Conscious experiences—smelling a skunk, feeling pain, or experiencing happiness—have a subjective, phenomenal character that seems difficult to explain in purely neurophysiological terms. Michael Tye proposes that all experiences and feelings represent things, and that their phenomenal aspects are to be understood in terms of what they represent. He tests his representational theory against ten critical problems of consciousness, laying out existing theories and their difficulties before developing his intentionalist approach in detail. The book includes boxed summaries and cartoons illustrating the ten problems.
After rejecting the phenomenal-concept strategy—the idea that special concepts explain subjective experience—materialist philosophers face four major puzzles of consciousness. Michael Tye, formerly a proponent of that strategy, argues it is mistaken and presents alternative solutions. The puzzles include how Mary discovers something new when leaving a black-and-white room, what the explanatory gap consists of and how to bridge it, how to solve the hard problem of consciousness, and how philosophical zombies are possible. Tye also addresses perceptual content, conditions for consciousness of an object, change blindness, phenomenal character and awareness of it, and privileged access to one's own experiences.
Phenomenal consciousness—what it is like to have an experience—has no borderline cases: an experience is either conscious or not. The best explanation for this absence of borderline cases is that phenomenal consciousness is irreducible to physical or functional properties. This leads to a paradox that is best resolved by adopting a form of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality. The version of panpsychism developed here explains differences in the phenomenal character of experiences via differences in what the experiences represent. This approach is compatible with representationalist claims about phenomenal consciousness and offers a straightforward solution to the problem of combination—how micro-level conscious experiences combine into macro-level conscious experiences.