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This chapter puts forward a view of the metaphysics of art that delivers conditions for the identity or survival of a work of art across time. This metaphysics is a consequence of the Aesthetic Creation Theory put forward in Chapter 2 called ‘Aesthetic Functionalism’. It proposes an account of the cross-time identity of functional things quite generally, which also applies to works of art. This leads to a denial that the material composition of a work of art is essential to it. It then proposes a way of understanding the fact that particular works of art may have many non-aesthetic functions that are essential to them, as well as their essential aesthetic functions. Appropriation — artistic and non-artistic — is discussed.

This chapter presents a fictive experiment in which a person named Harry voluntarily undergoes neurosurgical operations by which various cognitive processes are reversibly abolished. This paves the way for asking: which cognitive processes can be "peeled away" from our mental lives before consciousness is lost? Which processes belong to the core that is essential for consciousness? We review the relevance of processes such as sensory processing and perception in various modalities (vision, hearing, etc.), memory, emotions, motor behavior and language. Neurology and neuropsychology offer compelling cases for brain systems involved in perception and/or imagery as being essential for consciousness, whereas structures for memory, emotions, language and motor capacities appear less essential. This empirical evidence also argues against classic functionalism, which posits that a mental state acts as a causal intermediate between sensory input and motor output, because consciousness survives the long-lasting absence of motor behavior. As illustrated by clinical phenomena such as achromatopsia, the weight of evidence indicates that consciousness cannot be explained as simply having a discriminative state of groups of neurons, biasing or predisposing the organism toward specific actions.

Here we review the philosophical implications of the theory presented in previous chapters, and its consequences for future research. This leads us to demarcate the current theory from classical positions such as dualism, materialism, and functionalism. We discuss dualist arguments such as the case of philosophical 'zombies'. However, while these seem conceivable, they are argued not to be realizable: the construction of neural machinery appropriate for zombies would inevitably give rise to consciousness. Following a discussion of Jackson’s argument on “Mary the Color Scientist”, the reality of phenomenal experience is acknowledged as much as the reality of neural levels of processing, placing the theory away from eliminative materialism and classic functionalism. This characterizes the theory as a non-reductive, multilevel, neurobiological form of representationalism ('neurorepresentationalism'). Although representationalists have not been typically concerned with the problem of how neural aggregates give rise to consciousness, the “externalist” stream in this school is much more distant from the current view than the “narrow” stream emphasizing that representations are generated in and by the brain. Finally, we discuss consciousness in animals and in human-made inventions such as computers and robots, and on future treatment of disorders of consciousness.

The conclusion of the book uses the concept of myth—and the folkloristic approach to myth—to tie together the themes and concepts from previous chapters. Starting with concepts derived from Roland Barthes, the Superman myth is examined through lenses of form, function, content, and context, leading to structural and functional readings, with a few comparisons to other myths. The structural reading leads to the idea that Superman is a myth of exogamy and technology, while contextual and functional readings foreground both the ritual aspects of Superman stories and several similarities with the American presidency. This chapter employs the case studies presented throughout the earlier chapters building on the idea of affinity and philosophy of as if to demonstrate the application of the Superman myth in American life and the necessity of variation to the character; Superman is revealed as a story of change.

A few years ago I came down a backcountry road in Wisconsin looking for a place where a man had given his life. The road had once been the route of pioneers moving west, then a farm road running through dry, sandy, marginal fields. In the days of Prohibition it had carried illegal whiskey distilled hereabouts, some of the last trees having been cut down to cook the bootlegger’s brew. Then in 1935 another sort of settler came along. It was the time of the Great Depression, and he could buy a lot of land, 120 acres in all, land abandoned by its owners, for a little money in back taxes. The land had no economic value left in it. The man, whose name was Aldo Leopold, knew that but did not mind; he was not after gain or even subsistence. He began coming out regularly from the city of Madison, where he taught at the university, to plant trees. For thirteen years he planted and nurtured. Then, in 1948, he died fighting a forest fire on a neighbor’s land. Knowing those few details, I came wanting to know what manner of man he was and what he had died for. There was no publicity, no tour guide provided, but the dense forest of pines was a sufficient announcement that here was Leopold’s place, now all grown up again to natural splendor. I walked through an open field rich in wild grasses and forbs to a small, gray, weathered shack where he had stayed on those weekends, regaled by the smell of his new pines coming up and the sound of birdsong and wind in their branches. From the shack, I found my way down a short path to the Wisconsin River, rolling silently between its pungent banks, the warm summer sun glinting on its ripples. One August years ago Leopold, as recalled in a sketch he wrote and collected in A Sand County Almanac, found the river “in a painting mood,” laying down a brief carpet of moss on its silty edges, spangling it with blue and white and pink flowers, attracting deer and meadow mice, then abruptly scouring its palette down to austere sand.

Chapter 1 maps how petroleum development revenue allowed Venezuelans to acquire and not produce the same type of modernity that had been created elsewhere in response to vastly different conditions. Instead functionalism and the varied genealogies of Constructivism, geometric abstraction and kinetic art in particular, became the architectural and aesthetic signposts of this elusive paradigm. Yet internal conditions limited the reach of these ideologically “neutral” international tendencies as well as of the overarching national modernization project of which they were a part. A close examination of extant texts and photographs by El Techo reveals how the group challenged the cultural establishment, exposed its political dissidence, and anchored its project in the harsh material reality of the human underbelly that fuelled the dreams of progress in Venezuela.

This chapter considers the putative area of ‘American Constructivism’, a formation that did not have any organisational substance but existed as a number of respectively interconnected and discrete tendencies. Two exhibitions organised by The Little Review—the International Theatre Exposition (1926) and the Machine-Age Exposition(1927)—contained the largest amount of Constructivist works on display in the USA in the interwar years, in the form of theatre and architectural designs. The chapter charts the emergence of Constructivism and its reception in America. For the most part, the introduction of Constructivism into the USA involved the depoliticisation of the original Soviet version. Whilst largely apolitical, the exhibitions organised by The Little Review were unique in terms of the organisers’ grasp of Constructivist discourses and techniques, being informed by the International Constructivism of De Stijl via Austrian émigré Frederick Kiesler. The Machine-Age Exposition was notable for its detailed presentation of Soviet architecture, and therefore the chapter includes an extensive analysis of debates around functionalism, culminating in a consideration of the development of the International Style at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This chapter has three parts. First, it explores why angels have been overlooked in previous scholarship about Christianity in late antiquity. Second, it explains the methodological underpinnings of the argument of the book: that new ideas about angels emerged in the context of two modes of piety that developed after the start of the fourth century—contestation and cultivation. Third, it provides an outline of the argument of the book, chapter by chapter.

This chapter discusses two cases where the informational architecture of a distributed system yields robust patterns of collective behavior, but where we have no good reason to posit a unified cognitive system: the architecture of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the organization of termite colonies. In light of these cases, it is argued that the intentional stance offers an entry point into questions about collective mentality, but that a plausible defence of collective mentality must address difficult questions about the implementation of mentality.

This chapter focuses on commonsense and philosophical worries about collective consciousness and collective personhood. The arguments in this chapter proceed in a highly theoretical way, leading up to the claim that any theory that establishes a necessary connection between consciousness and mentality will require fundamental and untenable revisions to the foundations of cognitive science. These arguments are directed toward philosophers of mind; they address recent research in social psychology and experimental philosophy, as well as the familiar criticisms of functionalism advanced by Ned Block and John Searle.

Functionalism in the theory of mind requires an account of function that has a normative component—mere conditional connection (whether indicative or sub-junctive) is not enough. For instance, a component of a computing system isn’t an adder just in case its output is always or would always be the sum of the inputs, since any computing system in a world with as much indeterminism as ours can err or malfunction. Two general reductions of normative language have been proposed that one might wish to apply to the problem of defining proper function: the evolutionary reduction (Wright, Millikan) and the agential reduction (Plantinga). We argue that whatever the merits of the reductions in other contexts, a functionalist theory of mind that defines proper function in either of these ways must fail. The argument proceeds by first showing the agential reduction is viciously circular in the context of a functionalist theory of agency. Second, if functionalism about mind is true and proper function is reducible evolutionarily, then it is possible to have a situation in which the presence or absence of mental properties depends in an implausibly spooky, acausal way on remote facts. It is plausible that the only currently avail-able way for the functionalist to meet these challenges is to accept irreducible end-directed causal powers of minds and/or their functional parts, in accordance with a broadly Aristotelian tradition.