Xxx’x New Argument. In his new book Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness, Tye entertains the idea that consciousness seems both vague and sharp at the same time. To explain this, he claims that while conscious states might be vague, consciousness itself – or consciousness*, as he calls it – must be sharp (Tye 2021b: 2). Vague concepts are indeterminate, so it might be vague whether the colour I am seeing in my conscious experience is this shade of red or that shade of red, while sharp concepts are determinate or ‘binary’ – there either is conscious experience or there is not, with no borderline cases. Since Tye (2021b) posits that consciousness* is a fundamental feature of micro-reality, tying it to determinably sharp physical ultimates, he avoids the objections raised by the vagueness argument, as discussed in Chapter I13. If this is correct, it would preserve both the intuition that consciousness is a determinate on-or-off phenomenon, as well as the conflicting intuition that our experiences come in degrees. So, while our representational content might be indeterminate, a determinate and sharp aspect of consciousness is guaranteed. To further clarify the idea, he states that consciousness essentially has content, though what distinguishes it from other representational entities is not content but rather consciousness*, which is not a representational property (Tye 2021b: 80). Human beings have both consciousness* and consciousness – the former being the irreducible and fundamental, 13 Another reason for why Xxx introduces consciousness* are zombies. Consciousness* can explain why we are not zombies – beings who lack consciousness* at the fundamental level – since “microphysical duplication does not logically guarantee duplication at the level of quiddities” (Tye 2021b: 89). So, zombies can act like us but they lack consciousness* and are thus not conscious (Tye 2021b: 89). However, since I claimed that the conceivability argument is inconclusive in Chapter I, I will not focus on this aspect of Xxx’x proposal. non-representational property of consciousness-as-such, the latter being the representational aspect of our experiences (Tye 2021b: 79). Fundamental entities, like quarks, only have consciousness* but not consciousness, so they have no representational states at all (Tye 2021b: 79). Consciousness* is also not an emergent property, but an intrinsic physical property of fundamental entities, and it is not a phenomenal property of token experiences either since th...
