T. William Altermatt Welcome to my personal page. Here you will find assorted quotes, images, and links to other websites that I find interesting. I'm always interested in a good conversation, so feel free to email me with your reaction to anything on this page. My wife Ellen Altermatt is also a psychology professor at Hanover College. You can check out her page here. One theme you will see throughout this page is the mind-body problem, the question of how the experiencing mind (consciousness) and the physical body are related. I find this question endlessly fascinating, both philosophically and psychologically. It is a goal of mine to someday develop a course on consciousness and the mind-body problem. For some recommended readings on these and other topics, see my Readings Page Pictures from a couple of trips can be seen via my Picture Page. Some random thoughts on current-events issues are at my Opinion Page.

My son, Owen Nicholas Altermatt, born September 8th, 2004. He has his very own website.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Woody Allen

Between the physical processes which are released in the terminal organ of the nervous conductors in the central brain and the image which thereupon appears to the perceiving subject, there gapes a hiatus, an abyss which no realistic conception of the world can span. It is the transition from the world of being to the world of the appearing image or of consciousness.

Hermann Weyl

I do not hesitate to maintain, that what we are conscious of is constructed out of what we are not conscious of—that our whole knowledge, in fact, is made up of the unknown and the incognisable. Sir William Hamilton (1865)

"Mind-stuff" compounding: the idea that consciousness emerges from the work of unconscious mental elements. Similar to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" hypothesis [illustration by William James (1890)]

The following two quotes make similar points on different scales. Whitehead is talking about society, whereas James is talking about mind. Both propose that a reduction in conscious awareness can be considered a desirable end.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.	The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
Alfred Whitehead (1911)	William James (1890)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

You can never foretell what any man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals may vary, but percentages remain constant.

Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887)

The truth is that moderation works only if you are an unblinking maniac about it.

Lance Morrow, Time, July 19, 1999