Conscious, Unconscious, and What It’s Like

Conscious, Unconscious, and What It’s Like

What is the relationship between consciousness and what it’s like?  There are two questions: is the latter a necessary condition of the former, and is it sufficient? We could add a third question, which is really the central question: what is the real essence of consciousness—its intrinsic nature, its mode of being, what it is. It is sometimes said that what it’s like is not a necessary condition, since abstract thoughts don’t have it, or beliefs, or theoretical understanding; yet they are conscious. Less commonly, it has been argued that it is not sufficient, since unconscious mental states have it. The intuition is that what it’s likeness doesn’t logically entail consciousness. Here we must be careful about the word “conscious”: if it just means “feeling”, then surely what it’s likeness entails consciousness, since consciousness is a matter of how something feels. But if we mean something more like “being conscious of” or “consciously known”, then intuitions waver: why should we necessarily be conscious of or know about our feelings? Couldn’t there be something it is like to be in a certain unconscious state and yet the person not be conscious of this, not know about it. Sensations don’t logically require such higher-order states in order to exist. There seems no contradiction in the idea that unconscious mental states have subjectivity (“likeness”) but are not the objects of any conscious acts of knowing. Take the case of seeing a bunch of eight dots but not counting them: couldn’t it be true that the sensation is distinctively of eight dots and yet the perceiver doesn’t know this and is not consciously aware of it? The concepts seem to allow this degree of daylight between them: we can separate the concept of what it’s likeness from the concept of being conscious of—the former not entailing the latter. Also: couldn’t you be in a general state of depression and not be conscious of it? Isn’t the mind a two-level system—primitive awareness of things and a more sophisticated awareness of that awareness? Can’t there be subjectivity without consciousness? After all, there can be degrees of consciousness but not of subjectivity. An animal may be more or less conscious, but it can’t be more or less a being there is something it’s like to be. I can be in a state of being more or less conscious of what is going on around me (or within me), but it makes no sense to say that one sensation has more what it’s likeness in it than another. The terms have a different “logic”.

These are treacherous waters; it is easy fall into conceptual confusion. I want to advance the discussion by making a (relatively) clear point. Suppose I want to know the nature of a bat’s unconscious mental states as it echolocates; I already know I can’t know the nature of its conscious echolocation states. Can I know that? Reflection shows that I cannot know it in the unconscious case either: for the unconscious mind is not reducible to purely physical states of the bat’s brain, which I can know. Yet I might be reluctant to describe the bat’s perceptual unconscious using the phrase “what it’s like”, since I don’t think unconscious mental states are like anything. Then why do I think I can’t know the bat’s unconscious mind in this case? Because if it wereconscious, I wouldn’t be able to know it. It is of a type such that conscious expressions of it are not graspable by me. I am not supposing that it has what it’s likeness built into it when unconscious; I am supposing that if it were to become conscious, I would be unable to grasp its nature—as I am of the bat’s conscious echolocation experiences. I therefore think that if my inability so to grasp is an indication of irreducibility then the unconscious states are as irreducible as the conscious states. I think they are essentially of the same nature, with one conscious and the other unconscious. Thus, the bat’s perceptual unconscious is as much an obstacle to physicalism as its perceptual consciousness, so far as my reductive abilities are concerned—because I understand its unconscious via my understanding of its consciousness, which in this case is limited.

Perhaps the point will be clearer if I talk about Freud. You are told that the child has an Oedipus complex: he sexually desires his mother, but this desire is unconscious and always will be. How do you understand what is being said? On the face of it, unconscious desires are strange and incomprehensible things—you know what conscious desire is, but what is the unconscious kind? The answer is obvious: you know what the unconscious desire would be if it were conscious. You think, “The unconscious desire is just like the conscious expression of it (except for being unconscious), and I know what that is”. You use your knowledge of consciousness to form an idea of the unconscious (but not as conscious). But this means that the limitations of your knowledge of consciousness carry over to your knowledge of the unconscious—that is, you can’t know more about the contents of the unconscious than you can about the contents of consciousness. If a psychanalyst starts talking about the unconscious of Vulcans, you will get lost when she comes to describing unconscious mental states completely alien to you, precisely because of your own restricted consciousness. You are epistemically limited by your own (contingent) phenomenology in both cases—the conscious minds of others and their unconscious minds. This is a roundabout way of saying that you have a subjective (self-centered) conception of the unconscious. But that means that the unconscious is just as recalcitrant to physicalism as the conscious, neither more nor less. In other words, we don’t have to attribute what it’s likeness to the unconscious in order to derive the result that the unconscious is as problematic as the conscious. If the latter is mystery, then so is the former. If the unconscious were intrinsically endowed with what it’s likeness, then certainly it would pose the same explanatory problems as consciousness; but it doesn’t have to be so endowed in order for the same conclusion to follow. All we need is the assumption that we understand the unconscious via the conscious, by considering what the unconscious state would be like if it were conscious. And really, we have no other way—without this we would draw a complete blank. To repeat: I know what a particular unconscious state is by knowing what it would be like if it were conscious—it would be like this. If I couldn’t form this thought, I wouldn’t know what Freud was even talking about.

This is quite a strong result, because it tells us that consciousness is not uniquely problematic among the denizens of the mind. The unconscious shares the enigmatic character of consciousness as conceptually perspective-dependent: only someone mentally similar to the other can form the requisite concepts. It also underscores the point that we are conceptually impoverished with respect to the unconscious: we really have no conception of its intrinsic nature save by invoking our grasp of consciousness (ironically enough). So, our grasp of it is doubly limited: it is parochial and it is extrinsic (indirect, superficial). In the case of the bat, we can’t grasp the experiential type and we can’t grasp what kind of thing an unconscious mental state of that type (or any type) is. We are limited in the former way with respect to conscious experiences, but at least we have knowledge of the nature of consciousness itself (we can feel it inside us). We have a single mystery for the bat’s conscious experience but a double mystery for its unconscious experience (if we allow this word for unconscious perceptual states). Realism about the unconscious implies mystery as much as realism about the conscious does, even more so. This stands in contrast to anti-realist positions about the unconscious—that it is simply the physical brain, or mere dispositions to conscious states, or just a useful fiction. In particular, we don’t need to claim that the unconscious has what it’s likeness in order to argue that it has the problems ofwhat it’s likeness. The epistemology is much the same either way. We are not cognitively better off trying to understand the unconscious than trying to understand the conscious; in fact, we are worse off.[1]

[1] This paper goes with my “An Even Harder Problem”. I am aware that these are intricate and taxing questions that strain comprehension.