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Intuitions based on the first-person perspective can easily mislead us about what is and is
not conceivable.1 This point is usually made in support of familiar reductionist positions on the
mind-body problem, but I believe it can be detached from that approach. It seems to me that the
powerful appearance of contingency in the relation between the functioning of the physical
organism and the conscious mind -- an appearance that depends directly or indirectly on the first-
person perspective -- must be an illusion. But the denial of this contingency should not take the
form of a reductionist account of consciousness of the usual type, whereby the logical gap
between the mental and the physical is closed by conceptual analysis -- in effect, by analyzing
the mental in terms of the physical (however elaborately this is done -- and I count functionalism
as such a theory, along with the topic-neutral causal role analyses of mental concepts from which
it descends).......

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