A musical theory of experience: Metaphysics of experiential integration

This dissertation is all about working out a satisfactory account of experiential integration. Experiential integration exhibits certain characteristics, such as “experiential atmosphere” and “heterogeneity-respecting unity.” I argue that the related concepts of representation and event-causation provide a conceptual obstacle to understanding how processes of integration could deliver these characteristics. Accordingly, I drop the concepts of representation and event-causation and go on to work out a non-representational, modulation-based replacement concept called “transpositional simulation,” which I argue can do the work that the concepts of representation and event-causation did. I try to show that a model of experiential integration, which uses the modulation-based replacement concept of transpositional simulation, can deliver the characteristics of integrated experience that representation-based models cannot deliver on their own. The implication of a successful demonstration of this point is that the language of representationalism, which dominates cognitive science, needs to be supplemented or even be replaced by a modulation-based language, if a successful philosophy of the mind is to be worked out. For I take it as a bare minimum, that a successful philosophy of mind should be able to explain experiential integration satisfactorily, since everything else about the mind seems to flow from this fundamental fact of mental life.