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Hi, thanks for stopping by. Below you will find a list of the documents that are available here. For the most part, these are essays that I wrote whilst at The University of Melbourne, from 1996 to 1998. They are primarily from subjects taken from the Department of Philosophy, but there are also a few from Cinema and Computer Science. I also hope to add some other works here at some stage in the future...

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For those on the microsoft.public newsgroups which I frequent (you know who you are!), please have a look at this mini-essay on SPAM, and something else a little different.

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These texts are all available as Microsoft Word 6 / 95 documents, compressed using the popular ZIP file format. Please note that they were converted "blindly" from Word 97, so there may be some slight formatting problems, etc. (It did warn me a couple of times about this...).

• You can download a free Microsoft Word viewer from the Office web site.
• You can download a trial version of a ZIP utility from the WinZip web site, but please note that this is shareware and you are required to register if you keep using it.

The essays all appear as they were originally submitted; they contain numerous small errors, questionable philosophical viewpoints (hey, I'm allowed to change my mind, aren't I? :-) ), and other blemishes. If I have the time, energy, and inclination, I hope to convert them all to HTML one day, and add running annotations / updates / commentaries to them.

Please feel free to email me with any comments, questions, suggestions, and so on. I'd love to hear from you!

Philosophical Essays

Fundamental Questions In Philosophy

This was the first Philosophy subject I studied at Melbourne, dealing mainly with Rene Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy".

• This essay is about Descartes' question as to whether one can ever be sure that they are not dreaming.
  Download (early 1996)

Logic and Rationality

As the name suggests, this subject dealt with questions of logic (validity, soundness, and so on) as well as the rationality of certain religious beliefs.

• This essay is a criticism of Pascal's Wager, an argument that is supposed to convince the reader to believe in God. The lecturer for this subject described this essay as "brisk" :-).
  Download (late 1996)

Does God Exist?

The title says it all. The lecturer for this subject clearly (and openly) admitted he believe the answer was "Yes". Most of the class (myself included), on the other hand, were either undecided or on the other side of the fence.

• This essay argues that the existence of Evil does not disprove God's existence (it also doesn't prove it!).
  Download (early 1997)

Manners of Meaning

This subject explored various theories of meaning that have surfaced over the years. Due to the broad coverage of topics, the essays were meant to be short and descriptive, rather than critical.

• This essay discusses the views of Gottlob Frege.
  Download (late 1997)
• This essay discusses the views of J.L Austin on performative utterances.
  Download (late 1997)
• This essay discusses Quine's theory of the untranslatability of any natural language.
  Download (late 1997)

Philosophical Issues in Cognitive Science

This subject was very broad, looking at all manner of things from behaviouristic tests on rats and pigeons, through to Autism, and simple finite state machines.

• This essays is a standard Searlian rejection of the purely syntactical nature of the mind, and of Strong AI as a whole.
  Download (late 1997)
• This essay is more interesting (IMHO), but is also rather wishy-washy. I'm not really happy with the opening page... (Oh, BTW, it is to do with the possibility of there actually being anything 'Artificial').
  Download (late 1998)

Themes in 20^th Century Philosophy

The focus of this subject was on Ludwig Wittgenstein, both on his early work in the Tractatus, and his later work in the Investigations. Wittgenstein was very interested in language, among other things.

• This has got to be the worst essay I've ever written. The subject matter (the Tractatus) was incomprehensible for the most part, so I was writing more or less "on instruments". Then again, I didn't get a bad mark for it, so...
  Download (early 1998)
• I had slightly better luck with this one, since the Investigations are a lot more accessible than the earlier work. It is about Wittgenstein's "Private Language" argument.
  Download (early 1998)

Minds, Brains, and Machines

One of my favourite subjects, and my most fruitful Philosophy subject, this dealt with GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence - computationalism) and connectionism. Thankfully, the class was evenly divided amongst the believers and the non-believers, which made for interesting class discussions.

• This essay looks at the question of whether brains are computers.
  Download (early 1998)
• This combines two essays written for a final take-home exam, one examining whether connectionism really is an 'alternative' to GOFAI.
  Download (early 1998)

Basic Issues in Moral Theory

Is there an absolute moral code? Are some things always wrong? This subject looked not at morality in terms of how to live one's life, but at the underlying metaphysical questions about the very existence of moral absolutes.

• Another bad essay, this one criticises Iris Murdoch's "Vision Picture" of morality. After writing this, I began to think that I'd completely misunderstood her and that I was misrepresenting her point of view. Still, I didn't fail, so it can't have been too bad ;-).
  Download (late 1998)

Moral Context: Investigations into Applied Ethics

Now this is more like it! Operating at a higher level than "Basic Issues", this subject dealt with questions of morality in the areas of Sex, Business, Punishment and War.

• This essays is about sexuality, and why normative descriptions of it are not only "bad", but that they might not be normative in the first place.
  Download (late 1998)
• The subject's lecturer, Doug Adeney, has a nice idea of using quarantine as an alternative to punishment. Here's my take on it.
  Download (late 1998)

Computer Science Essays

Now most people don't associate Computer Science (or other Science / Engineering disciplines) with essay writing (that's what Arts students do), but Melbourne had a strong focus on fostering these skills in their students.

Communication Skills

No prizes for guessing what this one was about. The major unit of assessment here was a combined paper / presentation given at a conference organised and held by the students - "A World Going Digital".

• This is my favourite piece of writing, not just because of the content, but because of the style. Described by the lecturer as "beautiful" I laboured for weeks over this baby. It is a combined Word document / PowerPoint presentation, entitled "Why I am Not a Computationalist".
  Download (early 1998).
  Note that the document contains lots of hidden text and weird formatting - this is because it is actually a LaTeX document in disguise ;-)

Professional Issues in Computing

Standard subject dealing with professional / legal / ethical issues related to computing and the world at large.

• This essay was a group essay about SPAM. It was interesting because we (people at Melbourne) had to work with people in Arizona to come up with a very short essay in a short period of time.
  Read on-line (early 1998)
• This essay (which also had an accompanying talk) is my views on a small portion of that thorny subject that is Internet regulation (or censorship, if you will).
  Download (early 1998)

Cinema Essays

Classical Hollywood Cinema

I'm a huge movie fan, and one day I'm going to make them <grin>, so it was only natural I took this subject. Unfortunately, being an Engineering student who was already overloading on Arts, they weren't keen to have me back for any more subjects :-(.

• This essay discusses the breakfast scene in the classic screwball comedy "It Happened One Night".
  Download (early 1996)
• This essay is about film genre, focussing on Sci Fi / Horror, and the Alien trilogy of films.
  Download (early 1996)