The wine itself has aesthetic value; but what it is for a wine to have aesthetic value cannot be understood without making reference to the experience to tasting it

Music is one of my big interests - I once had a rather fanciful ambition to be a singer - and of course music is philosophically fascinating. What it is for music to express emotion strikes me as one of the most difficult questions - it's hard to say what it precisely means, although it plainly does mean something. But whenever I have tried to say something about this, it has come out as either banal or pretentious or both.

We have no proper understanding of the relationship between conscious thought and conscious sensation. The various forms of thought and sensation are underpinned by very different neural mechanisms; so how can the neural correlate of their conscious natures be the same? I don't think we are yet in a position to make such speculations. To make progress, we have to have a good conception of the phenomenology of consciousness, among other things.

I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.

Unlike art which contains a message, wine conveys nothing, it has no intellectual or cognitive content

Since I don't believe in externalism, I don't think it can explain consciousness!

I do think that philosophy and science are very different intellectual enterprises, but that does not mean that when we get knowledge from philosophy it is a different kind of knowledge.