Aesthetics begins with perception, whether understood as a theory of beauty or art. Enactivism, an account of sensuous cognition, can contribute to understanding aesthetics by offering a distinctive way to think about how we perceive, appreciate, interpret, evaluate, and share thoughts about artworks and forms of life. The article clarifies enactivism, catalogs its varieties, and endorses an enactivist approach to aesthetics.
Higher-order theories explain phenomenal consciousness—the subjective 'what it is like' aspect of experience—by proposing that an organism is conscious when it has an appropriate inner awareness of its own mental states. Different versions of this approach vary in how they conceive that awareness: as inner perception, as a higher-order thought that transforms a first-order state (Relational Model), as a joint determination where higher- and first-order content belong to the same state (Same-Order and Split-Level Models), or as a non-relational state that directly determines conscious experience. Non-standard theories appeal to acquaintance or mental quotation. Contemporary psychology and neuroscience do not support inner perception, leading to the higher-order thought theory developed in the 1990s.
Panpsychism holds that consciousness is a fundamental, ubiquitous feature of the natural world, with basic particles like electrons having simple forms of experience from which human and animal consciousness derives. Its appeal is that it avoids problems of physicalism (explaining consciousness from purely physical processes) and dualism (explaining how a non-physical mind affects a physically closed world). Critics argue that constitutive panpsychism faces physicalism's challenges in building complex consciousness from basic parts, while emergentist panpsychism faces dualism's causal interaction problem. The author responds to these criticisms, arguing that panpsychism in either form is preferable to its rivals.