Abstract

We argue that introspection reveals a ubiquitous aspect of conscious experience that hitherto has been largely unappreciated in philosophy of mind and in cognitive science: conscious appreciation of a large body of background information, and of the holistic relevance of this information to a cognitive task that is being consciously undertaken, without that information being represented by any conscious, occurrent, intentional mental state. We call this phenomenon chromatic illumination. We begin with a phenomenological case study, involving an experience of joke-understanding in which the conscious aspect of chromatic illumination is especially vivid. Then we offer an account of the prototypical causal role of conscious intentional states, and we offer a contrasting account of the somewhat different prototypical causal role of conscious chromatic-illumination features of conscious intentional states. Finally, we describe the specific kind of physical-to-mental supervenience situation that needs to obtain in order for a chromatically illuminated conscious intentional state to figure as a supervenient mental cause that exerts both kinds of prototypical, content-appropriate, reasons-guidance vis-a-vis one’s cognition and behavior.