Darren Medeiros

Against the claim that technological enhancements are largely good for us, I argue that instantaneous bypassing enhancements—enhancements that deprive the subject of opportunities for further self-development of that capacity—can be bad for us. Through an analysis of the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I show how human existence is temporally situated, and how our projections towards our future becoming imbue our experiences with value and significance. Because instantaneous bypassing enhancements disrupt the temporality of human existence, they would erase much of the value and significance in our lives that is gained through self-development. Moving beyond the binary of traditional and technological enhancements, I offer a more substantive framework for analyzing enhancements in regard to how those enhancements affect temporal self-development. I also respond to various claims made by proponents of transhumanist enhancement like Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, arguing that there are important differences between particular categories of traditional and technological enhancements, that it is impossible to enhance self-development through instantaneous bypassing enhancements, and distinguishing how my analysis differs from boredom arguments. Moreover, I argue that all forms of instantaneous enhancements foster an inauthentic or anonymous mode of being.

Although the notion of the higher pleasures is central to John Stuart Mill’s ethical hedonism, conspicuously absent from _Utilitarianism_ is any substantive explanation of the nature of the higher pleasures, resulting in several interpretative difficulties including the charge that Mill’s theory faces a dilemma that severely undercuts the consistency of his ethical theory. The mystery of why Mill would be so evasive in explaining the higher pleasures can be solved by analyzing the influence of Auguste Comte’s Positivism on Mill—as well as the influence of Plato. I argue that because Auguste Comte harshly rejects the validity of claims regarding conscious intellectual states, it is plausible that Mill chooses not to reveal his understanding of the higher pleasures. And furthermore, Mill does this because, as is shown by his commentary on _Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind_, he does in fact understand the higher pleasures as conscious intellectual states. I offer preliminary analysis of Mill’s expanded view and show how it can resolve some interpretative problems introduced in _Utilitarianism_.

Whether metacognitive experiences should be considered evidence for or against cognitive phenomenology is controversial. In this paper I analyze one metacognitive experience, having a word at the tip of one’s tongue, and argue that this experience is an instance of cognitive phenomenology. I develop what I call a Cognitive view of tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience, supported by examining the prominent psychological explanation of tip-of-the-tongue states emerging from the science of language production, showing how psychological data suggests that the phenomenal character of tip-of-the-tongue experiences is constituted in part by conceptual representations, from which it follows that tip-of-the-tongue experiences are instances of cognitive phenomenology. This view contrasts with metacognitive embodied affect views of tip-of-the-tongue experiences, and I provide several clarifications and challenges that defenders of these views would have to address to situate their views within the cognitive phenomenology debate. Ultimately, I conclude that the Cognitive view of TOT is better supported by empirical data, and comports better with introspection, in comparison to embodied affect views.