Consciousness, Color, and Content

Experiences and feelings are inherently conscious states. There is something it islike to feel pain, to have an itch, to experience bright red. Philosophers call this sort ofconsciousness "phenomenal consciousness." Even though phenomenal consciousness seems to be arelatively primitive matter, something more widespread in nature than higher-order or reflectiveconsciousness, it is deeply puzzling.In 1995 Michael Tye proposed a theory of phenomenalconsciousness now known as representationalism. This book is, in part, devoted to a furtherdevelopment of that theory along with replies to common objections. Tye's focus is broader thanrepresentationalism, however. Two prominent challenges for any reductive theory of consciousness arethe explanatory gap and the knowledge argument. In part I of this book, Tye suggests that thesechallenges are intimately related. The best strategy for dealing with the explanatory gap, heclaims, is to consider it a kind of cognitive illusion. Part II of the book is devoted torepresentationalism. Part III connects representationalism with two more general issues. The firstis the nature of color. Tye defends a commonsense, objectivist view of color and argues that such aview is compatible with modern color science. In the final chapter, Tye addresses the question ofwhere on the phylogenetic scale phenomenal consciousness ceases, arguing that consciousness extendsbeyond the realm of vertebrates to such relatively simple creatures as the honeybee.

Michael Tye is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995), Consciousness, Color, and Content (2000), and Consciousness and Persons (2003), all published by the MIT Press.