The Relation Between States of Consciousness and Their Properties

(1) We have spoken of states of consciousness as if they were realities. Why? It is one thing to establish the existence of a covering concept through demonstrating that the terms are contraries with contrary content, but why believe that they single out real existents? Why believe that there are wakings and sleepings and suchlike? Certainly the syndromes of properties seem to show so. But if as we have argued

these constellations are not epistemological ‘pointers’ of underlying real essences, why believe there is anything more than the properties themselves? Four considerations point that way. First, the existence of necessary and sufficient conditions for the states. Second, the fact that the states explain the properties, e.g. the state unconsciousness explains the absence of sense-perception in one concussed. Third, the fact that there exist agreed techniques for causing and removing the various states, e.g. concussion, smelling salts. And finally fourth, that the properties cannot exist in isolation of their fellows, but travel of necessity in groups. As a result I cannot bring myself to doubt, either the reality of states of consciousness, or the usual taxonomical carve-up.

Then how do these states relate to the syndromes of properties that ensure their presence and whose presence they explain? Might they be constituted of them? In that case the explanatory function of the states of consciousness would not be causal. Or are they instead the distinct and necessary cause of the syndrome? This is a substantive issue. The question is: does concussion just knock out sense-perception? or does it instead knock it out by knocking in unconsciousness which then causes attentive shut-down? or is there some other as yet unformulated third alternative?

One vitally important fact to remember is, that techniques for manipulating presence or removal of any one member of any state-of-consciousness syndrome, address themselves not so much directly to the particular phenomenon itself as to the state of consciousness which guarantees or proscribes it. Thus, to delete the phenomenon of attentive-function one does not attempt directly to expunge it from the mind, but rather wreaks such change that many other alterations in the mind occur along with the phenomenon one sought to produce, alterations such that a change of state of consciousness cannot but be effected along with it. And it is not that we lack techniques of sufficient finesse to remove the phenomenon on its own, and have perforce in our clumsiness to resort to the equivalent of a club: there is no remedy even in principle for such ‘crudeness’. This ‘technical holism’ (as one might call it) should be borne in mind when we come to adjudicate between the two rival theoretical positions on the issue of constitution.

(2) Neither position looks attractive. It is difficult to believe that states of consciousness are complexmental states made up out of other mental states. Mental Chemistry and suchlike seem near universal impossibilities. Again, a state like consciousness is as elemental a mental phenomenon as any, and it is hard to believe that it could depend for its being upon other presumably more fundamental mental phenomena. Further, we have just noted that we never manipulate the supposed constituent properties on their own, but inevitably alter the state of consciousness in the process. It must be a strange kind of constitutive assembly when the putative constituents necessarily travel in packets which inevitably realize wholes!

So much for the first theory. When we turn to the second theory, we find something that looks if anything even less palatable. I mean, the theory that states of consciousness are the distinct and necessary cause of the properties which attest to

their presence. The claim that unconsciousness causes attentive shut-down rings hollow to my way of thinking, if only because the former is inconceivable without the latter. And what is the evidence of distinctness? The explanatory role of the state? But explanatory force would be preserved, albeit of a constitutive rather than causal variety, if distinctness was discounted. Again, the rejection of distinctness would obviate the need to postulate necessary causation between distinct existents. These considerations push one towards the view that in some undetermined sense, the state of unconsciousness must actually involve attention-closure. That is, towards the constitutive theory in some shape or form.

But towards which theory exactly? And how to avoid the difficulties facing the constitutive theory?

What is the resolution of this problem? I think we must begin by endorsing the above theoretical intuition. That is, by rejecting the second theory, that states of consciousness are the distinct necessary cause of their properties. Next, we note a measure of holism in the situation. It is true that some syndrome properties do not entail their brethren properties: for example, the non-rationality of unconsciousness does not entail attention-closure, since sleep realizes the former without fully realizing the latter. Nevertheless, others do, and all are consistent with only some states of consciousness. In other words, they each necessarily occur in sets, each of which realize a unique state of consciousness.

Accordingly, the following account recommends itself. We accept that states of consciousness are assembled out of mental phenomena, but reject the supposition that the constituents have a fully autonomous existence. Because everything with a mind is in some one unique state of consciousness, which is logically rather than indexically individuated by its properties, each such property must be as dependent upon the state it helps constitute as is the latter upon it. In this sense the constituting of states of consciousness, while a real constituting out of real parts, is not additive in nature. The parts cannot even in principle exist prior to the kind of item which they succeed in constituting.

Therefore concussion neither just knocks out sense-perception; nor knocks it out by knocking in unconsciousness which then causes attentive shut-down: it just knocks out sense-perception in knocking in unconsciousness. Here we have a third alternative to two intolerable positions.

(3) The theory that states of consciousness are logically rather than indexically individuated by their properties smacks at first of a kind of conventionalism, rather as if we cobbled together an arbitrary mental construct out of given parts.

This would rob the constituted whole of a nature in any serious sense. (A lack that Real Essences would make good in convincing fashion.) However, the remaining elements of the theory reveal this account to be a misrepresentation. The dependence of the constituting states upon the constituted state of consciousness, together with the fact that they travel of necessity in constellations of properties which instantiate some one unique state of consciousness, stand in the way of such an interpretation.

These considerations disprove the additive theory, through placing constraints upon which part can join which in constituting a state, and by limiting the number and type of such constituted states.