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The chapter examines an account of phenomenal unity that appeals to the closure of phenomenal content under conjunction—‘closure,’ for short. The chapter begins by locating closure within the context of representational treatments of phenomenal consciousness. Four objections to closure are then examined. A first objection involves the claim that inconsistent states can be phenomenally unified. A second objection appeals to the fact that certain visual experiences appear to exhibit phenomenal unity in the absence of closure. A third objection involves the claim that closure cannot capture the unity between experiences drawn from different perceptual modalities. A fourth objection alleges that closure cannot account for the unity between different kinds of conscious states. It is argued that that there are plausible responses to the first three objections to closure but not to the fourth.

This chapter discusses the Problem of Inverted Spectra, which has been used as fuel against a number of different philosophical positions, for example, in attempts to analyze phenomenal properties in functional or behavioral terms, and recently by David Chalmers as another argument for dualism. It argues that by recognizing the ineliminable relationality of thought about the experience of others, we can acknowledge the epistemic and cognitive gaps brought out by the Knowledge Argument and the possibility of inverted spectra, while restricting them to purely epistemic ones.

Strong direct realism (SDR) has the resources to meet the Causal Argument from hallucination, which I once thought decisive. But it fails for a different reason. When a physical item is Φ‐terminally perceived, it sensibly appears to the subject in a certain way. Or put the other way round, the subject perceives the item in a certain phenomenal manner. I call this ‘phenomenal manner of perceiving phenomenal content’. Like any other theory of perception, SDR has to be able to give an adequate account of what phenomenal content is and how it relates to the securing of perceptual contact with the relevant physical item. There are three options here for SDR. The first is what I call ‘the presentational view’. This holds that the qualitative ingredients of phenomenal content are directly drawn from the physical items Φ‐terminally perceived, so that when a physical item sensibly appears to a subject to possess a certain quality Q, the featuring of Q in the phenomenal content of the perception is the featuring of the very instance of Q that occurs in the physical item itself. The second option is what I call ‘the internalist view’. This holds that, although the Φ‐terminal perceptual relationship with the physical item is something psychologically fundamental, and phenomenal content is the manner in which this relationship holds, the qualitative ingredients of such content are ontologically separate from their physical counterparts, so that the featuring of a quality in such content is not the featuring of some physical instance of it. The third option is what I call the ‘modified presentational view’, which holds that the featuring of a quality in phenomenal content is sometimes to be construed in a presentational way, and sometimes in an internalist way. The presentational view fails because it does not accommodate cases of non‐veridical perception, in which the sensible appearance of the perceived item is at variance with its actual character. The modified presentational view fails because of its hybrid character; for once the need for an internalist account is recognized for cases of non‐veridical perception, there is irresistible pressure to extend the same treatment to veridical perception too. And the internalist view fails because it does not permit a coherent account of how perceptual contact and phenomenal content fit together. Since all three options fail, and since there is no other remotely plausible account available to it, SDR must be rejected.

The broad representative theory (BRT) claims that, whenever someone perceives a physical item, his perceptual contact with it is psychologically mediated, i.e. it is constituted by the combination of his being in a more fundamental psychological state, which is not in itself physical‐item perceptive, and certain additional facts that do not involve anything further about his current psychological condition. One worry about BRT, in whatever form it is developed, is that, granted that the relevant psychological states are not in themselves perceptive, there is a prima facie difficulty in understanding how the subject's perceptual awareness can reach beyond the boundaries of his own mind. With the emergence of the sense‐quale theory (SQT) as the correct account of the nature of phenomenal experience, this worry turns into a decisive objection. For it is clear that, under SQT, the subject does not genuinely perceive external items at all. All he genuinely perceives—all that form genuine objects of his perceptual awareness—are sense‐qualia, which, because of the interpretative components of his phenomenal experiences, he (mistakenly) perceives as external items. However, if we do not have perceptual access to the physical world, it turns out that we do not have epistemic access either: we cannot acquire knowledge of the physical world or even well‐grounded beliefs about it. But this leaves us with a problem. For the conclusion that we have neither perceptual nor epistemic access to the physical world is one that, even from the standpoint of philosophical reflection, we cannot bring ourselves to accept.

By considering creatures that live their lives at different paces, such as turtles, sloths, starlings, and hummingbirds, the chapter argues that subjective rates and durations are not identical with real rates and durations, for the very same process can be experienced differently by differently constituted creatures. This is backed up with a thought experiment concerning Slow Earth, where everything happens at half the rate that it does on Earth. The chapter develops a version of intentionalism—the view that the phenomenal or subjective character of an experience is reducible to its representational content—that accounts for this. It is suggested that the phenomenal character of a rate or duration experience is a representation of a subject–environment functional (SEF) relation—a kind of functional version of the objective rate or duration. This has a bearing on the rate at which time seems to pass.

How are neuronal mechanisms related to the phenomenal unity as manifested in phenomenal consciousness? The book proposes a “continuity-based hypothesis of phenomenal unity.” The continuity-based hypothesis of phenomenal unity proposes that the phenomenal unity is based on and supersedes the already constituted spatial and temporal continuity in the ongoing resting state activity. More specifically, the stimulus may be linked to the resting state’s ongoing spatial and temporal continuity.

This chapter attempts to adjudicate the disagreement between familiar realist ways of understanding intentionality and the anti-realist way favored by phenomenal intentionalists. It begins this task by presenting what seems a particularly strong reason for thinking that phenomenal intentionalists have underestimated the need for intentional objects in an account of the intentional content of sensory experience. After arguing that we should nonetheless question the intentional realist's account of this intentional content, the chapter offers a compromise fictionalist approach that fits the spirit of the phenomenal intentionalist framework while retaining the benefits of the intentional realist's way of invoking intentional objects.

In unpacking the main tenets of Buddhist epistemology, this chapter offers a detailed analysis of perception as an epistemic modality centred on three main points: (1) the cognitive function of perception as an epistemic warrant; (2) the ontological status of perceptual objects; and (3) the relation between perception and conception. A variety of arguments about word-meaning relations, and about the proper use of philosophical terminology are considered throughout. The chapter juxtaposes the views of Buddhists with those of their principal opponents, and explores different ways of casting this classical philosophical debate in terms of contemporary inquiries into such things as the nature and limits of perceptual knowledge. It also explores the tension between empirical knowledge and reportability, by differentiating between substantive philosophical disagreements and mere verbal disputes. The chapter concludes with an examination of the relation between cognitive errors and perceptual illusions, drawing from some recent empirical studies of perception.

This chapter argues that brain systems must meet several 'hard' requirements to qualify as conscious, while other requirements are 'soft' in that they are important for sustaining normal, daily-life awareness but not strictly necessary for having the most basic form of conscious experience. The hard requirements include, first, the ability to interpret (or reconstruct) sensory inputs as having particular qualities or content, within a rich repertoire of modalities or (sub)modalities, such as visual motion, shape, depth and color. Second, this process of attributing sensory “feel” or meaning to inputs occurs in a dynamic or stable state, depending on the constancy of variables governing the sensory flux. Projection of interpreted sensory inputs into an external, perspectival space (vision) or body map (somatosensation) is seen as a relatively basic process, but patient studies indicate that core consciousness does not strictly depend on this ability, as applies as well to normal requirements on the grouping of similar features and binding of different submodalities into objects. Also the “unity” of consciousness and self-awareness are not classified as an essential feature but rather as a constantly maintained “illusion” of the healthy brain empowered by proper multimodal and motor alignment.

Chapter 4 explores the epistemic role of consciousness in cognition. Section 4.1 argues that all beliefs provide epistemic justification for other beliefs. Section 4.2 contrasts beliefs with subdoxastic states, which provide no epistemic justification for belief. Section 4.3 argues that this epistemic distinction between beliefs and subdoxastic states cannot be explained in terms of the functional criterion of inferential integration. Section 4.4 argues that this epistemic distinction must be explained in terms of the phenomenal criterion of conscious accessibility: the contents of beliefs are accessible to consciousness as the contents of conscious judgments. Section 4.5 argues that conscious judgments have phenomenal contents that supervene on their phenomenal character. Section 4.6 concludes with some proleptic remarks to explain why beliefs can provide epistemic justification for other beliefs only if their contents are accessible to consciousness.

Chapter 4 presents arguments against two accounts aimed at eliminating the first-person perspective altogether. Dennett accounts for consciousness in terms of his intentional systems theory in support of "heterophenomenology." Heterophenomenology is supposed to purge the data of commitment to anything first personal. But, I argue, it does not. Metzinger has a complex account of consciousness and self-consciousness in terms of self-models. I argue that Metzinger's account of cognitive first-person reference from a third-person point of view is unsatisfactory, as is his notion of phenomenal content and the use that he makes of it. Finally, I consider critically semantic, epistemic, and moral consequences of his view.

The thesis of this chapter is that one thing that ethics is centrally about is phenomenal contents, experience, and it’s hard to talk about experience. Much important ethical knowledge is knowledge ‘what it’s like’ of the key scenarios and interactions of human life; such knowledge can be communicated, for example, by poetry and drama. In having such experiences, either in real life or at second-hand through art, we can gain moral knowledge, rather as Mary the colour scientist can gain knowledge of colours; such knowledge is a real cognitive gain, but it is not knowledge of the propositional kind that philosophers have usually focused on.

This chapter critically assesses recent arguments that acquiring the ability to categorize an object as belonging to a certain high-level kind can cause the relevant kind property to be represented in visual phenomenal content. The first two arguments, developed respectively by Susanna Siegel (2010) and Tim Bayne (2009), employ an essentially phenomenological methodology. The third argument, developed by William Fish (2013), by contrast, is supported by an array of psychophysical and neuroscientific findings. This chapter argues that while none of these arguments ultimately proves successful, there is a substantial body of empirical evidence that information originating outside the visual system can nonetheless modulate the way an object’s low-level attributes visually appear. Visual phenomenal content, is shown, is not only significantly influenced by crossmodal interactions between vision and other exteroceptive senses such as touch and audition, but also by interactions between vision and non-perceptual systems involved in motor planning and construction of the proprioceptive body-image.

This chapter discusses the twin theses of representationalism and the transparency of experience. In place of standard representationalism, the chapter argues for “modest representationalism”: the thesis that two people who are visually representing the same scene will have experiences that are, phenomenally, pretty similar. While this might sound like an untenable compromise position, neo-pragmatism provides it with a solid theoretical foundation. This chapter also criticizes an argument of Ned Block’s, which attempts to move from the relatively uncontroversial claim that we can imagine someone with an inverted spectrum, to the much more controversial claim that we must acknowledge that there could be a significant phenomenal difference between the way something looks to two different normal people. The chapter also argues that phenomenal content is in principle amenable to verbal description in a sufficiently rich public language.

This chapter introduces and outlines the main themes of the book: the specific view on perceptual knowledge advanced by the Buddhist epistemologists, arguments offered in support of the role that a particular understanding of the structure of awareness must play in settling epistemological disputes, and the naturalist perspective adopted to explain the contributions of Buddhist philosophers to epistemology. Drawing on discussions about naturalism in epistemology and phenomenology, it argues for a non-reductionist account of mental content, and identifies a common concern that Buddhist and Western philosophers share: developing a theory of knowledge that does not divorce logical arguments from descriptive accounts of cognition. It also introduces the methodological insight that guides the entire book, namely that a phenomenological account of perception on models first provided by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, best serves to translate the intuitions of the Buddhist epistemologists about the cognitive function of perception.

Claude Panaccio shows that there was an important externalist drive in William of Ockham’s theory of language and mind in the fourteenth century. After distinguishing three different forms of externalism, Panaccio argues that Ockham has a principled externalist stance on all three counts. One particularly important result of Panaccio’s investigations is that Ockham’s externalism critically hinges on his account of the semantic content of concepts as being causally determined, quite independently from what Panaccio calls the “perceptual schemata” enclosed in concepts. The latter are what the cognitive subject having the concept is aware of about the typical phenomenal appearance of the objects to which the concept applies, which helps the cognizer to recognize individuals falling under the concept as such, most of the time fairly reliably, but not infallibly. This separation of the semantic and phenomenal content of intellectual concepts is moving in the direction of opening up the logical (and hence by divine omnipotence certainly realizable) possibility of the separation of the phenomenal content of subjective consciousness and the external reality this consciousness is normally supposed to be about.

Under certain conditions, synaesthesia would properly be understood as perception, i.e. as experience that affords the subject an accurate imagistic representation of some occurrence in the world that the subject understands as such. Perception is a true imagistic representation of the world concurrently around the perceiver, which, moreover, gives the perceiver unmediated reason to believe in what is so represented. Projector synaesthetes have an enhanced experience of what is known as the inducer stimulus. This experience includes a concurrent experience over and above the normal experience. I define direct synaesthesia as enhanced experience that gives direct reason to believe in the existence of the inducer (not the concurrent). Such direct projector synaesthesia is worth investigating because it seems, in short, to be enhanced perception of the inducer.