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bibliography of the philosophy of mind when I was a graduate student learning the ropes. People told me I should make it
available to others, so I did, and now it has grown to more than 4000 entries. The web has made it much easier to use. I've
also put together various pages with links to high-quality philosophy available elsewhere on the web. For example, it turns out
that around 400 papers on consciousness are available online, many of them by the leading philosophers and scientists in the
field. I put together a page categorizing these papers and linking to them. That page now gets a lot of use by people inside and
outside the field, and it is growing all the time. On the lighter side, I have a page devoted to zombies, and one devoted to
philosophical humor. Last time I checked, the humor page got the most traffic of any of my pages. I tend to work on my web
page when I'm in a mood to avoid getting real writing done -- but at least it's a form of productive procrastination!
One effect of all this, I hope, is to make real philosophy much more accessible to people outside the field, and people outside
academia. I have had a lot of nice feedback from people who appreciate this. Another effect is to help open lines of
communication between the different fields involved in a broad area such as consciousness research. And a third effect is to
speed up the process of philosophical dialectic. New work is often made available much more quickly these days. Where
responses between philosophers might have previously taken years, at least at the public level, now they can be available in
months. I suppose one negative effect could be potentially to encourage sloppiness and a lowering of standards, but I think that
the existence of journals and such will keep standards high. Overall, I hope the effect of the Internet is to help make philosophy
an even more interesting, active, and open field than it is already.
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