At the time, Edinburgh physicians and scientists were hotly debating whether mind and life could be reduced to material explanations, or whether mind was a completely separate, non-physical entity that could not be reduced to physical phenomena.
Together with contemporaries such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil du-Bois Reymond, he played a key role in overturning vitalism, the notion that living things differ from inanimate objects because they possess some kind of non-physical entity, often called a "vital spark," or merely "energy," that was likened by some to the soul.
Typically, rights do not surround the abstract non-physical entity; rather, intellectual property rights surround the control of physical manifestations or expressions of ideas.
Augmented reality is a combination of physical reality what we all experience everyday and virtual reality where all objects in the environment are non-physical entities created by a computer.
Insofar as matter denotes a principle of potentiality, matter is found even in non-physical entities such as angels and human souls.
After all, if one ceases to believe that all science is reducible to physics, this implies that physics is not a completely full description of the world, which opens the door to non-physical entities and inevitably to nightmares of vitalism.
As already remarked, the most widely held view historically concerning the strictly sensory aspect of immediate or given experience is that what is given in such experience is not public physical objects, but rather sense-data (or sometimes sensa): private, non-physical entities that actually possess the various sensory qualities that a person experiences.
So we are no longer required to explicate how flesh and blood mathematicians stand in contact with non-physical entities.
Measurement outcomes in the EPR/B experiment exist only as (non-physical) mental states in observers' minds (which are postulated to be non-physical entities).
(Of course, this response does not apply to those philosophers who take the view that qualia are irreducible, non-physical entities. However, these philosophers have other severe problems of their own. In particular, they face the problem of phenomenal causation. Given the causal closure of the physical, how can qualia make any difference? For more here, see Tye 1995, Chalmers 1996).
Perhaps the most historically standard, though not currently the most popular answer to this question has been that it is sense-data (private, non-physical entities that actually have the immediately experienced sensory qualities) that are the immediate objects of awareness or that are given.
