Consciousness, Color, and Content - Michael Tye.pdf

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 pa-
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
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
Phenomenal consciousness seems to be a relatively primitive, largely
automatic matter, something more widespread in nature than higher-order
x Preface
consciousness, for example. But it is also deeply puzzling. In Tye 1995,
I elaborated and defended a theory of phenomenal consciousness that