Barbara Gail Montero

Might the seat of conscious experience exist in 'prototime', a conjectured aspatial, quasi-temporal reality out of which space-time emerges? Schneider and Bailey argue that if space-time is emergent, this might help us to understand the place of consciousness in the physical world. Although I agree that their hypothesis suggests a possible solution to the 'hard problem' of consciousness — the challenge of explaining how consciousness arises from particles and processes that are themselves non-conscious — I argue that a timeless rather than prototemporal reality may offer a similar explanatory role. I also consider whether the lesson we should draw from the possibility of emergent space-time is not that consciousness may be a fundamental element of prototime, as Schneider and Bailey see it, but rather that the apparent incomprehensibility of one phenomenon's emergence from another should not lead us to conclude that such emergence is impossible.

This chapter takes a radical approach to the combination problem. It argues that the problem understood as a critique of panpsychism is ill-conceived because it searches for a solution to a question which the panpsychist should never have been asked. If we refrain from thinking about the origin of higher-level forms of consciousness out of pools or mere groupings of proto-minds, but instead conceive of it along the lines of how higher-level individuals are generated by lower-level individuals in general, then we have no reason to believe that there is anything mysterious about the origins of higher forms of consciousness.

Although we praise effort, we prize effortlessness. Effortless bodily movement, effortless speech or writing, even effortless objects affect us in a way we naturally think of as aesthetic. But just what is effortlessness? What are we appreciating when we admire a dancer’s effortless technique, precision or presence? And what makes effortlessness aesthetically valuable? In addressing these questions, this chapter distinguishes various ways in which we apply the accolade “effortless” to works of art, discusses the way in which an action may be effortless yet also difficult, and ponders the question of whether we sometimes appreciate an individual’s ability to present the guise of effortless action. It also examines Henri Bergson’s and Herbert Spencer’s thoughts about effortlessness and grace, including Bergson’s suggestion that our perception of grace is grounded in our sense of “physical sympathy.”

The attentional focus effect—the theory that focusing on the body during skilled tasks leads to suboptimal results relative to focusing externally—is well established, but it is not known why it holds. The most widely cited explanation is the constrained action hypothesis: Focusing on the body interferes with beneficial automatic motor programs. We argue that increased automaticity may not be the sole or even primary explanation for the attentional focus effect and propose the engaged action hypothesis: An external focus prompts individuals to focus on the task at hand and engage and coordinate relevant muscle groups.

It is generally thought that the better you are at performing a skill, the easier it is for you to perform it. Indeed, effortlessness is often seen as a defining characteristic of expertise. We question the idea that skill improvement invariably coincides with a reduction in the effort it takes to perform it. In place of the idea of effortless expertise, we argue for the view that one key characteristic of athletes, performing artists, and other highly skilled individuals who defy the power law of practice, which states that improvement in skill, while increasing rapidly at first, eventually plateaus, is the ability to maintain a high level of effort in both practice and performance. To support our view, we present a model of attention and conscious motor control in action that helps explain both why automaticity can lead to an improvement plateau and how exerting effort can sometimes enable one to defy the power law of practice.

A number of philosophers think that, while we cannot explain how the mind is physical, we can know that it is physical, nonetheless. That is, they accept both the explanatory gap between the mental and the physical and ontological physicalism. I argue that this position is unstable. Among other things, I argue that once one accepts the explanatory gap, the main argument for ontological physicalism, the argument from causation, looses its force. For if one takes physicaVnonphysical causation and ontological physicalism to be equally mysterious, as physicalists who accept the explanatory gap are inclined to do, there is little justification for accepting ontological physicalism rather than rejecting the causal closure of the physical.

Barbara Montero and Sam Coleman address the question of whether a life that involves psychedelic drug use can be meaningful and answer in the affirmative. Specifically, they contend that, on the conception of life’s meaning they defend, which they call “meaning-of-life externalism” (the view that the meaningfulness of one’s life is, at least partly, but essentially, a function of the relation between the content of one’s of mind, on the one hand, and truth and reality, on the other), the use of psychedelics, in appropriate contexts, is no bar to, but can contribute to, a meaningful life. They argue that, because psychedelics alter one’s perception in such a way as to leave both the world and one’s contact with it intact, the use of such drugs does not render one’s life any less meaningful. In making this case they contrast the clinical use of psychedelics with the prospect of sustained engagement in virtual reality (VR), recently discussed by Chalmers, which (as they put it) “does impede one’s ability to lead a meaningful life in the externalist sense because VR, in contrast to psychedelics, changes the world yet holds experience constant.” What is key for life’s meaning, then, is engagement with external reality.

The physical world, as Ted Honderich points out in his book Actual Consciousness, is almost invariably thought of as necessarily objective. What exactly this means is controversial. However, the rough idea is that there is no aspect of the physical world that can, in principle, be experienced by only one person. As such, physicalism would be refuted by irreducible subjective facts—facts, for example, about what my conscious experience of seeing red is like that cannot be fully conveyed in objective terms about light reflectances, the physiology of color vision and so forth. Athough Honderich pushes against the conception of the physical as inhospitable to private, subjective experience, I argue that he does not go far enough.

Could you be a brain in a vat, with all your experiences of people, plants, pebbles, planets and more being generated solely by computer inputs? It might seem difficult to know that you aren’t, since everything in the world would still appear just as it is. In his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam argues that if you were in such a predicament, your statement ‘I am a brain in a vat’’, would be false since, as an envatted brain, your word ‘vat’ would refer to the vats you encounter in your experienced reality, and in your experienced reality, you are not in one of those but are instead a full-bodied human being with head, torso, arms, and legs living in the wide open world. The following extended thought experiment is intended to illustrate that, contrary to Putnam’s view, you, as an envatted brain, could truthfully believe that you are a brain in a vat.

Alter (The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge Argument to Russellian Monism, GB: Oxford University Pres, 2023) argues for something surprising: despite being widely rejected by philosophers, including Frank Jackson himself, Jackson’s knowledge argument succeeds. Alter’s defense of Jackson’s argument is not only surprising; it’s also exciting: the knowledge argument, if it’s sound, underscores the power of armchair philosophy, the power of pure thought to arrive at substantial conclusions about the world. In contrast, I aim to make a case for something unsurprising and unexciting: that the knowledge argument does not succeed, or, even less far-reaching, that Alter’s defense of it is not persuasive. Mine is a classic file-drawer thesis, but what it has going for it is that it’s true, or so I think, and hope to illustrate why you should too.

Lorraine Besser argues that interesting experiences confer prudential value on those who have them. After summing up what Besser means by this, I question whether interesting experiences always confer such value and whether the experience of the interesting has its own distinctive phenomenal feel. Beyond this, I ponder the contours of Besser’s discussion of how people with Alzheimer’s might experience the interesting, agreeing with her that it seems likely that they can but questioning her suggestion that they may even be more prone to experience the interesting than those without the disease. I wrap up with a brief musing about whether today’s culture of constant distractions is robbing us of the value of being deeply interested in things.

According to L.A. Paul, conscious experiences can be transformative. But can unconscious experiences also be transformative? After a preliminary clarification of what it means to have an unconscious experience, we marshal three cases of unconscious experiences to support the idea that unconscious experiences can be transformative: one inspired by Anna Karenina, another by a case of Freud’s, and a third by the medical condition hemispatial neglect. Such examples, we argue, suggest not only that you may have had more transformative experiences than you are aware of, but also that the sphere of the authentic subject, from a first-person perspective, outstrips what is in her consciousness at any time. A full account of transformative decision making, we suggest, must take this into consideration.

Do we remember what pain feels like? Investigations into this question have sometimes led to ambiguous or apparently contradictory results. Building on research on pain memory by Rohini Terry and colleagues, I argue that this lack of agreement may be due in part to the difficulty researchers face when trying to convey to their study's participants the type of memory they are being tasked with recalling. To address this difficulty, I introduce the concept of 'qualitative memory', which, arguably, is the sort of memory we have of what red looks like yet lack with respect to pain. I also briefly address a number of consequences the acknowledgment of qualitative memory would potentially have for philosophy, arguing that if we fail to have qualitative memories of certain sensations, such as pain, the standard philosophical accounts of experience, rational choice, and the sources of moral action may all need revision.

To gain insight into human nature philosophers often discuss the inferior performance that results from deficits such as blindsight or amnesia. Less often do they look at superior abilities. A notable exception is Herbert Dreyfus who has developed a theory of expertise according to which expert action generally proceeds automatically and unreflectively. We address one of Dreyfus’s primary examples of expertise: chess. At first glance, chess would seem an obvious counterexample to Dreyfus’s view since, clearly, chess experts are engaged in deep strategic thought. However, Dreyfus’s argument is subtle. He accepts that analysis and deliberation play a role in chess, yet he thinks that all such thought is predicated on intuitive, arational expert perception, and action. We argue that even the so-called intuitive aspect of chess is rational through and through.

Do we remember what pain feels like? Investigations into this question have sometimes led to ambiguous or apparently contradictory results. Building on research on pain memory by Rohini Terry and colleagues, I argue that this lack of agreement may be due in part to the difficulty researchers face when trying to convey to their study’s participants the type of memory they are being tasked with recalling. To address this difficulty, I introduce the concept of ‘qualitative memory’, which, arguably, is the sort of memory we have of what red looks like yet lack with respect to pain. I also briefly address a number of consequences the acknowledgment of qualitative memory would potentially have for philosophy, arguing that if we fail to have qualitative memories of certain sensations, such as pain, the standard philosophical accounts of experience, rational choice, and the sources of moral action may all need revision.

According to David Chalmers , 'we have good reason to suppose that consciousness has a fundamental place in nature' . This, he thinks is because the world as revealed to us by fundamental physics is entirely structural -- it is a world not of things, but of relations -- yet relations can only account for more relations, and consciousness is not merely a relation . Call this the 'structural argument against physicalism.' I shall argue that there is a view about the relationship between mind and body, what I call, 'Russellian physicalism' that is consistent with the premises of the structural argument yet does not imply that consciousness is fundamental

It has been hypothesized that postperformance memory gaps occur in highly skilled individuals because experts generally perform their skills without conscious attention. In contrast, we hypothesize that such memory gaps may occur when performers focus so intently on their unfolding actions that their ongoing attention interferes with long-term memory formation of what was previously attended to, or when performers are highly focused on aspects of their bodily skills that are not readily put into words. In neither case, we argue, does performance proceed automatically yet both situations, we suggest, may lead to an inability to recollect performance.