Michael Tye
The University of Texas at Austin, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Website: www.michaeltye.us. My latest book with the title, Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through the ... moreWebsite: www.michaeltye.us. My latest book with the title, Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through the Looking Glass was published by Oxford University Press in August 2021. It is now available in paperback. My last but one book was on animal consciousness. It was published in December 2016 by Oxford. The earlier book is entitled Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious? That book led to a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in May, 2023 at a small interdisciplinary conference dedicated to the topic of animal consciousness. A later and more general version of the talk given there, one that encompasses both animals and AIs is to be found at the link below. This version was for a conference at Princeton organized by Peter Singer in October 2023.
https://uchv.princeton.edu/events/artificial-intelligence-conscious-machines-and-animals-broadening-ai-ethics
A still later (and much more detailed) version focusing on the case of AIs is forthcoming in the journal INQUIRY in a special issue devoted to machine intelligence and consciousness.
More general bio: I’m a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin (formally, I am the Dallas TACA Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts). My interest in philosophy was awakened at Oxford while an undergraduate. I went up to Oxford to study physics, but after finding out that a physics degree would require a day a week in the laboratory, I switched to physics and philosophy (which involved no lab work at all). By the time I had finished my undergraduate degree, I had decided to focus upon philosophy alone (for more here, see the interview for Mind and Consciousness below). Subsequently, I came to the USA, though I’ve been back to the UK as a visiting professor at King’s College, London for some ten consecutive years and briefly as the occupant of a chair at the University of St. Andrews.
I work mainly in the philosophy of mind and the foundations of cognitive science, but I also have interests in metaphysics. I’ve published nine books, five with MIT Press, Bradford Books, one with Cambridge University Press, and three with Oxford University Press. Six books are on various aspects of consciousness, one on the imagery debate in cognitive psychology, one on the metaphysics of mind, and one on concepts.
My first book on consciousness (Ten Problems of Consciousness) was an alternate selection of the Library of Science Book Club; it was published in 1995. The follow up (Consciousness, Color, and Content) came out in 2000. Both books defend what has come to be known as the representationalist approach to phenomenal consciousness. Another book, Consciousness and Persons, is on the unity of consciousness and was published by MIT Press, Bradford Books, in 2003. This was followed by Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts, also with MIT Press; it was published in Spring 2009. In 2012 I co-authored a book with Mark Sainsbury, entitled Seven Puzzles of Thought (and How to Solve Them): An Originalist Theory of Concepts. It was published by Oxford University Press.edit
The paper itself was the keynote address at a conference on panpsychism at Marist College in September 2023. The informal style reflects the fact that it was originally written for a multi-disciplinary audience, though parts of it are... more
The paper itself was the keynote address at a conference on panpsychism at Marist College in September 2023. The informal style reflects the fact that it was originally written for a multi-disciplinary audience, though parts of it are technical and will likely be of most interest to philosophers.
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Research Interests: Philosophy of Mind, Visual attention, Working Memory, Peripheral vision, Vision, and 6 moreVISION SCIENCE, VISUAL & PHYSIOLOGICAL OPTICS, PSYCHOLOGY OF VISION AND COGNITIVE VISUAL NEUROSCIENCE, Change Blindness, Crowding, Consciousness and Creativity, Visual perception (Psychology), Visual perception, Scene Gist Recognition, and statistical summary representations
This commentary discusses the target article's methodology, the relevance of the claim that crustaceans lack a neocortex to the thesis that they feel pain, and the evaluation of the results of some trade-off experiments done with hermit... more
This commentary discusses the target article's methodology, the relevance of the claim that crustaceans lack a neocortex to the thesis that they feel pain, and the evaluation of the results of some trade-off experiments done with hermit crabs.
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John Donne said, "Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing." What is needed to build such a masterpiece? We know that elephants, like everything else in the natural world, are made up of sub-atomic particles.... more
John Donne said, "Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing." What is needed to build such a masterpiece? We know that elephants, like everything else in the natural world, are made up of sub-atomic particles. Some philosophers would say that you can build one out of a very large boulder. You just have to take the boulder apart down to its sub-atomic particles and rearrange them suitably. But would the resulting entity really be an elephant or just a microphysical duplicate of an elephant, indistinguishable in itself from a real elephant? Further, are elephants literally one and the same as aggregates of sub-atomic particles? Or are they something more? What is needed to endow elephants with consciousness?
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In this paper, we defend the representationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness against a recent objection due to Hilla Jacobson, who charges representationalism with a failure to explain the role of pain in rationalizing certain... more
In this paper, we defend the representationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness against a recent objection due to Hilla Jacobson, who charges representationalism with a failure to explain the role of pain in rationalizing certain forms of behavior. In rough outline, her objection is that the representationalist is unable to account for the rationality of certain acts, such as the act of taking pain killers, which are aimed at eliminating the experience of pain rather than its intentional object. If representationalism were true, she claims, then the act of taking pain killers would be just as irrational as the act of a ruler who responds to bad tidings by killing the messenger. This paper aims to show that these charges are mistaken.
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Representationalism is the thesis that the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on its representational content. Tracking representationalism is the conjunction of representationalism with a “tracking” or causal-covariation... more
Representationalism is the thesis that the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on its representational content. Tracking representationalism is the conjunction of representationalism with a “tracking” or causal-covariation account of the content of experience. Several philosophers have maintained that the experience of pain poses a serious challenge to tracking representationalism. In particular, tracking representationalism is thought to be unable to account for the negative affective quality or “painfulness” of pain. In this paper we defend tracking representationalism against this challenge. We argue that pain has both descriptive and evaluative content and that pain has its negative affective quality in virtue of its (negative) evaluative content. We then show how a tracking theory of experiential content can accommodate this view of the content of pain. We conclude by noting some advantages of our account over a rival representationalist account, which explains the negative affective quality of pain in terms of imperative content rather than evaluative content.
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
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The main idea in this paper is that atomic concepts are to be individuated by their historical origins. Nonatomic concepts and thoughts are individuated by their constituent concepts and how they are structured. This originalist position... more
The main idea in this paper is that atomic concepts are to be individuated by their historical origins. Nonatomic concepts and thoughts are individuated by their constituent concepts and how they are structured. This originalist position contrasts with standard views, according to which concepts are to be individuated semantically or epistemically. Unlike Millianism, originalism is able to take Fregean data at face value. It also gives natural descriptions of cases, like Mates cases and examples involving demonstratives, that are problematic for Fregean views. Individuating concepts in a way that does not depend on semantic or epistemic matters makes concepts available to provide non-circular and simple explanations of puzzles concerning thought. Concepts are vehicles of representation, tools for thinking. They are individuated historically, and can be combined into structures we call thoughts. Thoughts can be evaluated as true or false. Typically, concepts have reference: for example, nominative concepts typically refer to objects, predicative concepts to properties, and so, indirectly, to objects possessing those properties. Some concepts fail to refer, but this does not prevent them having a role in thought. Distinct thoughts, even if they are referentially isomorphic, can play different cognitive roles. This enables us to make room for Fregean data, for example that the thought (in our sense) that Hesperus is visible is distinct from the thought that Phosphorus is visible. The concept Hesperus and the concept Phosphorus were introduced on distinct occasions, one at dusk, the other at dawn, so they are distinct. For similar reasons, the thought that Pegasus is a horse is distinct from the thought that Vulcan is a horse, even though there is no difference at the level of reference.
Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental... more
Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term 'qualia' (singular 'quale') to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. In this broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia. Disagreement typically centers on which mental states have qualia, whether qualia are intrinsic qualities of their bearers, and how qualia relate to the physical world both inside and outside the head. The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem. The entry that follows is divided into ten sections. The first distinguishes various uses of the term 'qualia'. The second addresses the question of which mental states have qualia. The third section brings out some of the main arguments for the view that qualia are irreducible and non-physical. The remaining sections focus on functionalism and qualia, the explanatory gap, qualia and introspection, representational theories of qualia, qualia as intrinsic, nonrepresentational properties, relational theories of qualia and finally the issue of qualia and simple minds.
Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
Michael Tye is the jumpin' jack flashman of philosophy of mind, always updating his zap mind with rigorous brooding on the nature of phenomenal consciousness. To do this he has to consider a whole bunch of things – including inverted... more
Michael Tye is the jumpin' jack flashman of philosophy of mind, always updating his zap mind with rigorous brooding on the nature of phenomenal consciousness. To do this he has to consider a whole bunch of things – including inverted earths, whether swamp things have eyes, how chinese sounds to the chinese, the beliefs of fish, one eyed zombie caterpillars, camouflaged moths, orgasms, the planet Vulcan and the difference between Keith Richards hallucinating a tomatoe and him hallucinating a unicorn. He writes his books to catch his thoughts as they shoot on by. All in all, he's a funky swell. 3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Was it really because you just wanted to avoid the lab work of
Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
Here are two crowds of balls (from Dretske 2010): View crowd A first and then view crowd B, each for a second or two. If you are like most people, you will fail to notice any difference in the crowds. But there is a difference: crowd A... more
Here are two crowds of balls (from Dretske 2010): View crowd A first and then view crowd B, each for a second or two. If you are like most people, you will fail to notice any difference in the crowds. But there is a difference: crowd A has one more ball. This is an example of change blindness. Do you see the ball that is the difference in the two crowds? You fail to see that there is a difference in the two crowds, but do you see the extra ball? The question is significant for three reasons. First, reflection upon it enables us to understand better the character or texture of visual experience. Secondly (and relatedly), how we answer the question is tied up with how we handle the further vexing question of the nature of attention and its relationship to consciousness. Finally , what we say about this case (and others like it) is relevant to how we think about the vehicles of consciousness awareness – the conscious states in our heads that are directed at things outside us. My discussion is divided into eight parts. I begin with a discussion of seeing and visual consciousness. In Section 2, I relate this discussion to the crowd of balls example and the issue of change blindness. I argue that the view Fred Dretske takes of this case (and others like it) is mistaken. Section 3 takes up the topic of levels of representation involved in visual awareness. I distinguish here two different general hypotheses with respect to change blindness – the comparison failure hypothesis and the representational failure hypothesis – and I adjudicate between them. The next three sections are concerned with various aspects of attention and the relationship of attention to seeing. Section 7 turns to the nature of the vehicles of conscious awareness. The final section addresses the general question of whether we see all the things in the field of view that are large enough to see. It is suggested that on
Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
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In her black and white room, Mary doesn’t know what it is like to see red. Only after undergoing an experience as of something red and hence acquainting herself with red can Mary learn what it is like. But learning what it is like to see... more
In her black and white room, Mary doesn’t know what it is like to see red. Only after undergoing an experience as of something red and hence acquainting herself with red can Mary learn what it is like. But learning what it is like to see red requires more than simply becoming acquainted with it, one must also know an appropriate answer to the question ‘what is it like to see red?’. To be acquainted with something is to know it, but such knowledge, as we argue, is object knowledge rather than propositional knowledge. Despite this mismatch between object knowledge and knowing an answer, we believe that acquaintance is crucial to Mary’s epistemic progress. We argue that in order to know what it is like, in order for Mary to know an appropriate answer, Mary’s propositional knowledge must be appropriately related to her acquaintance with red.