Consciousness, Color, and Content - Michael Tye.pdf - Nauka - raumion

Preface

Experiences and feelings are inherently conscious states. This is not to

say that if I am undergoing an experience or feeling, I must be attend-

ing to it; my attention is often focused elsewhere. Still, if I have an expe-

rience or feeling, consciousness must surely be present. Consciousness of

this sort goes with talk of “raw feels,” of “sensational qualities,” of

“what it is like.” For a person who feels pain, there is something it is

like for him to be in pain. Phenomenal consciousness is present.

Phenomenal consciousness is essential or integral to experiences and

feelings in a way in which it is not to other mental states. The state of

thinking that water is wet, to take a speciﬁc case, has no characteristic

phenomenal “feel,” in my view, although it may certainly be accompa-

nied by a linguistic, auditory image with phenomenal features. The subject

of the thought may “hear” an inner voice. It may seem to the subject as

if she is uttering a sentence in her native language, complete with a certain

pattern of stress and intonation. Remove the phenomenology of the audi-

tory experience, however, and no phenomenology remains. 1

I currently have a rich and varied phenomenal consciousness. My

visual ﬁeld is full of the colors of my garden. I have auditory sensations

of a bird singing from a nearby tree. I feel my watch strap on my wrist

and my shirt sleeves on my arms. I have a dryness in my mouth, a sore-

ness in my right knee. I feel my feet touching the ﬂoor, my hands resting

upon my legs, my brow furrow as I think about what to write. Sensory

experiences such as these can (and do) exist whether or not their sub-

jects are attending to them. 2

Phenomenal consciousness seems to be a relatively primitive, largely

automatic matter, something more widespread in nature than higher-order

Preface

consciousness, for example. But it is also deeply puzzling. In Tye 1995,

I elaborated and defended a theory of phenomenal consciousness that

has come to be known as representationalism. In reﬂecting further

upon the view, and in responding to questions at talks and in discussions,

I have come to realize that there are aspects to representationalism

that need further clariﬁcation (and indeed aspects that need certain

minor revisions). For example, it seems to me that the so-called “trans-

parency intuition,” which undeniably plays a very important role in

motivating the representationalist view, has not been well understood; nor

has the notion of content, in terms of which phenomenal character

or “feel” is best elucidated. I have also come to think that it would be

worthwhile not only to offer detailed replies to certain recalcitrant objec-

tions to representationalism but also to connect the view with other issues

of philosophical interest (most notably, the question of the nature of

color).

My focus in the essays that comprise this book is broader than repre-

sentationalism and associated topics, however. Two prominent chal-

lenges for any reductive theory of consciousness are the explanatory gap

and the knowledge argument. Much has been written on these challenges

(I myself have not been reticent [Tye 1984, 1995]), but more remains to

be said. In particular, it now seems to me that the two challenges are

intimately related and that the best strategy for dealing with the explana-

tory gap is to argue that it is a kind of cognitive illusion. Part I of the

book is concerned with these more general matters.

Part II is devoted to representationalism itself. This part opens with a

summary of representationalism and its motivations. I have tried to make

the development of the view here especially clear, and I think that this

chapter contains enough new material (as well as some minor revisions)

to make it worthwhile to peruse even for those who are fully familiar

with the theory presented in Tye 1995. The three chapters that follow

deal with objections to representationalism that take the form of puta-

tive counterexamples.

The ﬁrst class of these consists of actual, real-world cases in which, it

is claimed, perceptual experiences are the same representationally but

different phenomenally. These are the focus of chapter 4. Another class

of objections consists of imaginary cases in which experiences suppos-

Preface

edly are identical representationally but inverted phenomenally. These

cases, along with a modiﬁed representational theory proposed by Sydney

Shoemaker, are the focus of chapter 5. A third class of putative coun-

terexamples consists of problem cases in which experiences allegedly

have different representational contents (of the relevant sort) but the

same phenomenal character. Ned Block’s Inverted Earth example (1990)

is of this type. Counterexamples are also sometimes given in which sup-

posedly experience of one sort or another is present but in which there

is no state with representational content. Swampman—the molecule-by-

molecule replica of a notable philosopher (Donald Davidson), formed

accidentally by the chemical reaction that occurs in a swamp when a par-

tially submerged log is hit by lightning—is one such counterexample,

according to some philosophers. Chapter 6 presents replies both to the

Inverted Earth example and to Swampman.

Part III of the book deals with two more general issues, one of which

is potentially threatening to representationalism and the other of which

representationalism enables us to make progress upon. The potential

threat is posed by color (and other so-called “secondary qualities”). For

reasons that will become clear in chapters 3–6, representationalism of

the sort I endorse requires an objectivist account of color. It does not

require that colors be external , objective entities, but this is certainly

the view of color that goes most naturally with representationalism. This

is also, I believe, the commonsense view of color. Unfortunately, accord-

ing to many color scientists and some philosophers, colors cannot be

objective entities of the sort common sense supposes. Common sense

supposedly conﬂicts with modern science on color, and common sense

supposedly has no way of accommodating the distinction between

unitary and binary colors. I argue that this is quite wrong. Chapter 7

may thus be seen as a vindication of common sense and thereby

indirectly a defense of representationalism with respect to color.

The ﬁnal chapter considers an important question about conscious-

ness on which philosophers have been largely silent, namely: Where, on

the phylogenetic scale, does phenomenal consciousness cease? I address

this question from the perspective of representationalism, and I argue

that consciousness extends beyond the realm of vertebrates to such

simple creatures as honey bees.

xii

Preface

I have given talks at many places on the essays that comprise this book,

and I am indebted to many people for helpful comments, discussion,

and/or correspondence. In particular, I would like to thank the Depart-

ment of Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld for hosting a week-long

seminar on Tye 1995 (during which I was asked a large number of useful

and probing questions) as well as the following individuals: Kent Bach,

Ansgar Beckermann, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Earl Conee, Martin

Davies, Fred Dretske, John Dilworth, Jim Edwards, Frank Hofmann,

Terry Horgan, Keith Hossack, Frank Jackson, Joe Levine, David Lewis,

Peter Ludlow, Colin McGinn, Brian McLaughlin, Christian Nimtz, John

O’Leary Hawthorne, Andrew Melnyk, Tom Nagel, Chris Peacocke,

David Papineau, Jesse Prinz, Diana Rafmann, Alex Rosenberg, Mark

Sainsbury, David Sanford, Krista Saporiti, Giofranco Soldati, Wade

Savage, Sydney Shoemaker, Eilrt Sundt-Ohlsen, Bernhard Thole, and Bob

Van Gulick.

Some of the essays are entirely new; others involve a signiﬁcant

reworking of previously published articles. Chapter 1 differs only very

minimally from an essay with the same title that appeared in German in

an issue of Protosociologie (1998), edited by K. Preier. Chapter 2

appeared in Mind (October 1999) as “Phenomenal Consciousness: The

Explanatory Gap as a Cognitive Illusion.” An ancestor of chapter 6 was

published as “Inverted Earth, Swampman, and Representationism” in

Philosophical Perspectives (1998), but the latter part of the chapter that

appears here is notably different from the earlier essay. Chapter 8 is taken

from the last two-thirds of an article with the same title that appeared

in Philosophical Studies (1997).

Notes

1. It is sometimes held that the content of a conscious thought makes its own

distinctive contribution to the phenomenal character of a thinker’s mental state.

This has the very counterintuitive consequence that my molecular duplicate on

Putnam’s famous planet, Twin Earth, who thinks that twin water (or twater) is

wet, rather than that water is wet, thereby differs from me at the level of phe-

nomenal experience or feeling. I accept, of course, that what my twin thinks is

different from me. He has a thought with a different content from mine, and if

he is conscious of what is thinking then his thought has a different conscious

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