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We are all connoisseurs of the pains and pleasures of imagination, and many of us consider ourselves experts in the preparation of these episodes we enjoy so much, but we may still be surprised to learn just how powerful this faculty can become under serious training. I find it breathtaking, for instance, that when musical composition competitions are held, the contestants often do not submit tapes or records (or live performances) of their works; they submit written scores, and the judges confidently make their aesthetic judgments on the basis of just reading the scores and hearing the music in their minds. How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score, tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound? There are anecdotes aplenty, but so far as I know this is relatively unexplored territory, just waiting for clever experimenters to move in. Imagined sensations (if we may call these phenomenological items that) are suitable objects for aesthetic appreciation and judgment, but why, then, do the real sensations matter so much more? Why shouldn't one be willing to settle for recollected sunsets, merely anticipated spaghetti al pesto? Much of the pleasure and pain we associate with events in our lives is, after all, tied up in anticipation and recollection. The bare moments of sensation are a tiny part of what matters to us. Why and how things matter to us will be a topic of later chapters, but the fact that imagined, anticipated, recollected sensations are quite different from faint sensations can be easily brought out with another little self-experiment, which brings us to the gate of the third section of the phenom.

4. AFFECT
Close your eyes now and imagine that someone has just kicked you, very hard, in the left shin (about a foot above your foot) with a steel-toed boot. Imagine the excruciating pain in as much detail as you can; imagine it bringing tears to your eyes, imagine you almost faint, so nauseatingly sharp and overpowering is the jolt of pain you feel. You just imagined it vividly; did you feel any pain? Might you justly complain to me that following my directions has caused you some pain? I find that people have quite different responses to this exercise, but no one yet has reported that the exercise caused any actual pain. Some find it somewhat disturbing, and others find it a rather enjoyable exercise of the mind, certainly not as unpleasant as the gentlest pinch on the arm that you would call a pain.

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Now suppose that you dreamed the same shin-kicking scene. Such
a dream can be so shocking that it wakes you up; you might even find

you were hugging your shin and whimpering, with real tears in the corners of your eyes. But there would be no inflammation, no welt, no bruise, and as soon as you were sufficiently awake and well oriented to make a confident judgment, you would say that there was no trace of pain left over in your shin if there ever was any in the first place. Are dreamed pains real pains, or a sort of imagined pains? Or something in between? What about the pains induced by hypnotic suggestion? At least the dreamed pains, and the pains induced by hypnosis, are states of mind that we really mind having. Compare them, however, to the states (of mind?) that arise in you while you sleep, when you roll over and inadvertently twist your arms into an awkward position, and then, without waking up, without noticing it at all, roll back into a more comfortable position. Are these pains? If you were awake, the states caused in you by such contortions would be pains. There are people, fortunately quite rare, who are congenitally insensitive to pain. Before you start to envy them, you should know that since they don't make these postural corrections during sleep (Or while they are awake!), they soon become cripples, their joints ruined by continual abuse which no alarm bells curtail. They also burn themselves, cut themselves, and in other ways shorten their unhappy lives by inappropriately deferred maintenance (Cohen et al., 1955; Kirman et al., 1968). There can be no doubt that having the alarm system of pain fibers and the associated tracts in the brain is an evolutionary boon, even if it means paying the price of having some alarms ring that we can't do anything about. But why do pains have to hurt so much? Why couldn't it just be a loud bell in the mind's ear, for instance?
6. The literature on the evolutionary justification of pain is studded with amazingly myopic arguments. One author argues that there can be no evolutionary explanation of pain because some excruciating pains, such as the pain of gallstones sound an alarm that no one could do anything about until the development of modern medicine. No caveman got any reproductive benefit from the pain of his gallstones, so pain at least some pain is an evolutionary mystery. What this author ignores is the simple fact that in order to have a pain system that can properly warn you about such avertible crises as a claw or fang jabbed in your belly, you will very likely get the bonus which only much later can be appreciated as such of a system that also warns you about crises you are helpless to dissolve. And by the same token there are plenty of internal states that today it would be valuable to get pain warnings about (the onset of cancer, for instance), but to which we are oblivious presumably because our evolutionary past did not include any survival advantage for the requisite wiring (were it to emerge by mutation).

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And what, if anything, are the uses of anger, fear, hatred? (I take it the evolutionary utility of lust needs no defense.) Or, to take a more

complicated case, consider sympathy. Etymologically, the word means suffering-with. The German words for it are Mitleid (with-pain) and Mitgefuhl (with-feeling). Or think of sympathetic vibration, in which one string of a musical instrument is set to humming by the vibration of another one nearby, closely related to it in that both share a natural resonance frequency. Suppose you witness your child's deeply humiliating or embarrassing moment; you can hardly stand it: waves of emotion sweep over you, drowning your thoughts, overturning your composure. You are primed to fight, to cry, to hit something. That is an extreme case of sympathy. Why are we designed to have those phenomena occur in us? And what are they? This concern with the adaptive significance (if any) of the various affective states will occupy us in several later chapters. For the moment, I just want to draw attention, during our stroll, to the undeniable importance of affect to our conviction that consciousness is important. Consider fun, for instance. All animals want to go on living at least they strive mightily to preserve themselves under most conditions but only a few species strike us as capable of enjoying life or having fun. What comes to mind are frisky otters sliding in the snow, lion cubs at play, our dogs and cats but not spiders or fish. Horses, at least when they are colts, seem to get a kick out of being alive, but cows and sheep usually seem either bored or indifferent. And have you ever had the thought that flying is wasted on the birds, since few if any of them seem capable of appreciating the deliciousness of their activity? Fun is not a trivial concept, but it has not yet, to my knowledge, received careful attention from a philosopher. We certainly won't have a complete explanation of consciousness until we have accounted for its role in permitting us (and only us?) to have fun. What are the right questions to ask? Another example will help us see what the difficulties are. There is a species of primate in South America, more gregarious than most other mammals, with a curious behavior. The members of this species often gather in groups, large and small, and in the course of their mutual chattering, under a wide variety of circumstances, they are induced to engage in bouts of involuntary, convulsive respiration, a sort of loud, helpless, mutually reinforcing group panting that sometimes is so severe as to incapacitate them. Far from being aversive, however, these attacks seem to be sought out by most members of the species, some of whom even appear to be addicted to them. We might be tempted to think that if only we knew what it was

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like to be them, from the inside, we'd understand this curious addiction of theirs. if we could see it "from their point of view," we would know what it was for. But in this case we can be quite sure that such insight as we might gain would still leave matters mysterious. For we already have the access we seek; the species is Homo sapiens (which does

indeed inhabit South America, among other places), and the behavior
is laughter.7

No other animal does anything like it. A biologist encountering such a unique phenomenon should first wonder what (if anything) it was for, and, not finding any plausible analysis of direct biological advantages it might secure, would then be tempted to interpret this strange and unproductive behavior as the price extracted for some other boon. But what? What do we do better than we otherwise would do, thanks to the mechanisms that carry with them, as a price worth paying, our susceptibility to our near addiction to laughter? Does laughter somehow "relieve stress" that builds up during our complicated cognitions about our advanced social lives? Why, though, should it take funny things to relieve stress? Why not green things or simple flat things? Or, why is this behavior the byproduct of relieving stress? Why don't we have a taste for standing around shivering or belching, or scratching each others' backs, or humming, or blowing our noses, or

feverishly licking our hands? Note that the view from inside is well known and unperplexing. We laugh because we are amused. We laugh because things are funny and laughter is appropriate to funny things in a way that licking one's hands, for instance, just isn't. It is obvious (in fact it is too obvious) why we laugh. We laugh because of joy, and delight, and out of happiness, and because some things are hilarious. if ever there was a virtus dormitiva in an explanation, here it is: we laugh because of the hilarity of the stimulus.8 That is certainly true; there is no other reason why
7. "what would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight or furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions." Minsky, 1985, p. 280. 8. In Moliere's last play, the classic comedy I.e Malade Imaginaire (1673). Argan, the hypochondriac of the title, solves his problems in the end by "becoming" a doctor so he can treat himselr. No study is required Just a little tortured Latin. In a burlesque oral examination, he is put through his paces. Why, the examiner asks, does opium put people to sleep? Because, replies the doctoral candidate, it has a virtus dorniitiva the Latin for "sleep-causing power." "Bene. bene. bene, bene respondere." says the chorus. Well answered! Mow informative! What insight! And, in a more contemporary spirit we might ask: Just what is it about Cheryl Tiegs that makes her look so good in pictures?

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we laugh, when we laugh sincerely. Hilarity is the constitutive cause of true laughter. Just as pain is the constitutive cause of unfeigned painbehavior. Since this is certainly true, we must not deny it. But we need an explanation of laughter that goes beyond this obvious truth in the same way that the standard explanations of pain and pain-behavior go beyond the obvious. We can give a perfectly sound biological account of why there should be pain and pain-behavior (indeed, we just sketched it); what we want is a similarly anchored account of why there should be hilarity and laughter. And we can know in advance that if we actually come up with such an account, it won't satisfy everybody! Some people who consider themselves antireductionists complain that the biological account of pain and pain-behavior leaves out the painfulness, leaves out the "intrmsic awfulness" of pain that makes it what it is, and they will presumably make the same complaint about any account of laughter we can muster: it leaves out the intrinsic hilarity. This is a standard complaint about such explanations: "All you've explained is the attendant behavior and the mechanisms, but you've left out the thing in itself, which is the pain in all its awfulness." This raises complicated questions, which will be considered at length in chapter 12, but for the time being we can note that any account of pain that left in the awfulness would be circular it would have an undischarged virtus dormitiva on its hands. Similarly, a proper account of laughter must leave out the presumed intrinsic hilarity, the zest, the funniness, because their presence would merely postpone the attempt to answer the question. The phenomenology of laughter is hermetically sealed: we just see directly, naturally, without inference, with an obviousness beyond "intuition," that laughter is what goes with hilarity it is the "right" reaction to humor. We can seem to break this down a bit: the right reaction to something funny is amusement (an internal state of mind); the natural expression of amusement (when it isn't important to conceal or suppress it, as it sometimes is) is laughter. It appears as if we now have what scientists would call an intervening variable, amusement, in between stimulus and response, and it appears to be constitutively linked at both ends. That is, amusement is by-definition-that-which. provokes-sincere-laughter, and it is also provoked-by-something-funny. All this is obvious. As such it seems to
Shes photogenic. So thats why' (1 always wondered.) In chapter 12, the charge of vacuity that is implied by calling some explanatory posit a virtus dormitivci will be considered in more detail.

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need of no further explanation. As Wittgenstein said, explanations have to stop somewhere. But all we really have here is a brute but definitely explicable fact of human psychology. We have to move beyond pure phenomenology if we are to explain any of these denizens of the phenomenological garden. These examples of phenomenology, for all their diversity, seem to have two important features in common. On the one hand, they are our most intimate acquaintances; there is nothing we could know any better than the items of our personal phenomenologies or so it seems. On the other hand, they are defiantly inaccessible to materialistic science; nothing could be less like an electron, or a molecule, or a neuron, than the way the sunset looks to me now or so it seems. Philosophers have been duly impressed by both features, and have found many different ways of emphasizing what is problematic. For some, the great puzzle is the special intimacy: How can we be incorrigible or have privileged access or directly apprehend these items? What is the difference between our epistemic relations to our phenomenology and our epistemic relations to the objects in the external world? For others, the great puzzle concerns the unusual "intrinsic qualities" or to use the Latin word, the qualia of our phenomenology: How could anything composed of material particles be the fun that I'm having, or have the "ultimate homogeneity" (Sellars, 1963) of the pink ice cube I am now imagining, or matter the way my pain does to me? Finding a materialistic account that does justice to all these phenomena will not be easy. We have made some progress, though. Our brief inventory has included some instances in which a little knowledge of the underlying mechanisms challenges and maybe even usurps the authority we usually grant to what is obvious to introspection. By getting a little closer than usual to the exhibits, and looking at them from several angles, we have begun to break the spell, to dissipate the "magic" in the phenomenological garden.
be in