to have been caught in February 2003 using a fishing rod baited with squid at Skinningrove, United Kingdom.


title: Oarfish

text: A photograph on display in bars, restaurants, guesthouses and markets around Laos and Thailand captioned "Queen of Nāgas seized by the American Army at Mekhong River, Laos Military Base, on June 27, 1973, with the length of " is, as far as the caption goes, a hoax. The photograph is real, however, and was taken by Leo Smith of the Field Museum, of an oarfish found in September 1996 by United States Navy SEAL trainees on the coast of Coronado, California, USA.


title: Oarfish

text: In 2001, an oarfish was filmed alive "in situ": the fish was spotted by a group of U.S. Navy personnel during the inspection of a buoy in the Bahamas. The oarfish was observed to propel itself by an amiiform mode of swimming; that is, rhythmically undulating the dorsal fin while keeping the body itself straight. Perhaps indicating a feeding posture, oarfish have been observed swimming in a vertical orientation, with their long axis perpendicular to the ocean surface. In this posture, the downstreaming light would silhouette the oarfishes' prey, making them easier to spot.


title: Oarfish

text: In July 2008, scientists captured footage of the rare fish swimming in its natural habitat in the mesopelagic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It is the first ever confirmed sighting of an oarfish at depth, as most specimens are discovered dying at the sea surface or washed ashore. The fish was estimated to be between in length.


title: Oarfish

text: As part of the SERPENT Project, five observations of apparently healthy oarfish "Regalecus glesne" by remotely operated vehicles were reported from the northern Gulf of Mexico between 2008 and 2011 at depths within the epipelagic and mesopelagic zones. These observations include the deepest verified record of "R. glesne" (). In the 2011 sighting, an oarfish has been observed to switch from swimming with a vertical posture to swimming laterally, using lateral undulations of its entire body. Oarfish were found to have late or slow flight responses towards approaching remotely operated vehicles, supporting the hypothesis that oarfish have few natural predators.


title: Oarfish

text: From December 2009 to March 2010, unusual numbers of the slender oarfish "Regalecus russelii" (宮の使い "Ryūgū-No-Tsukai",) known in Japanese folklore as the "Messenger from the Sea God's Palace", appeared in the waters and on the beaches of Japan, the appearance of which is said to portend earthquakes. After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami which killed over 20,000 people, many pointed to the oarfish from 2009–2010 to build up this myth.


title: Oarfish

text: In 2016, Animal Planet aired an episode of the television series "River Monsters" named "Deep Sea Demon" in which Jeremy Wade was filmed during an encounter with a live oarfish while diving. The oarfish at this location seemed to be using a buoy anchor chain as a guide to ascend to the surface. On his second diving attempt, he was able to film two live oarfish as they ascended relatively close to the surface. This is the only known footage of human interaction with a healthy oarfish in its own environment. Wade was even able to touch one of the oarfish with his hand. The oarfish were propelling themselves by an amiiform mode of swimming as noted by other sightings.


title: Oarfish

text: In January 2019 two oarfish were found alive in the nets of fisherman on the Japanese island of Okinawa.


title: Oarfish

text: Oarfish feed primarily on zooplankton, selectively straining tiny euphausiids, shrimp, and other crustaceans from the water. Small fish, jellyfish, and squid are also taken. Large open-ocean carnivores are all likely predators of oarfish. It has been observed that oarfish eat by suctioning prey such as plankton blooms while in the water.


title: Oarfish

text: The oceanodromous "Regalecus glesne" is recorded as spawning off Mexico from July to December; all species are presumed to not guard their eggs, and release brightly coloured, buoyant eggs, up to across, which are incorporated into the zooplankton. Based on their reproductive morphology, oarfish are thought to batch spawn. Within each breeding season that may last one or two months, individuals spawn once or multiple times in discrete spawning events before their gonads enter a long, regressive stage of reproductive development.


title: Oarfish

text: The eggs hatch after about three weeks into highly active larvae that feed on other zooplankton. The larvae have little resemblance to the adults, with long dorsal and pelvic fins and extensible mouths. Larvae and juveniles have been observed drifting just below the surface. In contrast, adult oarfish are rarely seen at the surface when not sick or injured. It is probable that the fishes go deeper as they mature.


title: Oarfish

text: From January to February, 2019, researchers tested and recorded the first successful instance of artificial insemination and hatching of the oarfish ("Regalecus russellii") using gonads from two washed-up specimens. Compared to adults, the body structure of newly hatched oarfish larvae look more compressed. The larvae often swam using mainly their pectoral fins, facing downward, with their mouths constantly open. The larvae were invertebrates but had bones in their head area, as well as fins. They did not eat, so they had died four days after they hatched.


title: Oarfish

text: In addition to the otolith, recent studies have revealed more information about the reproductive organs of the oarfish. Using photographs, histological cross-sections, and measurements of four samples of "R. russelii", researchers were able to qualitatively describe the sexual organs of the species. These studies have shown that female oarfish have bifurcated ovaries containing a cavity through which the eggs pass before leaving the body of the oarfish. Testes on male oarfish are located in a similar place as the ovaries of female oarfish, near the digestive tract called the coelomic cavity. The oarfish have two separate, disconnected testes and the left testes observed were longer than the right testes. An analysis of these findings led researchers to conclude that "R. russelii" are likely batch spawning fish that produce a large number of offspring every breeding season.


title: Oarfish

text: Like the case of behavior and hunting, scientists know very little about the actual breeding habits of these fish. A single female can produce hundreds of thousands, to million of eggs. She lays her eggs in the water column, and they float freely in the water.


title: Oarfish

text: A recent study concerning the parasitization of this species revealed that the shortfin mako shark and the sperm whale could both be predators of the oarfish, based on patterns of parasite transmission. These conclusions were made based on analysis of the visceral tissue of an oarfish recovered by the Catalina Island Marine Institute in Santa Catalina Island, California.


title: Lübeck

text: Lübeck (; Low German also ), officially the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 217,000 inhabitants, Lübeck is the second-largest city on the German Baltic coast and in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, after its capital of Kiel, and is the 35th-largest city in Germany.


title: Lübeck

text: The city lies in Holstein, northeast of Hamburg, on the mouth of the River Trave, which flows into the Bay of Lübeck in the borough of Travemünde, and on the Trave's tributary Wakenitz. The city is part of the Hamburg Metropolitan Region, and is the southwesternmost city on the Baltic, as well as the closest point of access to the Baltic from Hamburg. The port of Lübeck is the second-largest German Baltic port after the port of Rostock. The city lies in the Northern Low Saxon dialect area of Low German.


title: Lübeck

text: Lübeck is famous for having been the cradle and the "de facto" capital of the Hanseatic League. Its city centre is Germany's most extensive UNESCO World Heritage Site.


title: Lübeck

text: While the city's symbol is the Holsten Gate, Lübeck's skyline is dominated by the seven towers of its five main churches St Mary's, Lübeck Cathedral, St Jacob's (), St Peter's (), and St Giles'. The cathedral, finished around 1230, was the first large brickwork church in the Baltic region. St Mary's, finished in 1351, served as model for the other Brick Gothic churches around the Baltic. It has the second-tallest two-steeples façade after Cologne Cathedral, which only surpassed it in 1880, the tallest brick vault, and is the second-tallest brickwork structure after St Martin's in Landshut. Travemünde is a famous seaside resort, and its "Maritim" high-rise serves as the second-tallest lighthouse in the world at high. Lübeck is also known for Lübeck Marzipan.


title: Lübeck

text: Humans settled in the area around what today is Lübeck after the last Ice Age ended about 9700 BCE. Several Neolithic dolmens can be found in the area.


title: Lübeck

text: Around 700 AD, Slavic peoples started moving into the eastern parts of Holstein, an area previously settled by Germanic inhabitants who had moved on in the Migration Period. Charlemagne, whose efforts to Christianise the area were opposed by the Germanic Saxons, expelled many of the Saxons and brought in Polabian Slavs allies. Liubice (the place-name means "lovely") was founded on the banks of the River Trave about north of the present-day city-center of Lübeck.


title: Lübeck

text: In the 10th century, it became the most important settlement of the Obotrite confederacy and a castle was built. In 1128, the pagan Rani from Rügen razed Liubice.


title: Lübeck

text: In 1143, Adolf II, Count of Schauenburg and Holstein, founded the modern town as a German settlement on the river island of Bucu. He built a new castle, first mentioned by the chronicler Helmold as existing in 1147. Adolf had to cede the castle to the Duke of Saxony, Henry the Lion, in 1158. After Henry's fall from power in 1181, the town became an Imperial city for eight years.


title: Lübeck

text: Emperor Barbarossa (reigned 1152–1190) ordained that the city should have a ruling council of 20 members. With the council dominated by merchants, pragmatic trade interests shaped Lübeck's politics for centuries. The council survived into the 19th century. The town and castle changed ownership for a period afterwards and formed part of the Duchy of Saxony until 1192, of the County of Holstein until 1217, and of the kingdom of Denmark until the Battle of Bornhöved in 1227.


title: Lübeck

text: Around 1200, the port became the main point of departure for colonists leaving for the Baltic territories conquered by the Livonian Order, and later, by the Teutonic Order. In 1226, Emperor Frederick II elevated the town to the status of an Imperial free city, by which it became the Free City of Lübeck.


title: Lübeck

text: In the 14th century, Lübeck became the "Queen of the Hanseatic League", being by far the largest and most powerful member of that medieval trade organization. In 1375, Emperor Charles IV named Lübeck one of the five "Glories of the Empire", a title shared with Venice, Rome, Pisa, and Florence.


title: Lübeck

text: Several conflicts about trading privileges resulted in fighting between Lübeck (with the Hanseatic League) and Denmark and Norway – with varying outcome. While Lübeck and the Hanseatic League prevailed in conflicts in 1435 and 1512, Lübeck lost when it became involved in the Count's Feud, a civil war that raged in Denmark from 1534 to 1536. Lübeck also joined the pro-Lutheran Schmalkaldic League of the mid-16th century.