Tim Bayne

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 in which these points of contact can be located and introduces the reader to some of the general issues that frame the discussion of subsequent chapters.

After 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 second half of this entry (the fifth to seventh sections) examines a number of the methodological challenges facing the science of consciousness.

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 phenomenal judgments. I argue that Chalmers is unable to sustain this claim.

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 _multi-track account. I make three points in reply: (1) O'Brien and Opie's characterization of the orthodox conception of the unity of consciousness is problematic; (2) their arguments in support of the multitrack account are unpersuasive; and (3) the phenomenon of intersensory integration suggests that O'Brien and Opie are wrong to claim that "the only sense in which it is correct to talk of a 'unified' consciousness (...) is that in which the representational contents of the various components coincide."

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 reductive.

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 possess those properties that proponents of the psychological approach claim suffice for full moral status. If this account of DID is true, then the psychological approach to full moral status seems to entail that the two standard therapies for treating DID might, on occasion, be seriously immoral, for they may well involve the (involuntary) elimination of an entity with full moral status. This result should give proponents of the psychological approach pause, for most people find the claim that current treatments of DID are ethically suspect highly counter-intuitive

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 and identify ways in which the study of absence seizures might bear on their investigation

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 ‘ensemble properties’ should be added to the list of visually admissible properties. Ensemble properties are features that belong to a set of perceptible objects as a whole as opposed to the individuals that constitute that set. They include such features as the mean size of an array of shapes or the average emotional expression of an array of faces. Recent work in vision science has yielded compelling evidence that the visual system routinely encodes such properties. We argue that epistemological considerations provide strong reasons to think that these properties figure in visual experience. Judgements about ensemble properties are immediately warranted by our perceptual experience, and the only plausible way that a perceptual experience could confer this warrant is if it confers awareness of ensemble properties.

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, people with brain damage, nonhuman animals, and AI systems. There is a pressing need to identify measures of consciousness that can be applied to challenging cases. This paper explores one of the most promising strategies for identifying and validating such measures—the natural-kind strategy. The paper is in two broad parts. Part I introduces the natural-kind strategy, and contrasts it with other influential approaches in the field. Part II considers a number of objections to the approach, arguing that none succeeds.

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. Finally, I sketch a variant of inclusionism which I call ‘restricted inclusionism’ (RI); RI can evade many, but not all, of the objections to standard inclusionism.

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 challenging monistic versions of gestationalism, the view that gestation uniquely grounds parenthood. Monistic and necessity gestationalism are implausible. First, we raise the ‘paternity problem’– necessity gestationalists lack an adequate account of how men become fathers. Second, the positive arguments that necessity gestationalists give are not compelling. However, although gestation may not be a necessary condition for parenthood, there is good reason to think that it is sufficient. After further rebutting an ‘intentionalist’ account of parenthood, in which having and acting on intentions to procreate and rear is necessary for parenthood, we end by sketching a pluralist picture of the nature of parenthood, rooted in causation, on which gestation, direct genetic derivation, extended custody, and even, sometimes, intentions, may be individually sufficient for parenthood.

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 for geneticism: the property argument, the causal argument, and the parity argument. We conclude that none of these arguments succeeds.

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 qualified support for the claim that certain kinds of high-level properties—such as being a natural scene —can be perceptually represented.

Most 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-reading’: the capacity to ascribe mental states to a creature on the basis of information derived from neuroimaging

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 consciousness. This, we argue, represents a serious liability for the NCC framework for the plausibility of the Lite-Brite model is very much an open question, and the science of consciousness would be better served by a framework that does not presuppose it. Drawing on interventionist ideas in the philosophy of science, we suggest that the Difference-Maker framework can provide just such an alternative. Instead of searching for the neural correlates of consciousness, we ought to be searching for the difference makers of consciousness. We detail how a shift to searching DMCs will change both the practice of consciousness science and the interpretation of existing results.

From 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 conscious whereas thoughts are not. However, those theorists who hold that thoughts have a distinctive kind of phenomenal character – often known as “cognitive phenomenology” – cannot account for the contrast between thought and perception in this manner. This paper examines the various options that are available to advocates of cognitive phenomenology for capturing the experiential contrast between thought and perception, and argues that each of them faces serious challenges.

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, the identity theory, functionalism, and eliminativism as accounts of the mental The nature of perception, including the issue of perceptual transparency, the admissible contents of perception, and the question of unconscious perception The nature of thought, including the language of thought hypothesis, Searle’s Chinese room argument, and the Turing test The basis of intentional content Externalist accounts of content and the ‘extended mind’ thesis Consciousness-based objections to physicalism, and illusionist and panpsychist conceptions of consciousness Theories of consciousness, including methodological issues in the study of consciousness Mental causation, including both philosophical and scientific challenges The problem(s) of other minds, including knowledge of non-human minds Self-knowledge Personal identity and the nature of the self The book features a number of boxes that provide a more in-depth look at particular issues. Also included are chapter summaries, guides to further reading, and a helpful glossary of terms. Written by a leading figure in the field, Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction is an invaluable core text for any student coming to philosophy of mind for the first time.

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 accounts of parenthood provides good reason for ascribing parenthood to gamete donors. I then argue that even if gamete donors do have parental responsibilities for ‘their’ children, it is not clear that they treat these responsibilities too lightly. I conclude the paper by examining the wider question of just what kind of responsibilities gamete donors might have towards the children that they have a role in creating.

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 are of limited use, and currently we have no C-tests for many of the populations for which they are most critical. Here, we identify challenges facing any attempt to develop C-tests, propose a multidimensional classification of such tests, and identify strategies that might be used to validate them.