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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.

The ‘B‐theory’ of time says that all temporal facts ‘reduce’ to tenseless facts about a manifold of equally real past, present, and future objects; the ‘A‐theory’ denies this reduction. Presentism is a version of the A‐theory that denies the existence of part of the B‐theorist's manifold: the part containing merely past and future objects. Some say that the B‐theory cannot account for the irreducibly temporal nature of our psychological attitudes, but this is incorrect. B‐theorists can defend temporal versions of well‐known theories of ‘indexical’, or ‘de se’, attitudes. Presentism, on the other hand, is vulnerable to powerful objections: (1) The irreducible tense‐operators to which presentists must appeal are objectionably ungrounded in reality. (2) Presentists cannot account for the fundamental ‘cross‐time spatial relations’ that ground the structure of space‐time, and thus cannot account for spatiotemporal continuity, acceleration, and other states of motion. (3) Presentism conflicts with the special theory of relativity.

To understand cognition and emotion in the real world, it is critical to investigate the phenomena of interest within the rich context of moment-to-moment variations in the real world, which we assume is at least in part encoded in the high-dimensional state of the brain. Here the chapter reviews empirical evidence from a series of novel validation studies that demonstrate the technical capabilities of one blind source separation (BSS) algorithm—second-order blind identification (SOBI)—in enabling neuronscientists and clinicians to investigate human brain functions, cognition, and behavior using the electroencephalography (EEG). The chapter concludes that by shifting from an EEG-sensor-based to a neuronal-source-based characterization of brain states, one may better capture the rich context of moment-to-moment variations in the real world.