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228Delusion and self-deception: Mapping the terrainIn Tim Bayne & Jordi Fernández (eds.), Delusion and Self-Deception: Affective and Motivational Influences on Belief Formation, Psychology Press. pp. 1-21. 2009.The papers in this volume are drawn from a workshop on delusion and self-deception, held at Macquarie University in November of 2004. Our aim was to bring together theorists working on delusions and self-deception with an eye towards identifying and fostering connections—at both empirical and conceptual levels—between these domains. As the contributions to this volume testify, there are multiple points of contact between delusion and self-deception. This introduction charts the conceptual space …Read more
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224After being sorely neglected for some time, consciousness is well and truly back on the philosophical and scientific agenda. This entry provides a whistle-stop tour of some recent debates surrounding consciousness, with a particular focus on issues relevant to the scientific study of consciousness. The first half of this entry (the first to fourth sections) focuses on clarifying the explanandum of a science of consciousness and identifying constraints on an adequate account of consciousness; the…Read more
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221Chalmers on the Justification of Phenomenal JudgmentsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2): 407-419. 2001.We seem to enjoy a very special kind of epistemic relation to our own conscious states. In The Conscious Mind (TCM), David Chalmers argues that our phenomenal judgments are fully‐justified or certain because we are acquainted with the phenomenal states that are the objects of such judgments. Chalmers holds that the acquaintance account of phenomenal justification is superior to reliabilist accounts of how it is that our PJs are justified, because it alone can underwrite the certainty of our phen…Read more
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208The unity of consciousness: Clarification and defenceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 78 (2): 248-254. 2000.In "The Disunity of Consciousness," Gerard O'Brien and Jon Opie argue that human consciousness is not synchronically unified. They suggest that the orthodox conception of the unity of consciousness admits of two readings, neither of which they find persuasive. According to them, "a conscious individual does not have a single consciousness, but several distinct phenomenal consciousnesses, at least one for each of the senses, running in parallel." They call this conception of consciousness the _mu…Read more
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204The Oxford Companion to Consciousness (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2009.Five years in the making and including over 250 concise entries written by leaders in the field, the volume covers both fundamental knowledge as well as more recent advances in this rapidly changing domain.
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196Resisting ruthless reductionism: A commentary on BicklePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (3): 239-48. 2005.Philosophy and Neuroscience is an unabashed apologetic for reductionism in philosophy of mind. Bickle chides his fellow philosophers for their ignorance of mainstream neuroscience, and promises them that a subscription to Cell, Neuron, or any other journal in mainstream neuroscience will be amply rewarded. Rather than being bogged down in the intricacies of two-dimensional semantics or the ontology of properties, philosophers of mind need to get neuroscientifically informed and ruthlessly reduct…Read more
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194Moral status and the treatment of dissociative identity disorderJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 27 (1): 87-105. 2002.Many contemporary bioethicists claim that the possession of certain psychological properties is sufficient for having full moral status. I will call this thepsychological approach to full moral status. In this paper, I argue that there is a significant tension between the psychological approach and a widely held model of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). According to this model, the individual personalities or alters that belong to someone with DID pos…Read more
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162The Presence of Consciousness in Absence SeizuresBehavioural Neurology 24 (1): 47-53. 2011.Although the study of epileptic absence seizures has the potential to contribute a great deal to the scientific understanding of consciousness, this potential has yet to be fully exploited. There have been a number of insightful discussions of consciousness in the context of epileptic seizures, but the basic conceptual issues are still poorly understood and many empirical questions remain unexplored. In this paper I review a number of questions that are of interest to consciousness scientists an…Read more
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151Ensemble representation and the contents of visual experiencePhilosophical Studies 176 (3): 733-753. 2019.The on-going debate over the ‘admissible contents of perceptual experience’ concerns the range of properties that human beings are directly acquainted with in perceptual experience. Regarding vision, it is relatively uncontroversial that the following properties can figure in the contents of visual experience: colour, shape, illumination, spatial relations, motion, and texture. The controversy begins when we ask whether any properties besides these figure in visual experience. We argue that ‘ens…Read more
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138Consciousness, Concepts and Natural KindsPhilosophical Topics 48 (1): 65-83. 2020.We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behavior. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants…Read more
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130Delusion and Self-Deception: Affective and Motivational Influences on Belief Formation (Macquarie Monographs in Cognitive Science) (edited book)Psychology Press. 2008.This collection of essays focuses on the interface between delusions and self-deception.
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124Co-consciousness: Review of Barry Dainton's Stream of Consciousness (review)Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (3): 79-92. 2001.
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120The inclusion model of the incarnation: Problems and prospectsReligious Studies 37 (2): 125-141. 2001.Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne have recently defended what they call the ‘two-minds’ model of the Incarnation. This model, which I refer to as the ‘inclusion model’ or ‘inclusionism’, claims that Christ had two consciousnesses, a human and a divine consciousness, with the former consciousness contained within the latter one. I begin by exploring the motivation for, and structure of, inclusionism. I then develop a variety of objections to it: some philosophical, others theological in nature.…Read more
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107Review of Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology, by Christopher Mole (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1). 2013.Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-4, Ahead of Print
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95Toward a pluralist account of parenthoodBioethics 17 (3). 2003.What is it that makes someone a parent? Many writers – call them ‘monists’– claim that parenthood is grounded solely in one essential feature that is both necessary and sufficient for someone's being a parent. We reject not only monism but also ‘necessity’ views, in which some specific feature is necessary but not also sufficient for parenthood. Our argument supports what we call ‘pluralism’, the view that any one of several kinds of relationship is sufficient for parenthood. We begin by challen…Read more
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94VI—Gist!Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (2): 107-126. 2016.A central debate in the philosophy of perception concerns the range of properties that can be represented in perceptual experience. Are the contents of perceptual experience restricted to ‘low-level’ properties such as location, shape and texture, or can ‘high-level’ properties such as being a tomato, being a pine tree or being a watch also be represented in perceptual experience? This paper explores the bearing of gist perception on the admissible contents debate, arguing that it provides quali…Read more
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93"Are you my mommy?" On the genetic basis of parenthoodJournal of Applied Philosophy 18 (3). 2001.What exactly is it that makes someone a parent? Many people hold that parenthood is grounded, in the first instance, in the natural derivation of one person's genetic constitution from the genetic constitutions of others. We refer to this view as "Geneticism". In Part I we distinguish three forms of geneticism on the basis of whether they hold that direct genetic derivation is sufficient, necessary, or both sufficient and necessary, for parenthood. Parts two through four examine three arguments …Read more
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89Most animals have mental states of one sort or another, but few species share our capacity for self-awareness. We are aware of our own mental states via introspection, and we are aware of the mental states of our fellow human beings on the basis of what they do and say. This chapter is not concerned with these traditional forms of mind-reading—forms whose origins predate the beginnings of recorded history—but with the prospects of a rather different and significantly more recent form of ‘mind-re…Read more
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81Précis of The Unity of Consciousness (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (1): 200-208. 2013.
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74Thought: A Very Short IntroductionOxford University Press. 2013.In this lively Very Short Introduction, Tim Bayne looks at the nature of thought. Exploring questions such as 'What are thoughts?' and 'How is thought realized in the brain?', he draws on research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology to look at what we know - and don't know - about the capacity for thought
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70Explanation in the science of consciousness: From the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) to the difference makers of consciousnessPhilosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (II). 2020.At present, the science of consciousness is structured around the search for the neural correlates of consciousness. One of the alleged advantages of the NCCs framework is its metaphysical neutrality—the fact that it begs no contested questions with respect to debates about the fundamental nature of consciousness. Here, we argue that even if the NCC framework is metaphysically neutral, it is structurally committed, for it presupposes a certain model—what we call the Lite-Brite model—of conscious…Read more
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68Replies to CommentatorsAnalysis 74 (3): 520-529. 2014.This article is a response to commentaries by Chris Hill, Farid Masrour and Robert van Gulick on "The Unity of Consciousness" . Topics covered in the discussion include the phenomenal unity relation, the respect in which the unity of consciousness is a necessary feature of consciousness, and challenges to the idea that the self might be a merely virtual entity
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66From the first-person point of view, seeing a red square is very different from thinking about a red square, hearing an alarm sound is very different from thinking that an alarm is sounding, and smelling freshly-roasted coffee is very different from thinking that there is freshly-roasted coffee in one’s vicinity. How might the familiar contrast between representing a fact in thought and representing it in perception be captured? One influential idea is that perceptual states are phenomenally con…Read more
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64Gamete Donation and Parental ResponsibilityJournal of Applied Philosophy 20 (1): 77-87. 2003.Unlike surrogacy and cloning, reproduction via gamete donation is widely assumed to be morally unproblematic. Recently, a number of authors have argued that this assumption is mistaken: gamete donors, they claim, have parental responsibilities that they typically treat too lightly. In this paper I argue that the ‘parental neglect’ case against gamete donation fails. I begin by examining and rejecting the view that gamete donors have parental responsibilities; I claim that none of the current acc…Read more
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63Philosophy of Mind: An IntroductionRoutledge. 2021.Developments in the philosophy of mind over the last 20 years have dramatically changed the nature of the subject. In this major new introduction, Tim Bayne presents an outstanding overview of many of the key topics, problems, and debates, taking account not only of changes in philosophy of mind itself but also of important developments in the scientific study of the mind. The following topics are discussed in depth: What distinguishes a physicalist conception of the mind? Behaviourism,…Read more
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56Tests for consciousness in humans and beyondTrends in Cognitive Sciences 29. 2024.Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness (‘C-tests’) are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural organoids, and xenobot technology. Although a number of C-tests have been proposed in recent years, most ar…Read more
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54The grounds of worship again: A reply to Crowe: Tim Bayne and Yujin NagasawaReligious Studies 43 (4): 475-480. 2007.In this paper we respond to Benjamin Crowe's criticisms in this issue of our discussion of the grounds of worship. We clarify our previous position, and examine Crowe's account of what it is about God's nature that might ground our obligation to worship Him. We find Crowe's proposals no more persuasive than the accounts that we examined in our previous paper, and conclude that theists still owe us an account of what it is in virtue of which we have obligations to worship God.
Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |