Tutor profile: Margaux P.

Give the only three french nouns known to be masculine when singular and feminine when plural.

These three exceptions are "amour" (love), "delice" (delight, joy) and "orgue" (organ). example: An unrequited love = Un amour non partagé Unrequited loves = Des amours non partagées (Notice the end of the verb "partager")

Give a counter-argument to the physicalist main claim that the hard problem of consciousness can be answered only by physical means.

The thought experiment of the "philosophical zombie" - or p-zombie - (developed notably by David Chalmers after Kirk coined the term in 1974) is probably the best known counter-argument to physicalism. According to the p-zombie argument, philosophical zombies are conceivable beings (which means they are possible, not logically incoherent) and absolutely indistinguishable from other humans in that they would show the same behaviours or emotional responses. The difference between p-zombies and humans is that there is no "what-it's-like-ness" associated with being a zombie, i.e. p-zombies have no qualia nor conscious experience associated to the observable manifestations of their alleged mental states. The debatable point of this thought experiment is the conceivability of such a being, aspect debated notably by physicalists arguing that such beings are logically incoherent.

Give a detailed example of neuroplasticity documented in humans.

Human echolocation is the ability observed in humans to detect objects through sounds. The most notable expert on human echolocation is Daniel Kish, president of World Access For The Blind, a nonprofit organization aimed at teaching echolocation to blind children all around the world. Kish himself is blind since he was a toddler, having his eyes removed because of retinal cancer when he was 13-month-old. Using palatal clicks and listening to the echo of the sound he created, he is able to localize - and even identify - objects in his environment, which allows him to do activities like riding a bike or going on hikes unassisted. Despite being known for several centuries (French philosopher Denis Diderot mentioned it in his "Letter on the Blind" in 1749), this method has been better understood only in recent years through the study by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of several echolocation experts. These studies have shown that when experts "listen" and analyse the information coming back from the echo of the sound they created, activation from brain areas normally used to process visual information by sighted individuals are activated, like V1, the primary visual cortex.