This chapter introduces the hard problem of sensory phenomenal consciousness and the three-part solution, the MOUDD theory, developed in the book.

Chapter 4 draws on both existing research and semi-structured interviews with people with visible differences to explain what we know about the human experience – both psychological and social – of having a disfigurement. For instance, are particular types of disfigurement more vulnerable to discrimination than others? Are certain life contexts impacted more acutely? Are coping mechanisms commonly used? It considers the link between physical appearance and perceived personality traits. And it challenges common assumptions – like the idea that more severe disfigurements are always worse to live with (an erroneous assumption which lives on undaunted in the law). Despite methodological difficulties in researching such a dynamic and underexplored area, this chapter identifies significant disadvantages in looking different. With this in mind, this chapter probes how people with lived experience of visible difference understand their experiences and relate them to the law. Exploring the legal consciousness of this group of people provides a partial insight into the low numbers of claims brought under the relevant part of equality law. It interrogates the gulf between what the law says on paper and how it works in real life, revealing tensions and mixed messages which undermine law’s potential for effectiveness.

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.

This chapter explores the medically-trained writer, Robert Montgomery Bird, and his fraught experience of the way the competing ontological paradigms that inflected Edgar Huntly also conditioned early nineteenth-century medical discourse. Bird uses his picaresque novel, Sheppard Lee (1836), to interrogate what was called “regular” medical discourse and its mind-centered ontology, and to imagine instead the ontological possibilities that result from the body-centered ontology of metempsychosis. For Bird, metempsychosis involves our consciousness migrating from one body to another, and being defined by its different embodiment. In representing the lived experience of both white and Black embodiment, Bird uses metempsychosis to interrogate “regular” medicine’s mind-centered ontological paradigm, even as he puts pressure on “irregular” medicine as well. As I argue, Bird understands conscious existence as ontological drift, as I call it, a far less clear, but far more capacious ontology than either regular or irregular medical discourses entertain. By “minding the body” in this way, Bird uses his novel’s interrogation of the mind-body relationship to imagine a less repressive, but not unproblematic, form of racialized conscious existence in the antebellum period.

TOT states are conscious experiences. When we are in a TOT state, we know it and we feel it. A major conclusion from the work presented in this book is that reliance on subjective reports remains a critically important means of investigating the TOT phenomenon. How TOTs influence other thoughts, decisions, and behaviors remains an important area for future investigation. One of the newest areas in TOT research and one that is driving recent research is the finding that TOT states are associated with a number of cognitive biases in the moments that those TOT states are occurring as well as with indicators of goal-oriented behaviors aimed at information-seeking and possibly ultimately at TOT resolution. This research shows that TOTs help to put people on a path toward resolution, enabling and even motivating them to pursue and eventually obtain the answer. We highlight some other future directions in TOT research, such as focusing on TOTs in people with anomia.

In this chapter of Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us, the author describes a case involving multiple interactions between a patient’s family and the healthcare team surrounding "futile" therapy. Each new team believes that the family does not understand and tries to educate them, leading to exhaustion and lack of trust all around. The case demonstrates the complexity that arises in communication in the current healthcare system.

This chapter unpacks the complex nature of emotions, highlighting their multifaceted components: activity in affect systems, physiological changes, evaluations, motivations, attention, memory, and expression. The feeling cortex integrates these signals to form emotional percepts, shaping our subjective experiences. The chapter details the four biological components of feelings: affective, somatic, motor, and cognitive. It emphasizes the role of interoception, the perception of bodily states, in emotional awareness and well-being. Additionally, it explores the concept of emotional resonance, where music surpasses language in conveying emotions. Finally, the chapter examines the interplay between emotions and consciousness, explaining how conscious thought can influence and regulate our emotional responses. It underscores that understanding this complex interplay is crucial for harnessing music’s power to enhance emotional balance and well-being.

This paper presents the main topics, arguments, and positions in the philosophy of AI at present (excluding ethics). Apart from the basic concepts of intelligence and computation, the main topics of artificial cognition are perception, action, meaning, rational choice, free will, consciousness, and normativity. Through a better understanding of these topics, the philosophy of AI contributes to our understanding of the nature, prospects, and value of AI. Furthermore, these topics can be understood more deeply through the discussion of AI; so we suggest that “AI philosophy” provides a new method for philosophy.

Although movement is largely generated from the primary motor cortex, what movement to make and how to make it is influenced from the entire brain. External influences from the environment come from sensory systems in the posterior part of the brain, and internal influences, such as homeostatic drive and reward, from the anterior part. A movement is voluntary when a person’s consciousness recognizes it to be so because of proper activation of the agency network. Behavioral movement disorders can be understood as dysfunction of these mechanisms. Apraxia and task specific dystonia arise from disruption of parietal–premotor connections. Tics arise from a hyperactive limbic system. Functional movement disorders may also have an origin in abnormal limbic function and are believed to be involuntary due to dysfunction of the agency network. In Parkinson’s disease, bradykinesia comes from insufficient basal ganglia support to the anterior part of the brain.

Chapter 10 analyses nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical debates surrounding hypnotism by way of a close reading of George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). Criticism of Trilby has tended to focus on the extraordinary powers of Svengali to seize control of another’s consciousness in order to conduct their preternatural performances. I, however, attend to the intricately constructed physiological and psychological interiority of Trilby O’Ferrall and to the hidden spaces of the mind and body which constitute the complex, multilayered selves with which Du Maurier’s novel is preoccupied. Du Maurier, I argue, conceives of human selfhood in distinctly materialist terms, as a complicated series of caverns and recesses holding experiences and emotions, dreams and memories, latent talents, and the deep impressions of desire, pain, and trauma. His fiction probes the ways in which those depths might be sounded. In the case of Trilby, I argue, this investigation is primarily an acoustic and musical one.

Various areas in psychology are interested in whether specific processes underlying judgments and behavior operate in an automatic or nonautomatic fashion. In social psychology, valuable insights can be gained from evidence on whether and how judgments and behavior under suboptimal processing conditions differ from judgments and behavior under optimal processing conditions. In personality psychology, valuable insights can be gained from individual differences in behavioral tendencies under optimal and suboptimal processing conditions. The current chapter provides a method-focused overview of different features of automaticity (e.g., unintentionality, efficiency, uncontrollability, unconsciousness), how these features can be studied empirically, and pragmatic issues in research on automaticity. Expanding on this overview, the chapter describes the procedures of extant implicit measures and the value of implicit measures for studying automatic processes in judgments and behavior. The chapter concludes with a discussion of pragmatic issues in research using implicit measures.