Tye’s Contingentism

Philosopher Michael Tye has proposed a theory of consciousness he calls “contingentism,” which is a kind of identity theory (i.e., phenomenal states and physical/brain states are literally the same) but with a novel twist: while the identity is indeed true in our world, it is not metaphysically true in all possible worlds. “Scenarios in which the relevant physical processing is present and consciousness is missing are easily imaginable (and thus metaphysically possible), but this is irrelevant if it is only a contingent fact that consciousness is a physical phenomenon” (Tye, 2023).^[1]

Contingent Identity and Origins

Contingentism, Tye states, “finds its origins in the views of Feigl, Place and Smart in the 1950s and 1960s. These philosophers held that sensations are contingently identical with brain processes, where sensations are understood to be conscious states such as pain or the visual experience of red.” The identity here was taken to be contingent, in part, because “it was taken to be clear that scientific type-type identities generally are contingent.” Smart's example was that he could imagine that lightning is not an electrical discharge. (These claims are mistaken, Tye says; “If in actual fact lightning is an electrical discharge, it could not have been otherwise,” Tye, 2023).

Tye says, “the contingentist about consciousness agrees with the above remarks concerning lightning and is happy to extend them to many other scientific identity statements. But the contingentist holds that the case of conscious mental states—states such that there is something it is like to undergo them—is different. Here the claim is not that such states are contingently identical with brain processes, but that such states are contingently identical with physical states of some sort or other, where the notion of a physical state is to be understood broadly to include not only neurophysiological states but also other states that are grounded in microphysical states, including functional states or states of the sort posited by representationalism, for example. For conscious states, the identities are contingent since we can easily imagine their having not obtained. For example, we can easily imagine a zombie undergoing the physical state with which the experience of fear is to be identified and yet not experiencing fear at all. Similarly, we can easily imagine someone experiencing fear without undergoing the given physical state” (Tye, 2023).

Solving the Hard Problem

The solution, Tye suggests, “lies with the realization that it is a mistake to model the consciousness case on that of physical-physical relationships. Qualitative character Q is identical with physical property R, if physicalism is true. But this is a contingent identity (even though the designators ‘Q’ and ‘R’ are rigid). So, we can imagine Q without R (and R without Q), but the fact that we can do so is not an indicator of an explanatory gap. A creature could indeed have been in a state having Q without being in a state having R and vice-versa” (Tye, 2023).

Might things have been different in the actual world? Indeed, they might, Tye says. “The physical processing might have gone on just as it does, the information processing might have been just the same, the cognitive machinery might have functioned as it does, and yet along with all of this, Q might not have been present in experience. That is certainly intelligible to us. But it creates no explanatory puzzle; for that is only a metaphysically possible world. It is not the actual world. As far as the actual world goes, there is nothing puzzling or problematic, nothing left to explain … No mystery remains” (Tye, 2023).

This is because “in the actual world,” consciousness is physical, according to the physicalist, “since it is only on the hypothesis of physicalism with respect to the actual world that problems of emergence and causal efficacy can be handled satisfactorily, or so the physicalist believes.”

Thus, Tye concludes, “once we become contingentists, the hard problem has a straightforward and satisfying solution.”

Evolution, Vagueness, and Panpsychist Turn

In support of his views, Tye turns to “vagueness” in assessing consciousness in the hierarchical taxonomy of life and in the process of evolution (Tye, 2021). According to Tye, “The two dominant theories of consciousness argue it appeared in living beings either suddenly, or gradually. Both theories face problems. The solution is the realization that a foundational consciousness was always here, yet varying conscious states were not, and appeared gradually.”

Given that it is hardly obvious how to discern which organisms are conscious, and, if so, their kind or level of consciousness, borderline cases of consciousness can make no sense. As David Papineau reviews Tye, “But this isn't because a sharp line is found somewhere as we move from non-conscious physical systems to conscious ones. Rather [according to Tye] it's because no such line exists at all. Even the most basic constituents of physical reality are already endowed with consciousness” (Papineau, 2022). Thus, Tye transitions from his traditional physicalism to a form of panpsychism, though differing from those of mainstream panpsychists.^[2]

In admirable full disclosure, Tye states that his contingentism “is written from the perspective of the reductive physicalist (understood broadly to include functionalists and representationalists),” and that he believes contingentism presents “the best hope for a defense of reductive physicalism.” However, he adds, “I myself am no longer a thoroughgoing reductive physicalist. I now believe that there is an element in our consciousness that cannot be captured via higher level reductions” (Tye, 2023)

In addition, Tye suggests that, from the representationalist perspective and supporting its views, “history matters crucially to phenomenology. What it is like for an individual at a given time is fixed not just by what is going on in the individual at that time but also by what was going on in the individual in the past. Two individuals can be exactly alike intrinsically at a time and yet differ in the phenomenal character of their mental life at that time” (Tye, 2019).

Tye concludes his contingentism account by stating that “once we think of experiences in a representationalist and broadly reductionist way,” we can better appreciate phenomenology, including its presence or absence, such as in thought experiments where “a person slowly acquires a silicon chip brain.”

More recently, however, Tye has come to hold that, at the most fundamental level, there is a kind of 'consciousness*' or a protoconsciousness, a version of panpsychism (see "Tye's Irreducible Consciousness*" under Panpsychism).

Footnotes

[1]. Tye notes that “contrary to orthodoxy, there is no obvious difficulty with holding that identity statements in which the identity sign is flanked by rigid designators are sometimes contingent” (Tye, 2023).

[2]. To speak of “mainstream panpsychists”—when I was doing neurophysiology (mid-1960s, UCLA Brain Research Institute)—would have seemed an oxymoron.