Consciousness
While hiking Muttontown Preserve Sunday morning, I quickly look at some texts in my phone before turning it off. As a response to me canceling our hangout to escape the city, my friend texts: “go get healed by nature.”
Nature always had a way of making me feel good, or at least better than I felt before. I never looked that deeply into it, as I have met many others who also feel this way, and I just accepted it as a fact. When we say we ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’ something it because it gives us some kind of positive feeling when we do it, right? I see nothing wrong there. It was always very noticeable to me and I had no further questions. I came home from a hike, or from being at the beach, etc, and I felt better. It’s a physical thing. It exists out in the world. I feel it. Many of you do. This we cannot argue.
Rosenthal speaks of an Higher Order Thought. He says in order for a mental state to be considered ‘conscious’, one needs to have a thought of themselves in that state. So I am conscious that I sitting on my couch because I am having a though of myself sitting here. Mental states without this further thought would be considered ‘non-conscious’ states.
Now, he also believes that not only are certain states, such as beliefs, sometimes non-controversially non-conscious, but that even pains and sensations sometimes are non-conscious too. Rosenthal is pretty much committed to the idea that, for any mental state you can think of, that state can occur either consciously or non-consciously.
However, the higher order though in virtue of which our mental states are conscious need not themselves be conscious. Higher order thoughts result in conscious qualities because they make us conscious of ourselves as being in certain qualitative states, and this in turn results in subjective impressions of conscious mental qualities.
In other words, what it is like for me to have a particular “calm” sensation when in nature depends upon how much detail and differentiation goes into the higher order though in virtue of which that sensation is conscious. Given any particular sensory state, different higher order thoughts will yield different ways it is like for us to be in that state.
Thus it follows that it is not the sensory state alone that determines what it is like to be in that state - there will also be factors like the size and repertoire of concepts at one’s disposal, how attentive one is, how experienced one is in making the relevant discriminations.
And as I walk through the pines, I realize that this helps us make sense of how it is that people sometimes “misrepresent” the states they are in. Perhaps that is why some of us do not get the calmness associated with nature as I do. And perhaps that’s why some of us feel things like anxiety when faced with a certain mental states.
Perhaps….
