I submit that the phrase ‘conscious state’ is ambiguous. People commonly use
one sense of the phrase ‘conscious state’ wherein this phrase describes a mental state that
is conscious. However, and importantly, people also commonly use another sense of the
phrase ‘conscious state’ wherein the phrase describes a creature’s state of being
conscious. For example, someone might say that George is in a conscious state. In
saying this, the person might mean that a particular mental state of George’s, his desire
for a drink of water, say, is conscious and hence that George has a mental state that is
conscious. On the other hand, the person might mean that, insofar as George is
consciously desiring things like drinks of water and is not passed out due to dehydration,
George himself is in a state of being conscious.11 Let’s examine the differences between
these two claims a little further.
The first sense of ‘conscious state’ identified here, according to which the phrase
describes a mental state that is conscious, matches up with what HOT theorists are
traditionally taken to be identifying with their notion of state consciousness. As the HOT
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
11 Those immersed in debates about the HOT theory might recognize the distinction drawn here as potentially mirroring the common distinction between intransitive state consciousness on the one hand and transitive and intransitive creature consciousness on the other. Though I am not convinced the notion of subject consciousness that I introduce here will map neatly onto the usual notions of creature
consciousness, I choose to avoid the standard terminology primarily in hopes of minimizing theoretical baggage and maximizing clarity.
!!!"+#!
"
theorists are most often understood to use this term (and I will share in this usage), state
consciousness is a property attributed to mental states and it is the property that
differentiates mental states that there’s something it’s like for their bearer to be instantiating from mental states that there’s nothing it’s like for their bearers to be
instantiating. For example, before George was distracted by the phone call from his wife,
his desire for a drink of water was a state conscious desire and there was something it
was like for George to have that desire.
The second sense of ‘conscious state’ identified here is the sense captured by
saying that a creature is in a state of being conscious. I propose that this sense of
‘conscious state’ identifies a property attributed to subjects (i.e., to people or other
suitable creatures), rather than a property attributed to mental states. I also propose that we can understand this property as being the property that differentiates creatures for
whom there’s something it’s like from those for whom there’s not something it’s like.12
So, for example, George might be said to have this property both before and during his phone call with his wife. Before the call, what it’s like for George might be characterized by saying that he wanted a drink of water. During the phone call, however, when
George’s desire for water was no longer immediately before his mind, there would be some other way of characterizing what it’s like for George to be chatting with his wife. If there was nothing it was like for George, however – if he was a philosophical zombie, for
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
12 By using the phrase ‘something it’s like’ here, I intend to loosely identify the aspect of consciousness that I believe Thomas Nagel (1974) famously discusses. This feature, according to Nagel, is something subjective and experiential, something it’s like for an organism to be conscious or to have a conscious mental state. This essential, subjective nature of consciousness is also sometimes referred to as the
qualitative or phenomenal character of consciousness or simply as what-it’s-like-ness. The reader should note that I intend no theoretical ties to any one particular account of this sort of consciousness when I use these terms though. Instead, I just mean to identify a more intuitive notion, similar to what Weisberg (2011) calls the “moderate” reading of these terms. Furthermore, since I attribute this property to subjects
rather than mental states, it’s not clear my notion of this property can be mapped onto the usual accounts anyway.
!!!"+$!
"
example – then George would lack the sort of property identified by this sense of
‘conscious state’ entirely. I propose that we call this property subject consciousness,
since this sort of property is only attributed to subjects, not to mental states. (After all,
while we are fine saying that there’s something it’s like for a subject, we would find it
quite odd to say that there’s something it’s like for a mental state.) So here we’ve
characterized the subject consciousness sense of ‘conscious state’.
To recap, we have identified two separate senses of the phrase ‘conscious state’ – a state consciousness sense and a subject consciousness sense. When we use ‘conscious
state’ in the state consciousness sense we mean to identify a property attributed to mental
states that consists in the relation between those mental states and the appropriate HOTs that represent them. We also intend to identify mental states for which there’s something it’s like for their bearers to be in them. On the other hand, when we use ‘conscious state’
in the subject consciousness sense of the phrase we mean to identify a property attributed
to a subject and a property that differentiates subjects for whom there is something it’s
like from subjects for whom there is nothing it’s like.
Having identified these two different senses of the phrase ‘conscious state’, we are now ready to see how Block’s representation of the HOT theory’s necessary and sufficient conditions can be seen to equivocate on these two senses of ‘conscious state’.