© Michael Lacewing

Two Theories of Consciousness

SOME DISTINCTIONS
To understand the two theories of consciousness we will look at – Higher Order
Thought theory and Searle’s biological naturalism – we first need to understand a
distinction between ‘creature consciousness’ and ‘state consciousness’. Some types of
organism, like human beings are conscious, some, like plants, are not. If an organism
is conscious ‘in general’, there are times when it can be not conscious, e.g. when
asleep. Conscious organisms have mental states. But very few philosophers think that
all mental states are conscious; i.e. most believe that mental states can be
unconscious. What it is for a creature to be conscious, and what it is for a mental
state to be conscious are two different things. Of course, the two will be related; but
philosophers disagree about how they are related.

Second, we also need to notice the distinction between consciousness and

introspection. Human beings, perhaps uniquely, can be not only conscious of things in
the world, but can also be conscious of their consciousness. We not only see, think
and feel things, we are aware that we do so. This ability is the ability to introspect; it
involves self-consciousness. It is very difficult for us to imagine what it is like to be
conscious without being self-conscious, but it is a distinction we need to bear in mind.
The two theories we are looking at are theories, first of all, of consciousness.

HIGHER ORDER THOUGHT (HOT) THEORY

HOT theory is a theory of state consciousness. It starts by noting that not all mental
states are conscious. There are desires and emotions we have that we are not
conscious of having; perhaps there are even sensations that are not conscious. For
example, we naturally say ‘my headache lasted all day’, even if I didn’t actually feel
it all day. So it lasts between my moments of being aware of it. The properties
involved in a headache can occur even when the mental state is not conscious. If
sensations, or other mental states, had to be conscious to exist at all, it would be
very hard to explain how they can go in and out of awareness as they do. So, we may
conclude, there is something – some condition, some property – that makes a mental
state conscious or not.

We talk of being ‘conscious of’ something, e.g. I am conscious of my computer; but

we also talk about mental states being ‘conscious’ (no ‘of’). We can explain one in
terms of the other: a mental state is conscious if the subject is conscious of that
state. And, HOT claims, I am conscious of a mental state if I have a thought about
that state. For example, if the conscious state is seeing my computer, the thought
that makes this state conscious is ‘I see my computer’. For a desire to be conscious, I
must have the thought ‘I want…’. This thought occurs to me in some immediate way,
not on the basis of inference, which is why we feel we have no idea how it is that the
state is conscious. In the normal case, the mental state causes the thought, which
makes the mental state conscious. But this doesn’t always happen, and there might
be different reasons why.
The idea of consciousness has often been linked to perception, rather than thought,
so that being conscious of a mental state was thought to be like perceiving it. But this
is not as good a theory as HOT, because every kind of perception we have – sight,
hearing, smell and so on – detects particular kinds of qualities – colour, sounds,
smells… But consciousness itself, like thought, has no such specific qualities, but can
encompass them all. This suggests consciousness is not like perception, but is a type
of thinking.

OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES

1. HOT theory claims that for every conscious mental state there is another mental
state, a thought, about that state. This immediately doubles the number of things
going on in our minds! Reply: this is true, but not an objection. Note that the
higher order thoughts themselves are not conscious. For a higher order thought to
be conscious, we would need a second higher order thought, viz. ‘I think I want…’
or ‘I think I see…’ (‘think’ is not uncertainty, but assertion). This is what self-
consciousness or introspection is. Because the higher order thoughts are not
conscious, they are not distracting and they don’t take up processing time.

2. If the higher order thought is not conscious, how can it make the mental state it is
about conscious? Reply: this wrongly assumes that consciousness is a type of
intrinsic property, passed on from one state to another. But HOT theory claims
that a state is conscious just is for the subject to be conscious of it. ‘Consciousness
of’ is the basic type of consciousness.

3. Isn’t experience necessarily conscious? Surely I wouldn’t see my computer at all if

I wasn’t conscious of it. Reply: yes and no. All mental states are conscious in the
sense that they are consciousness of something. But we are not conscious of all our
mental states, so in that sense, some can be unconscious. If I feel angry but don’t
have the thought ‘I am angry, then that feeling will not be conscious. The same is
true of perception. So I am not conscious of seeing my computer until I have the
thought ‘I see my computer’.

4. But doesn’t this mean that all conscious creatures have higher order thoughts?
How could non-linguistic creatures have thoughts like ‘I see x’? Reply: there are
two possibilities. First, they do have such thoughts, although of course they can’t
express them. Their concepts of self and perception that occur in higher order
thoughts are very minimal. Alternatively, they don’t have such thoughts, so they
have no conscious mental states as defined. However, they could still have mental
states which involved consciousness of the world. We need some other account to
say what this involves.

5. The theory challenges some basic intuitions, which suggest that consciousness and
thinking aren’t connected as it claims. First, philosophers agree, and HOT theory
must accept, that there can be sensory processing without consciousness; so
perhaps there can be thoughts about sensory processing without consciousness.
 Second, it seems that consciousness of one’s mental states, e.g. pain, is not the
thought that ‘I am in pain’; it is rather that the consciousness of the pain is one’s
ground for judging ‘I am in pain’.

BIOLOGICAL NATURALISM
HOT theory assumes that it is possible to give some analysis of ‘consciousness of’
without a prior notion of consciousness. In other words, it assumes we can give an
account of intentionality (mental states being ‘about’ things) without consciousness.
But John Searle argues that this gets things the wrong way around. Intentional
content necessarily involves how things seem to the subject (see the handout on
Intentionality), and the only way to explain this is in terms of consciousness. We
should start, then, not with state consciousness, but with creature consciousness.

Searle agrees that a conscious mental state is simply a matter of the subject being
conscious of something. Consciousness is a ‘field’, conscious states are the ‘flux’,
modifications in the field. It is irreducibly first-personal; its reality, its phenomena
exist from the first-personal perspective (to be a mental state is to be someone’s
mental state). This doesn’t mean it comes between the subject and the world;
consciousness is ‘transparent’ – we are conscious of the world, not of our
consciousness of the world (unless we introspect, and then our consciousness becomes
that part of the world we are conscious of).

This first-personal nature of consciousness might make it difficult to see how

consciousness fits into the world as explored and described by science, because
science always gives third-personal descriptions. Searle argues that consciousness is a
biological phenomenon like any other. In science, we often find a ‘micro-level’
explanation for some feature at a ‘higher’ or ‘system’ level. For example, water is
liquid, even though none of its parts are liquid. But we can explain why water is liquid
in terms of its parts and their causal interactions. Similarly, consciousness is caused
by brain processes, and if the brain and its causal powers and processes were
reproduced, so would consciousness be.

More than that, we can explain the causal powers of the higher property in terms of
the causal powers of the lower property; i.e. we can causally reduce liquidity and
consciousness. In science, this usually means we can also ontologically reduce the
higher property to the lower. For example, being liquid just is having a certain
arrangement of molecules: ‘we simply redefine the expression that denotes the
reduced phenomena [being liquid] in such a way that the phenomena in question can
now be identified with their causes [arrangement of molecules]’ (The Rediscovery of
the Mind, 115). But there is an important disanalogy between water being liquid and
people being conscious, because this is not true for consciousness. Consciousness is
irreducibly first-personal, while properties of the brain are third-personal.

Some philosophers argue that this entails property dualism. If the phenomena of
consciousness cannot be reduced to physical properties, then properties of
consciousness are not physical. Searle rejects this. We could, if we wanted to, insist
on redefining the facts of consciousness in physical terms, just as we have redefined
liquidity in molecular terms, or we might redefine colours in terms of wavelengths of
light. We could, but we don’t, because then we leave out what we are really
interested in, viz. the first-personal conscious experiences themselves. This has no
metaphysical consequences; we have explained how consciousness can be a higher-
order property of a working brain. The irreducibility of consciousness is purely
pragmatic.

Is this true, though? Searle has left all the questions about consciousness to
neurobiology – how we are conscious, how we can have intentional mental states, how
consciousness is a feature of the brain. This seems to side-step the issue of how an
explanation in third-personal terms can ever be an adequate explanation of something
first-personal. To claim that consciousness is a biological property like any other is
difficult to defend when consciousness, uniquely, turns out to be a biological property
like no other.