Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through the Looking Glass

Description

When Alice stepped through the looking-glass, she encountered a peculiar world where she meets animated chess pieces, characters from nursery rhymes, and talking animals. Everything there is inside out and upside down: so it is with consciousness. Reflecting on the inception of consciousness, it is natural to suppose that there are just two alternatives. Either consciousness appeared in living beings suddenly, like a light switch turning on, or it appeared gradually, like the biological development of life itself, through borderline cases which became the collective experience over time. For the former theory, consciousness is an on/off matter, but once it was there it became richer over time, like a beam of light becoming brighter and broader in its sweep. For the latter theory this is not the case, and there are shades of grey in how consciousness develops. Unfortunately, both alternatives face deep problems. The solution to these problems lies in the realization, strange as it may be, that a key element of consciousness itself was always here, as a fundamental feature of micro-reality. Varying conscious states were not, however: they appeared gradually. In Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness, Michael Tye addresses the questions that this raises. Where in the brain is consciousness located? How can consciousness be casually efficacious with respect to behaviour? What is the extent of consciousness in the animal world? How can all of this be so? Cover Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through the Looking Glass Copyright Contents Introduction 1: A Paradox of Consciousness 1.1 The Paradox Explained: Part A 1.2 The Paradox Explained: Part B 2: Russellian Monism to the Rescue? 2.1 Versions of Russellian Monism 2.2 Objections to Reductive Russellian Monism 2.3 Objections to Primitivist Russellian Monism 2.4 A Final Concern 3: Transparency and Representationalism 3.1 The Transparency Thesis 3.2 Qualia Realism 3.3 Two Arguments from Transparency Against Qualia Realism 3.4 How Does Transparency Support Representationalism for Visual Experience? 3.5 Blur 3.6 Extending Transparency: Bodily Sensations 3.7 Emotions and Moods 3.8 Conscious Thoughts 3.9 More on Property Representationalism 3.10 Objections and Clarifications 3.11 An Argument for Property Representationalism 3.12 Moore and the Missing Ingredient 4: Representationalism and Panpsychism 4.1 The Problem of Undirected Consciousness 4.2 The Problem of Combination 4.3 Poise and the Global Workspace 4.4 More on the Problem of Combination 4.5 The Problem of Tiny Psychological Subjects 4.6 The Causal Efficacy of Consciousness 5: The Location of Consciousness 5.1 A Hypothesis by Crick and Koch 5.2 Decorticate Children 5.3 The Prefrontal Cortex and Working Memory 5.4 Where in the Animal Realm Is Consciousness Located? Bibliography Index of Names Index