The philosophy papers blog is still fairly quiet, with the holiday (and the snowstorm?) keeping most people from publishing updates. Still, the two pages that are updated are usually high quality. Jessica Wilson has a new paper on physicalism and an updated draft of a review of John Perry’s book on consciousness. Strictly speaking the paper on physicalism is an update to an earlier paper as well, but she’s given it a new title, and seems to have made substantial revisions, so I’ll call it a new paper. (Seems? -ed. Well, it’s eight pages shorter and while I’m too lazy to confirm that’s a substantial revision, it sure seems like one, and by the way, this editor meme is getting a little out of hand.) And Nick Bostrom has one new and one revised ethics papers out. At first the new paper looks like it is arguing that it is tragic thing that the sun will eventually die out and we are wasting the finite amount of time we have until that sad occurrence by doing things like watching Joe Millionaire rather getting to and colonising the galaxy. But eventually it turns out that what’s more important is that we not mess up the colonisation, because that would be a catastrophe on a different order of magnitude to missing a few years of colonisation, so perhaps Joe Millionaire is not so bad. (Bet that’s not a conclusion you ever thought you’d see a halfway decent argument for. I still haven’t. -ed.)