PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIND: Higher level awareness and thoughts

PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIND Higher level awareness and thoughts

We know or conjecture the feelings, intentions, sensations, thoughts, and desires of other people. On

In our case we generally do not have to conjecture and sometimes we pay special attention to these experiences.

These appear to be events or objects very different from external objects from which, for example, they are

experiences. Not only are they different, but they are of a different kind. Experiences have properties that do not have

external objects.

This difference suggests the problem of what the physical world has to do with that other class of entities, called

mental. Furthermore, it seems that these states or processes or entities are closely related to the organism.

that has them. This problem is known as the mind-body problem, which can be concentrated in the

question of the relationship between the brain and the mind, or can be expanded to the broader problem of the relationship between

mental and physical.

The main objective of this article is to present the higher level thought consciousness theory proposed by David Rosenthal, as well as to offer an overview of the main objections that can be made to it. It begins with a brief characterization of the meaning of the term "consciousness" in the philosophical field and with a note on the antecedents of this theory in the philosophy of Descartes and Locke. After exposing Rosenthal's theory, according to which a mental state is conscious when it is accompanied by a thought about the mental state in question, the objections that have been made and the strategies that can be followed to answer them are reviewed. Finally, it warns about the danger that this theory represents for the normativity of our thinking if it is intended to cover all conscious mental states with it.

The answer to these questions and the way of approaching them are the main character by which the philosophies of the mind are

have distinguished. Dualism, behaviorism, functionalism, mind-brain identity theory and others

more, such as emergentism, epiphenomenalism or the theory of the double aspect are distinguished by how they approach the relationship

between the mental and the physical or between the mind and the body.

The Philosophy of Mind subject deals with the study of these doctrines, with how the statute of the mind is defined in them.

mental vocabulary and what suggestions are derived from here for the methodology of the sciences that attempt to explain the

behavior, knowledge or emotions. Of all these areas of research, stands out for many reasons, among

others its difficulty, the problem of conscience.

The point of view that has dominated the last decades of the twentieth century has been the cognitivist, which considers the states

mental as computations operated on representations characterized syntactically. For this point of view

two problems are especially thorny, apart from that of conscience: emotions and the circumstance that some

Mental processes, especially what used to be called "higher mental processes" are partially external and in

socially shared part

On "conscience" in Philosophy

The term "consciousness" is used in so many senses that it is doubtful whether there is a particular phenomenon to which it refers. Despite this, there is something that most philosophers agree on: with that term we emphasize the perspective of the first person, the perspective from which each person lives their own experiences. To characterize this perspective, it is useful to take into account what those who reject that it is something special have said. Behaviorists, for example, argue that everyone's access to their experiences and, in general, to their mental life is similar to the access we have to other people's mental states: in both cases we resort to observing behavior (Ryle, 1967: 150-165). There is — according to them — an essential difference between the way we know our mental states and the way we know those of others. What makes them different is that each of us is more familiar with ourselves than with the others (ibid .: 159-161). The spontaneous reaction against these claims is clear, especially if we think about what Schopenhauer considered the most important life experience: pain (Schopenhauer, 1991: 257-260). It is one thing to listen to the screams and gestures of a person when the doctor introduces an artifact through the ear and another thing to feel that pain. Even if a doctor claims that what he is doing does not hurt, even a child can reply "you don't know what I feel." This is the perspective we refer to when we speak of conscience. It is not just the fact that the patient is different from the doctor. The patient could be anesthetized and gesturing still in this state. The truth is that if he does not feel the pain he is not aware of the pain.

Behaviorism actually opposed a certain way of understanding consciousness, although it ended up throwing the water out of the bathtub with everything and the child. He denounced the incongruities of conceiving consciousness as an internal space in which our mental states appear as in a theater with a single spectator, the soul. According to this characterization, the brain can go behind the scenes processing information, but at a given moment our mental states appear on the scene and then the soul, its only spectator, enjoys or suffers the spectacle. This caricature of the Cartesian conception of mind and consciousness, spread by authors such as Gilbert Ryle or Daniel Dennett, is not without foundation (Ryle, op. Cit .: 138-149; Dennett, 1995: 115-147). Indeed, for Descartes the distinctiveness of the mental, which he calls "thought", is to be the immediate object of consciousness (Descartes, AT, IV: 28; VII: 160; VIII: 7; IX: 124, and Descartes , 1977, 129). Everything of which we are immediately aware is part of thought, of a substance other than our own body. These immediate objects of consciousness can represent physical objects whose existence we can doubt, just as we can doubt the history that the actors represent in the theater. What we cannot doubt is the existence of the mental states that these physical objects represent. This direct and immediate relationship between consciousness and mental states suggests, then, that consciousness conforms with mental states a space other than the space represented by mental states.

Higher Level Thought Theory of Consciousness

What makes a state of mind conscious? What makes a state of mind part of the perspective of the person who has it? For Descartes and for Locke this question did not represent as desperate a problem as for contemporary philosophers. This is partly because they did not give enough importance to the existence of unconscious states of mind. For them the mark of the mental was precisely consciousness or, in other words, for them there is mind because there is consciousness.2 It could be thought, therefore, that for these philosophers consciousness is an intrinsic property of each mental state, that is, a property that it has regardless of its relationship with other mental states (Rosenthal, 2005: 31-32). However, both seem to subscribe to what are today called "higher-level representational theories of consciousness." According to these theories, there is only consciousness where there are mental states that have other mental states as their object. The definitions of thought that Descartes offers take thoughts as immediate objects of consciousness, that is, as immediate objects of other mental states. For this reason, Descartes' contemporaries objected to a regression to infinity of mental states (Stepanenko, 1993). This objection warns that if a mental state is conscious because it is the object of another mental state, then this new mental state requires another that has it as an object and so on ad infinitum. Every mental state immediately triggers an infinite chain of mental states, which is absurd.

Like Descartes, Locke also subscribes to a higher-level theory of conscious mental states. When a man thinks or perceives - Locke maintains - he has to be aware of, perceive or be sensitive to the thoughts and perceptions in which he finds himself (Locke, 1959: 94-95). This clearly indicates that Locke subscribed to a type of higher-level state theory of consciousness: one that considers higher-level states to be perceptions, that is, they are phenomenal in nature, that there is something that it feels like to have those states of mind. higher level.3 This position not only exposes itself to the objection of the return to infinity of conscious mental states, 4 but it also seems to reproduce the perceptions within us: not only do we have perceptions of objects external to our own mind, we also perceive the own perceptions in our mind. Something is felt not only to perceive, but also to perceive that I perceive.

In contemporary philosophy of mind, David Rosenthal has proposed a higher-level representational theory of consciousness that avoids the two previous objections. Faced with the objection of the return to infinity, he points out that the higher-level mental state need not be a conscious state of mind, although it can be (Rosenthal, op. Cit.: 27-33). Faced with the objection of duplicating our perceptions, he argues that the higher-level state must be a thought and that thoughts are distinguished from experiences (perceptions, dreams, hallucinations) in which it does not feel anything to have them, that is, they do not have phenomenal properties. (ibid .: 5). This theory is called the "higher level thought theory of consciousness." According to Rosenthal, the value of such a theory consists neither more nor less in that it opens up the possibility of offering an explanation of consciousness (ibid .: 21-22). This explanation - he maintains - can only be given from the mental point of view. But if consciousness is taken as distinctive of the mental, as the Cartesian tradition does, and those who define consciousness only in terms of what it feels like to be in a state of mind tend to do so, then we cannot move forward. We cannot point out what are the distinctive features of conscious mental states. On the contrary, if we accept that the mental encompasses a broader range of phenomena than consciousness, then we have hope of explaining how conscious mental states arise from non-conscious mental phenomena. So we must begin by defining the mental and then defining the consciousness.

For Rosenthal mental states have at least one of the following two properties: 1) intentional properties, thanks to which they have a content or represent an object other than themselves; and 2) phenomenal properties, thanks to which something feels to be in these mental states (ibid .: 23-26). For many philosophers the characteristic of the mental is having the first type of properties. The most famous of them is Franz Brentano who argued that what is characteristic of the mental is to have intentionality, that is, to be something about something else, to address an object. Contemporary philosophers who call themselves "representationalists" go further and not only affirm that all mental states have a content, but also that any difference in the phenomenal properties of a mental state must have its counterpart in what is represented (Tye, 1995: 136) . There are, however, mental states that do not seem to have intentional properties, such as certain types of sensations or pain. Representationists insist that the pains represent damage to certain parts of the body (ibid .: 134). But perhaps there are certain pains that we cannot locate in a certain part of the body or certain emotions that do not tell us anything about something other than themselves or certain sensations that only later we can link with certain images. Recall the famous passage from Du côté de chez Swann in which Marcel Proust describes how, from the taste of a cupcake soaked in tea, he goes back to the seasons he spent as a child in Illiers-Combray (Proust, 1954: 56-61) . Before being able to establish the link between that taste and the memories of him, the taste impresses him and to put it in some way "wants to say something to him" that he only later understands. It is not clear if that feeling of remembering something without being able to formulate it has a propositional content, if it is about something before the memories appear. In any case, by accepting that mental states can have at least one of the two properties mentioned, Rosenthal leaves open the possibility of accepting mental states that do not have intentional properties.