Michael Tye | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 1950 |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
Main interests | Philosophy of mind, consciousness, metaphysics |
Michael Tye (born 1950) is a British philosopher who is currently the Dallas TACA Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind.
Tye completed his undergraduate education at Oxford University in England, studying first physics and then physics and philosophy. He went on to complete a PhD in philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. [1] Before moving to Texas, Tye taught at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia and Temple University in Philadelphia proper. He was also a visiting professor at King's College, London for some ten consecutive years while at Temple and briefly took up a chair at the University of St. Andrews. In 2023, Tye met with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala at a conference dedicated to the topic of animal consciousness. Besides philosophy of mind, Tye has interests in cognitive science, metaphysics, and philosophical logic, especially problems relating to vagueness.
Tye's third book, Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995), was a selection of the Library of Science Book Club.
In the philosophy of mind, Tye has dedicated much of his work to the development and defense of representationalism. Representationalism is a thesis about the phenomenal, “qualitative” character of conscious experiences. According to Tye, the most basic version of the representationalist thesis holds that “necessarily (visual) experiences that are alike with respect to the qualities they represent are alike phenomenally.”. [2] Tye has argued for representationalism about conscious experience in general on the grounds that it provides the best explanation of the connection between phenomenal and representational features in experience, the "transparent" character of sensory consciousness, and perceptual accuracy conditions. [3] [4]
In his early work on representationalism, Tye defended materialist views about conscious representation and developed an influential account of phenomenal character known as the "PANIC theory". According to the PANIC theory, “phenomenal character is one and the same as Poised Abstract Nonconceptual Intentional Content.” Tye's proposal precludes the possibility that conceptual states such as beliefs are (or could be) phenomenally conscious. [3] Tye later came to reject the PANIC theory in favor of the view that phenomenal character is nothing other than the cluster of properties represented by an experience (as opposed to being a representational content). [5] In his more recent work, Tye retains his commitment to representationalism while rejecting the claim that phenomenally conscious states can be fully characterized in terms of standard materialist features. [2]
Tye endorses the realist view that “colors are physical properties whose natures are discoverable by empirical investigation.” [4] His work on color has broadly examined the extent to which contemporary science can be reconciled with pre-theoretical convictions about the nature of color. Tye affirms what he calls the “commonsense” belief that colors are objective features of surfaces.
Tye has defended his view of color in print against criticism from Ned Block. [6]
Tye has authored papers on animal consciousness and pain in animals. He is the author of the book, Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious?, published in 2016. The book defends the hypothesis that consciousness extends a considerable way down the phylogenetic scale, focusing on felt pain as a criterion. [7] [8] [9] He states that, in the absence of defeaters, we should prefer the view that animals feel pain if they behave similarly to humans in contexts where we know that humans feel pain. [10] He has reviewed scientific studies and concludes that mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and arthropods are, in most cases, likely to be conscious. [2] [8]
According to Tye, current evidence suggests that teleost fish feel pain while the evidence for pain in elasmobranchs and certain insects remains inconclusive. Tye has commented that "insects do not react to treatment that would undoubtedly cause severe pain in mammals. So, there is reason to doubt that generally insects feel pain." [11] However, in Chapter 5 of Vagueness And The Evolution Of Consciousness: Through The Looking Glass, Tye favorably considers opposing evidence including cases of apparent pain-behavior in elasmobranchs and insects as well as “striking commonalities in gene pathways in fruit flies and mice, pathways that aid mice in sensing pain and fixing pain thresholds.” [2] In Chapter 11 of Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious?, Tye discusses arguments in favor of vegetarianism. [9]
Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious? has been reviewed in Metascience and PsycCRITIQUES . [8] [12]
In his 2021 book, Vagueness And The Evolution Of Consciousness: Through The Looking Glass, Tye abandons an earlier form of physicalism and argues that sensory experience cannot be fully characterized by the resources of standard scientific investigation. [2] On the basis of issues relating to vagueness and the emergence of consciousness, Tye endorses a modified, “panpsychist” form of representationalism. This view holds that fundamental physical particles possess a basic, proto-phenomenal mental property that transfers to representational states when the particles are appropriately arranged. According to his new position, this basic mental property (which Tye refers to as “consciousness*”) is a necessary feature of phenomenally conscious states over and above the representational features described in his previous work. [3] [4]
Tye holds that fundamental physics can only “tell us about the relational/structural properties of matter.” [2] Significantly, these relational/structural properties do not include the intrinsic mental property that he attributes to fundamental particles and conscious states. However, Tye maintains that his proposed property still qualifies as genuinely physical on the grounds that it is “found in things that are unconscious as well as in things that are conscious”, occurs “across all of nature at the most fundamental level”, and obeys “fundamental physical laws”. [2] For this reason, Tye denies that his conversion constitutes an endorsement of anti-physicalism.
Epiphenomenalism is a position on the mind–body problem which holds that subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body, yet themselves have no influence over physical events. The appearance that subjective mental states influence physical events is merely an illusion, consciousness being a by-product of physical states of the world. For instance, fear seems to make the heart beat faster, but according to epiphenomenalism the biochemical secretions of the brain and nervous system —not the experience of fear—is what raises the heartbeat. Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, yet have non-physical properties, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a form of property dualism.
The mind is that which thinks, imagines, remembers, wills, and senses, or is the set of faculties responsible for such phenomena. The mind is also associated with experiencing perception, pleasure and pain, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. The mind can include conscious and non-conscious states as well as sensory and non-sensory experiences.
In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality as opposed to a "two-substance" or "many-substance" (pluralism) view. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.
Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. The word was first coined by philosophers in the 1630s for the concept of an ability to feel, derived from Latin sentiens (feeling), to distinguish it from the ability to think (reason).
Intentionality is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it has been regarded as the characteristic mark of the mental by many philosophers. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of intentional inexistence: to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states.
In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation: that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral, as each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
A philosophical zombie is a being in a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal person but does not have conscious experience.
Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model of consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991. As the title states, the book proposes a high-level explanation of consciousness which is consistent with support for the possibility of strong AI.
A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.
In philosophy of mind, Cartesian materialism is the idea that at some place in the brain, there is some set of information that directly corresponds to our conscious experience. Contrary to its name, Cartesian materialism is not a view that was held by or formulated by René Descartes, who subscribed rather to a form of substance dualism.
A mental representation, in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality or its abstractions.
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by consciousness, including the possible insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing.
Peter Carruthers is a British-American philosopher and cognitive scientist working primarily in the area of philosophy of mind, though he has also made contributions to philosophy of language and ethics. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, an associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, and a member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences.
In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory was published in 1996, and is the first book written by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher specialising in philosophy of mind. Although the book has been greatly influential, Chalmers maintains that it is "far from perfect", as most of it was written as part of his PhD dissertation after "studying philosophy for only four years".
Pain in crustaceans is a scientific debate which questions whether they experience pain or not. Pain is a complex mental state, with a distinct perceptual quality but also associated with suffering, which is an emotional state. Because of this complexity, the presence of pain in an animal, or another human for that matter, cannot be determined unambiguously using observational methods, but the conclusion that animals experience pain is often inferred on the basis of likely presence of phenomenal consciousness which is deduced from comparative brain physiology as well as physical and behavioural reactions.
Externalism is a group of positions in the philosophy of mind which argues that the conscious mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the nervous system, but also what occurs or exists outside the subject. It is contrasted with internalism which holds that the mind emerges from neural activity alone. Externalism is a belief that the mind is not just the brain or functions of the brain.
The concept of absent qualia is one of two major functionalist objections to the existence of qualia, the other being the inverted spectrum hypothesis. Qualia is a philosophical term used to refer to an individual's subjective experience, that is to say, the way something feels to that individual at that particular moment.
Higher-order theories of consciousness postulate that consciousness consists in perceptions or thoughts about first-order mental states. In particular, phenomenal consciousness is thought to be higher-order representation of perceptual or quasi-perceptual contents, such as visual images.
The phenomenal concept strategy (PCS) is an approach within philosophy of mind to provide a physicalist response to anti-physicalist arguments like the explanatory gap and philosophical zombies. The name was coined by Daniel Stoljar. As David Chalmers put it, PCS "locates the gap in the relationship between our concepts of physical processes and our concepts of consciousness, rather than in the relationship between physical processes and consciousness themselves." The idea is that if we can explain why we think there's an explanatory gap, this will defuse the motivation to question physicalism.
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