 Consider, for a start, our apparently direct awareness of our own conscious experiential states. (Conscious cognitive states such as beliefs and desires have complicating aspects that cannot be explored here. But see  section 5.1.2  immediately below for a possible linkage between the two germane to strong emergentist conjecture.) The natural physicalist strategy for characterizing such awareness would be in terms of a distinctive form of informational flow among distinct physical states (the experiential state itself and a distinct state of awareness of the experience); yet any such account would seem consistent with the possibility of a nonstandard causal source of the state of awareness of the conscious state, such that the subject is utterly mistaken about its object, the subject’s current conscious state. Such strong fallibilism about the contents of consciousness seems implausible, as is shown by the fact that philosophers such as Descartes who entertain radical skeptical doubts about much of human knowledge do not typically extend it to our grasp of our current conscious experience. Is it, for example, conceivable that I am only seemingly (but mistakenly) aware of undergoing excruciating pain as of being laid out on the torturer’s rack, while in fact I am in a serene conscious state as of lying on a warm sandy beach? It seems not, but it is hard to account for this datum in physicalist terms.