Erik Myin

In this paper, we present an account of phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is experience, and the problem of phenomenal consciousness is to explain how physical processes?behavioral, neural, computational?can produce experience. Numerous thinkers have argued that phenomenal consciousness cannot be explained in functional, neural or information-processing terms (e.g. Block 1990, 1994; Chalmers 1996). Different arguments have been put forward. For example, it has been argued that two individuals could be exactly alike in functional/computational/behavioral measures, but differ in the character of their experience. Though such persons would behave in the same way, they would differ in how things felt to them (for example, red things might give rise to the experience in one that green things give rise to in the other). Similarly, it has been held that two individuals could be functionally/computationally/behaviorally alike although one of them, but not the other, is a mere zombie, that is, a robot-like creature who acts as if it has experience but is in fact phenomenally unconsciousness. For any being, it has been suggested, the question whether it has experience (is phenomenally conscious) cannot be answered by determining that it is an information-processor of this or that sort. The question is properly equivalent to the question whether there is anything it is like to be that individual (Nagel 1974). Attempts to explain consciousness in physical or information-processing terms sputter: we cannot get any explanatory purchase on experience when we try to explain it in terms of neural or computational processes. Once a particular process has been proposed as an explanation, we can then always reasonably wonder, it seems, what it is about that particular process that make it give rise to experience. Physical and computational mechanisms, it seems, require some further ingredient if they are to explain experience. This explanatory shortfall has aptly been referred to as "the explanatory gap" (Levine 1983)..

Music raises many problems for those who would understand it more deeply. It is rooted in time, yet timeless. It is pure form, yet conveys emotion. It is written, but performed, interpreted, improvised, transcribed, recorded, sampled, remixed, revised, rebroadcast, reinterpreted, and more. Music can be studied by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians, biologists, computer scientists, neuro-scientists, critics, politicians, promoters, and of course musicians. Moreover, no single perspective seems either sufficient or invalid. This situation is not so different from that of other arts, but perhaps more intense, due to the pervasiveness of pop, the inaccessability of much contemporary classical music, the strong cultural associations of many styles , the infusions of technology, and the combination with lyrics

Inverted sensation arguments such as the inverted spectrum thought experiment are often criticized for relying on an unconstrained notion of 'qualia'. In reply to this criticism, 'qualia-free' arguments for inversion have been proposed, in which only physical changes happen: inversions in the world, such as the replacement of surface colors by their complements, and a rewiring of peripheral input cables to more central areas in the nervous system. I show why such constrained inversion arguments won't work. The first problem is that the world lacks the symmetry required to invert physical properties in the way required. The second problem concerns 'rewiring'. Empirical evidence indicates that the rewirings are either impossible, or would not result in an inversion of sensation. I propose the deeper reason for the failure of constrained inversion arguments lies in the fact that sensations are not properties of brain states, but spread into the world and the body

There is a popular view on depiction which holds that convincingly realistic paintings depict their subjects through evoking in the spectator the illusion of seeing these very subjects face to face. There is, as it were, an exact 'match' between the visual experience of seeing something in a picture and the corresponding visual experience one would entertain if one were to stand in front of the real thing. This view, which we shall call 'illusionism', supports the widespread assumption that some kinds of pictures -- notably post-Renaissance perspective paintings -- provide the correct, 'natural' way to depict physical space because they capture the way the visual system enables one to see the world. The most notable defence of illusionism has been offered by Ernst Gombrich. In his Art and Illusion, Gombrich (1960) argues that the development of Western art consists in a series of discoveries about the nature of visual perception that eventually lead to pictorial techniques that are able to elicit illusionary visual experiences on part of the spectator and thus reach the perfection of naturalistic representation.

According to a standard representationalist view cognitive capacities depend on internal content-carrying states. Recent alternatives to this view have been met with the reaction that they have, at best, limited scope, because a large range of cognitive phenomena—those involving absent and abstract features—require representational explanations. Here we challenge the idea that the consideration of cognition regarding the absent and the abstract can move the debate about representationalism along. Whether or not cognition involving the absent and the abstract requires the positing of representations depends upon whether more basic forms of cognition require the positing of representations

We address the thesis recently proposed by Andy Clark, that skill-mediated access to modality implies phenomenal feel. We agree that a skill theory of perception does indeed offer the possibility of a satisfactory account of the feel of perception, but we claim that this is not only through explanation of access to modality but also because skill actually provides access to perceptual property in general. We illustrate and substantiate our claims by reference to the recently proposed 'sensorimotor contingency' theory of visual awareness. We discuss why this theory offers a distinctively attractive access-based approach to perceptual consciousness because it 'dereifies' experience and permits otherwise problematic aspects of phenomenal perceptual consciousness to be explained. We suggest our approach thus offers the prospect of 'naturalizing phenomenology'