Motivating a Hindu approach to conscious mentality

On the traditional picture of the mind bequeathed to us by Descartes, consciousness is the mark of the mental. A subject cannot have a mental state and not be conscious of being in that mental state (Radner, 1988). And although this traditional picture has been largely discredited for various reasons, its legacy still lives on in the contemporary debate on conscious mentality, in the question of what it is that makes a mental state conscious. In particular, according to the same-order approach to conscious mentality advocated by philosophers like Kriegel (2009), Gennaro (2012), Zahavi (2014), Levine (2016) and Strawson (2017), a mental state’s being conscious is an intrinsic or non-relational property of that mental state; nothing extrinsic to the mental state is needed to render it conscious.

But this intuitive picture has been challenged in recent times, especially since the rise of modern psychology as a disciplined study of the mind. It is now commonplace to regard even paradigmatically conscious mental states as being potentially nonconscious, such as thoughts, sensations and emotions. This suggests an alternative higher-order approach to conscious mentality, advocated by philosophers like Armstrong (1968), Lycan (1996), Rosenthal (2005) and Carruthers (2005), according to which consciousness is an extrinsic or relational property of mental states, since the states can occur without being conscious. On this view, a mental state’s being conscious is a matter of its being contingently and appropriately related to another mental state.

Although the higher-order view of conscious mentality seems to align better with recent empirical findings, it faces a range of problems. The most serious problem is in explaining how mental states become conscious at all. For if mental states by themselves aren’t conscious, then it’s hard to see how other nonconscious mental states can make them so.

In this paper I attempt to chart a middle path between these two extremes in an effort to avoid their pitfalls while nevertheless securing their benefits. In doing so, I draw on an alternative and influential metaphysical framework from the Hindu philosophical tradition, one which sharply distinguishes between mind and consciousness (Schweizer, 1993). I call this the Hindu view of conscious mentality. Unlike the same-order view, the Hindu view doesn’t mistake consciousness for a property of mental states, and unlike the higher-order view, it doesn’t reduce consciousness to a combination of nonconscious mental states. Instead, it treats consciousness and mentality as two distinct and irreducible components of conscious mentality.

The paper will be structured as follows. First, in Section 1, I explain what I mean by conscious mentality, disambiguating it from similar notions in the vicinity. Next, in Section 2, I briefly survey contemporary approaches to conscious mentality, highlighting the main problems that they face along the way. Then, in Section 3, I sketch an alternative Hindu approach to conscious mentality and discuss its theoretical advantages in comparison to contemporary views. Later, in Section 4, I highlight some important challenges for the Hindu view and offer some tentative responses on its behalf. Section 5 concludes.

1. Conscious mentality

There is considerable debate today about what constitutes conscious mentality, and I will shortly be surveying competing responses to this question. But before we turn to that, let me first clarify what I mean by conscious mentality (CM):

CM: Conscious mentality occurs when there is something it is like for a subject to have a given mental state.

There are several things to note about this characterisation. First, conscious mentality involves mental states, which we can think of as representational states, in that they are of or about something. This is what distinguishes mental states from other states of a subject that are not of or about anything, such as the state of being asleep or diseased. A paradigm example of a mental state is a thought, say your thought “I had fruit for breakfast this morning”. This thought is of or about what you had for breakfast this morning, whereas your being asleep or diseased isn’t of or about anything at all. So conscious mentality involves representational states that exhibit certain semantic properties like content, reference, truth conditions etc.

A word of caution here. The fact that conscious mentality involves representational states is compatible with but doesn’t entail representationalism about conscious mentality. Representationalism is the view that all there is to conscious mentality is mental representation, as opposed to the view that there are at least some aspects of conscious mentality that cannot be reduced to mental representation, such as the property of what it is like to have a given mental state. This is important because mental representation is normally taken to be amenable to naturalistic explanation, and so representationalism promises to deliver a naturalistic account of conscious mentality. Nevertheless, CM as characterised above is neutral on this issue, since what it is like to have a given mental state may or may not admit of a representationalist treatment. As we shall see in the next section, this will be a key point of divergence for different contemporary approaches to conscious mentality.

This brings us to the next point to note about CM: conscious mentality only occurs when there is something it is like for a subject to have a given mental state, and not otherwise. Crucially, this leaves open the possibility of a subject having a nonconscious mental state for which there is nothing it is like for its subject to have it. That is, CM does not say that mental states are necessarily conscious; rather it says that a conscious mental state is one for which there is something it is like to have it. It makes no claims about whether some or even all mental states can occur without being like anything at all for their subjects.

But we need to tread carefully here, since the expression ‘what it is like’ is liable to conflate distinct features of conscious mentality. For example, what it is like to have a given mental state is often glossed in terms of qualitative character, of what an experience is like. Consider Chalmers:

“[A] mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that mental state. To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel – an associated quality of experience.” [Chalmers,1996, p. 4]

Here Chalmers characterises what it is like to have a conscious mental state in terms of its qualitative character, the distinctive way that it feels. What it is like to have pain for example is different to what it is like to see red, and we can say that these two mental states are distinguished by their qualitative content.

But what it’s like to have a given mental state consists not just in what the state is like, but also in an awareness of what it is like. Because mental states can have qualitative content without their being like anything at all for their subjects. Consider for example the case of subliminal perception, where we perceive qualitative features of the external environment without being aware of it. Similarly, subjects with blindsight report no awareness of objects in the blind region of their visual field, even though forced choice experiments indicate that perceptual information about those objects is in fact cognised by those subjects (Bornstein & Pittman (1992)). There’s no question that in such cases we token mental states with qualitative content, since our behaviour may be responsive to that content. Nevertheless, we are unaware of that content, and so we regard such mental states as nonconscious. By contrast, conscious perception occurs when we are aware of the qualities that our perceptual mental states represent.

The same can be said for non-perceptual mental states as well. For example, it is now commonplace to regard at least some thoughts, emotions and sensations as being nonconscious. For example, psychologists help us to uncover and confront ‘subconscious’ thoughts and emotions that adversely affect us, and we regularly have sensations without being aware of them. Consider the example of an intermittent headache given by Rosenthal (2005). When you are aware of the pain, we regard the pain as conscious. But you might be temporarily distracted from the pain, perhaps because you are focusing on a difficult philosophy paper, during which time we do not regard your pain as being conscious. But then you suddenly become aware of it again, and it once again becomes conscious. It is natural to suppose that the same mental state of pain persisted throughout, it was just your awareness of it that came and went. So conscious mentality occurs when there is something it is like for a subject to have a given mental state, but what it’s like to have a given mental state requires more than just a state with qualitative content, it also requires awareness of that content.

Considering this, conscious mentality is sometimes described as having a first-person phenomenology, as occurring from a particular subjective point of view. But the reference here to ‘first-person’ shouldn’t be construed as necessitating the use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ or its mental analogue. That is, it should be understood in a minimal sense only, to be distinguished from the more robust sense of self-awareness that we are familiar with when we introspect our own mental states. One does not need to recognise oneself as the subject of a given mental state or even have a concept of oneself as a subject of mental states, in order to have a conscious mental state. In this regard, Zahavi and Kriegel’s (2016) characterisation of ‘for-me-ness’ captures what I have in mind – conscious mentality is phenomenally given for its subject, irrespective of whether the subject conceptualises itself as such. Indeed, the latest research in developmental psychology indicates that although newborn babies lack the ability to entertain a self-concept, they do nevertheless possess a kind of ‘minimal self-awareness’ that grounds their conscious experiences (Rochat, 2011).

A final point to note about CM. In having a conscious mental state, one is conscious of what that state represents, but CM is silent about whether one is thereby conscious of the mental state itself. This is an especially contentious issue. On some views like Rosenthal’s (2005), a conscious mental state is one that you are conscious of, whereas on other views like Dretske’s (1995,1997), a conscious mental state is one that you are conscious through, and not of. This difference will also play a role in some of our discussions to follow in the next section.

1. Contemporary approaches to conscious mentality

In the previous section I explained what I mean by conscious mentality – this occurs when there is something it is like for a subject to have a given mental state. When this happens, we regard that mental state as conscious. Now I want to consider what it is that makes a mental state conscious. Two competing approaches can be discerned in the contemporary debate: a higher-order approach and a same-order approach. In this section I describe these approaches and highlight some of the problems that they face in accounting for conscious mentality. In the next section I introduce an altogether different approach drawn from the Hindu philosophical tradition and consider whether it can overcome or avoid these problems.

I should flag that my purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive and detailed survey of the contemporary accounts on offer, but rather to sketch the main approaches while highlighting their main problems, and in this way motivate consideration of an alternative approach.

1. The higher-order approach to conscious mentality

The guiding principle behind the higher-order approach to conscious mentality is neatly encapsulated by Rosenthal as follows:

“[A] mental state is conscious only if one is, in some suitable way, conscious of that state. This is evident because we do not regard as conscious any mental state of which one is in no way whatever conscious.” [Rosenthal, 2000, p. 231]

The idea here is that you can’t be in a conscious mental state if you aren’t aware of being in that mental state. Note that I am here using the transitive expressions conscious of and aware of synonymously, although some may prefer to treat awareness as a determinable that can be either conscious or nonconscious. I will ignore that terminological nuance for present purposes.

The idea is intuitive enough. If you aren’t aware of pain, then plainly your pain isn’t conscious. This is consistent with CM as characterised above, which requires that there be something it is like for one to have a conscious mental state. If you aren’t aware of a given mental state, then there is nothing it is like for you to be in that mental state, and so we would rightly hesitate to classify that mental state as conscious. Instead, it would be more like the case of subliminal perception we noted earlier, where you were mentally representing features of the environment without being aware of it. Such mental states are best regarded as nonconscious.

Building on this intuition, higher-order theorists propose that we have a conscious mental state when we have another mental state that makes us aware of it. We may therefore characterise the basic higher-order (HO) approach to conscious mentality as follows:

HO: Conscious mentality occurs when we become aware of a given mental state by means of a distinct and suitable higher-order mental state that represents it.

Of course, what counts as a suitable higher-order mental state will vary from one higher-order account to another. For example, on Rosenthal’s (2005) view, a suitable higher-order mental state will be a thought to the effect that one is in the target mental state, whereas on Lycan’s (1996) view, a suitable higher-order mental state will be some kind of inner perception of the target mental state, rather than a thought about it. It is not my purpose here to arbitrate amongst the competing higher-order views; the important point is that, on the higher-order approach, a mental state is conscious in virtue of its relation to another mental state, however we construe that other mental state.

The reason this is important is because it means that mental states are only contingently conscious, since their being conscious consists in their bearing an extrinsic relation to a distinct and separate mental state that may or may not occur. This view is motivated by the growing conviction that many mental states can and often do occur without being conscious. Recall again the example of subliminal perception, which affects our behaviour even without our being aware of it. Or think of the work that psychologists do, helping us to uncover and confront ‘subconscious’ thoughts and emotions that we didn’t even know we had but which nevertheless affect us. According to the higher-order approach to conscious mentality, the reason these mental states aren’t conscious is that we lack the requisite higher-order mental states that would make us aware of them.

Now there are several problems that arise for this higher-order approach to conscious mentality, such as accounting for what happens in the case of ‘targetless’ higher-order states (Byrne, 1997), or the problem of making sense of the possibility of nonconscious qualitative states (Levine, 2001). However, here I want to highlight a more fundamental problem for the view, that of explaining how mental states can become conscious at all.

Remember that according to the higher-order approach to conscious mentality, mental states by themselves are not inherently conscious; they only become conscious when they are accompanied by suitable higher-order mental states that make us aware of them. But notice that the higher-order mental state, being itself a mental state, is subject to the same strictures – it too is not inherently conscious. But then it is in no better position to make us aware of what it represents. In short, it’s hard to understand how one nonconscious mental state could make another nonconscious mental state conscious. On the contrary, the following principle would seem to make more sense: no combination of nonconscious mental states necessitates the occurrence of a conscious mental state.

It seems then that we first need the higher-order state to be conscious, for otherwise it would fail to make us aware of the target mental state. But on the higher-order view, the higher-order mental state cannot be conscious unless it is accompanied by a yet higher-order mental state that makes us aware of it. And now we are faced with a vicious regress of mental states, with no opportunity for consciousness to enter the picture. In short, by treating consciousness as an extrinsic property of mental states, higher-order theories fail to explain how mental states become conscious at all. Of course, higher-order theorists have attempted to address this problem, but in my view, these attempts ultimately fail. Unfortunately, I do not have the space to delve into this debate here, but the interested reader may refer to my forthcoming work on higher-order theories where I explore the topic in more detail. Suffice to say, this regress problem is one of the main motivations for the alternative same-order approach to conscious mentality, to which we turn next.

1. The same-order approach to conscious mentality

As we saw above, a fundamental problem for the higher-order approach is the infinite regress it gets forced into when trying to account for what makes a mental state conscious, since it treats consciousness as an extrinsic property of mental states. The same-order approach seeks to avoid this problem by treating consciousness as an intrinsic property of mental states. In this way, the target mental state is sufficient in itself to make its subject aware of what it represents. This contrasts with the higher-order view on which the mental state needs to be supplemented by a separate mental state in order to make its subject aware of what it represents. We may therefore characterise the same-order (SO) approach to conscious mentality as follows:

SO: Conscious mentality occurs when there is something it is like for a subject to have a given mental state and this is accounted for by means of properties intrinsic to that state.

How this basic principle gets implemented varies from one same-order account to another, however we can discern two broad camps which we may call reductive and non-reductive. For both camps, only a single state is needed to deliver conscious mentality, however they differ with respect to the way in which they treat the awareness element of conscious mentality. On the reductive approach, awareness is decomposed into two more basic constituent relations, one directed at the object of the mental state and the other directed at the mental state itself, neither of which is sufficient for awareness on its own. Whereas on the non-reductive approach, awareness is treated as a sui generis and primitive feature of mental states, non-reducible to any more basic constituent relations.

As an example of the reductive approach, consider Gennaro’s (2018) ‘wide intrinsicality view’, which he contrasts with the typical higher-order view:

“[W]hen one has a first-order conscious state, the (unconscious) [higher-order thought] is better viewed as intrinsic to the target state, so that we have a complex conscious state with parts (Gennaro 1996, 2006, 2012). I call this the “wide intrinsicality view” (WIV)... On the WIV, first-order conscious states are complex states with a world-directed part and a meta-psychological component. Conscious mental states can be understood as brain states, which are combinations of passively received perceptual input and presupposed higher-order conceptual activity directed at that input.” [Gennaro, 2018, p. 116]

There are many interesting features of Gennaro’s account, but for our purposes the key point is that Gennaro disaggregates a conscious mental state into two distinct components, a world-directed component and a self-directed component. That is, he decomposes awareness into two more basic constituent relations, much like was done for the higher-order approach considered above. However, since these two components still constitute a single (albeit complex) mental state, Gennaro’s position still falls within the general confines of the same-order view.

The trouble with this approach though is that even if we grant for the sake of argument that both constituents form part of a single but complex mental state, that still won’t save the view from the regress problem. Because we are still decomposing awareness into two more basic constituent relations, neither of which is sufficient for awareness on its own. Instead of piling one nonconscious state on top of another, we are now piling one nonconscious part of a state on top of another. But no combination of nonconscious constituents necessitates the occurrence of a conscious state; it doesn’t matter whether they belong to one mental state or two. This has led some philosophers to abandon the reductive strategy altogether.

Consider by contrast Levine’s (2016) ‘quasi-Satrean theory’ of conscious mentality, a non-reductive version of the same-order approach, and one that stands opposed to both the higher-order approach and to reductive versions of the same-order approach:

“To my mind, when I have a visual experience of an object—say, the ripe tomato—it is that very awareness of the tomato that is the instance of consciousness at issue here, and this includes the feature of subjectivity. That is, I want to say that the awareness of the tomato is a form of conscious awareness (at least in part) by virtue of the fact that it—that very awareness of the tomato, not some other awareness stuck on top of it—is a subjective taking of a point of view on the tomato, which, to me, is another way of saying that my awareness of the tomato is for me.” [Levine, 2016, p. 353, emphasis in original]

Here Levine treats awareness as a primitive feature of conscious mental states, not as something decomposable into more basic constituent relations, whether belonging to one state or two. That is, Levine treats awareness as an intrinsic and sui generis property of conscious mental states, and so his account falls squarely within the confines of the same-order view, but in its non-reductive camp.

But even this purer version of the same-order view faces problems. Perhaps the most serious problem is in accounting for the difference between conscious and nonconscious mental states. According to the non-reductive approach, consciousness is an intrinsic property of the mental states that have it, but as we saw in Section 1 above, the same mental state can be either conscious or nonconscious, and this is more difficult to explain if consciousness is as an intrinsic and sui generis property of mental states. So while the reductive approach to conscious mentality struggles to account for why a given mental state becomes conscious, the non-reductive approach struggles to account for why a given mental state becomes nonconscious.

Before moving on, let me quickly address another popular view that bears a close resemblance to the same-order approach but which is nevertheless fundamentally different in the way it treats the awareness that characterises conscious mentality. This is the view typically known as the first-order representationalist view, advocated by philosophers like Dretske (1995) and Tye (1995). This view also adopts a single-state approach to conscious mentality and so is also opposed to the higher-order view, but unlike the same-order views considered above, it takes a distinctively functional approach to awareness. That is, it treats awareness as a matter of the functional role played by a mental state in the wider cognitive economy of an organism.

For example, on Tye’s ‘PANIC theory’ of conscious mentality, “phenomenal character is one and the same as Poised, Abstract, Nonconceptual, Intentional Content” (1995, p. 137). But the way that Tye attempts to account for the awareness element of conscious mentality is very different to the way in which the same-order and higher-order views attempt to do so. The relevant feature in Tye’s account in this regard is the ‘Poised’ feature. As Tye explains it, a mental state is poised if it “stand[s] ready and available to make a direct impact on beliefs and/or desires” (1995, p. 138). For Tye then, awareness consists in a mental state’s availability to the wider cognitive economy of the organism for contributing toward higher-order processes like reasoning and behaviour. In short, awareness is a matter of a state’s accessibility or function, not a meta-psychological component accompanying the mental state or a special quality inhering in the mental state itself. But I agree with Kriegel (2009) and Levine (2016) when they point out that this kind of approach is insufficient to account for awareness, since such functions could occur in the absence of awareness.

This concludes my brief survey of the current state of play in the contemporary debate on conscious mentality. Of course, there is much more that can be said for and against the various approaches that I only briefly touched on here, but the basic message should be clear – none of the views currently on offer in the contemporary debate provides a satisfactory account of conscious mentality. This motivates consideration of a different approach. Accordingly, in the next section I describe an entirely different approach to conscious mentality drawn from the Hindu philosophical tradition and consider how it compares against contemporary accounts.

1. A Hindu approach to conscious mentality

In this section I explore an alternative approach to conscious mentality drawn from the Hindu philosophical tradition. But it should be noted at the outset that the Hindu philosophical tradition is not a single or unified system of thought; rather, it is made up of six diverse and competing schools with roots grounded in ancient Vedic texts of uncertain origin, specifically the schools known as Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṁsā and Vedānta. All of these schools have systematic and complex ontologies and epistemologies propounded in sophisticated treatises which have been elaborated on and debated for centuries, mostly conducted in the refined language of Sanskrit. I do not have the expertise to interpret and analyse the philosophical writings of any particular Hindu school or philosopher, so I will instead rely on secondary literature from experts in the field. Furthermore, I do not claim to represent any particular Hindu school or philosopher; rather, I seek to elucidate and utilise key ideas from an influential account of conscious mentality most often associated with the Sāṃkhya school but which has gained widespread currency across the Hindu philosophical spectrum. As Dreyfus and Thompson (2020) note in relation to Indian theories of mind:

“One of the most important views of the mind in the Hindu tradition is found in the Sāṃkhya school… The Sāṃkhya was in fact less a school proper than a way of thinking based on the categorization of reality. It was crucial in the formation of Indian philosophical thinking before and after the start of the Common Era, and hence it is unsurprising that its view of the mind has been largely adopted in the Hindu tradition and beyond… the Sāṃkhya view can be taken as representative of the Hindu view of the mind, especially in its emphasis on the difference between a passive witnessing consciousness and mental activity.” [Dreyfus and Thompson, 2020, pp. 89-90]

What interests me about this view is the way it separates mind and consciousness, treating them as belonging to distinct ontological categories. This is in marked contrast to what we find in contemporary Western views on which mind and consciousness are treated as belonging to the same ontological category, whether that be physical or non-physical. I want to try to understand and exploit this distinction in what follows, without taking on board the wider commitments of the school, such as its cosmogonical account of material reality or its impersonal conception of the nature of the self. I will first draw on selected writings from contemporary philosophers to elucidate the distinction and then consider how it handles the problems highlighted earlier for contemporary accounts.

1. The Sāṃkhya account of the mind

Let me begin by outlining the basic contours of the Sāṃkhya theory of mind. Here I rely primarily on Paul Schwiezer’s (1993, 2019) illuminating exposition of the view, with occasional input from other scholars in the field. The first thing to note is that, according to Sāṃkhya, mind is treated as being part of the physical world. As Schweizer explains:

“According to the Sāṃkhya-Yoga view, the ultimate principle underlying matter is prakṛti, the metaphysical substrate supporting all material phenomena. The mind is deemed to be part of the material world, and hence to be metaphysically grounded in prakṛti. The body is also part of the realm of prakṛti, and thus mind and body are held to be of the same metaphysical substance. In its most general connotation, the term 'mind' in western philosophy corresponds to the combination or complex of three faculties recognized in the Sāṃkhya-Yoga taxonomy, namely manas, buddhi, and ahamkāra…” [Schweizer, 2019, pp. 234-235]

Here Schweizer introduces the notion of prakṛti, the metaphysical ground of material reality, but for present purposes we don’t need to investigate how this relates to current theories about the fundamental constituents of the natural world; what matters for our purposes is that mind is part of that natural world, inasmuch as the body is part of the natural world. It’s worth highlighting though that, although mind and body are both material on this account, mind and body are not identical. So Sāṃkhya is opposed to the identity theory of mind, although as experts like Schweizer (2019) and Perrett (2001) have pointed out, the view is in principle compatible with a computational or functional account of the mind.

Here Schweizer also introduces Sāṃkhya’s influential analysis of the mental faculties, known as manas, buddhi and ahaṁkāra, which comprise the antaḥkaraṇa (internal organ). For our purposes it won’t be necessary to delve too deeply into this analysis, since what matters for us is the combined function that they perform. Schweizer describes the function of the mind as follows:

“On the Sāṃkhya-Yoga view, the mind is impacted by various forms of external stimuli, which give rise to internal structures that mirror various key aspects of the external world. These internal structures are instantiated as modifications of the material manas, which in turn represent salient aspects of the environment... So, on this model, the representational content of thought is carried in the unconscious physical configurations of the mind…” [Schweizer, 2019, p. 237]

So on the Sāṃkhya account, mind is conceived of as a representational mechanism; our mental states represent the external environment or states of affairs, and those representations are constituted by the configurations of the material mind. So far this is broadly consistent with the approaches surveyed in the previous section, which also treat mental states as representational. But that is as far as the similarity goes, for Sāṃkhya takes a radically different approach to contemporary Western views when it comes to accounting for what it is that makes a mental state conscious, by treating consciousness as being ontologically distinct from mental states. In this regard, Schweizer notes that:

“[O]n the Sāṃkhya-Yoga account, the realm of prakṛti or matter is held to be inherently unconscious, and is thereby incapable of producing consciousness as an effect. The manifestations of prakṛti are always objects, and it is argued that objects can never transform themselves into subjects. Thus at the heart of this dualistic position is the notion that mind-material is not capable of generating consciousness out of unconscious ingredients. Subjective awareness is seen as a distinct ontological category, and in principle it cannot be derived from the stuff of which objects are made.” [Schweizer, 2019, p. 235]

So here we encounter a kind of dualism that is entirely unfamiliar in Western philosophy. In Western dualism, the mind or its properties are treated as being non-physical, but here the mind and its properties are treated as being physical. It is consciousness only that is being treated as non-physical, and so consciousness is here being ontologically separated from the mind. This is very different to what we find in the Western paradigm, on which consciousness and mind are seen as belonging to the same ontological category, whether physical or non-physical. Here we find a categorical distinction between the two; consciousness and mind are ascribed to different sides of the ontological divide. So although Sāṃkhya agrees in principle with contemporary views on which the mind and its activities are treated as part of the physical world, it nevertheless insists that our awareness of those states is not physical. As Schweizer observes in the case of perception:

“It is the conscious, subjective aspect of visual perception which serves to motivate the introduction of a distinct metaphysical category, not the causally induced representational structure of perception, since it is theoretically feasible that the latter can be explained in terms of unconscious mechanisms, of generally the same sort that would be applied in the case of robotic 'vision.' The deep philosophical problem in the case of human perception lies not in the explication of structure, but rather in the fact that this bio-mechanically induced structure is imbued with conscious awareness.” [Schweizer, 1993, p. 852]

Perret makes the same point for mental activity more generally:

“The Sāṃkhya-Yoga dualism, then, is perhaps less of a mind-body dualism than a consciousness-mind dualism. In Sāṃkhya-Yoga the representational mental states typically associated with the mind in Western philosophy are all states of the more refined evolutes of matter (prakṛti)… What Sāṃkhya-Yoga will resist, however, is the suggestion that such representational states are sufficient for consciousness. Consciousness is instead essentially associated with the non-representational pure awareness of the puruṣa. The intentional mental states associated with the material antaḥkaraṇa are unconscious (acetana) and not to be confused with the pure consciousness of the puruṣa.” [Perrett, 2001, pp. 11-12]

The idea here then is that conscious mentality consists of a complex of cognitive functions, most of which can be accounted for by nonconscious physical processes. The only thing that cannot be accounted for in this way is the awareness that accompanies some of those cognitive functions. This view is based on the conviction that no combination of nonconscious physical processes suffices for conscious awareness.

And so Sāṃkhya attributes consciousness to an independent metaphysical principle known as puruṣa, the contrasting metaphysical principle to prakṛti, which Perrett here describes as ‘non-representational pure awareness’. The terms ‘non-representational’ and ‘pure’ indicate that the kind of awareness at issue here is a non-intentional, contentless kind of awareness, a mere ‘presence’ or ‘illumination’ shorn of all representational content. This is no doubt a very strange and unintuitive conception of consciousness from a Western perspective. Burley (2007) attributes this discord to the fact that both the Continental and Analytic streams of Western philosophy have been heavily influenced by an intentional conception of consciousness, on which consciousness is conceived of in terms of being consciousness of something. And he points to contemporary debates in the area of mystical experience to try and elucidate the notion of a consciousness that doesn’t involve being conscious of anything at all, alluding for example to the ‘pure consciousness events’ investigated by Forman (1990). In the end he suggests that this non-intentional conception of consciousness may be only intelligible by means of first-hand experimentation of the proposed techniques and by diligent evaluation of the results.

I agree – if there really is such a thing as ‘pure consciousness’, then it’s no surprise that it cannot be adequately analysed, since analysis requires content to analyse and that is unavailable in the present case. Here we may simply note that since the material mind already accounts for the representational content involved in conscious mentality, all that is missing from the picture is the ‘illumination’ that makes that content ‘present’ to and for a subject in experience, and so puruṣa is introduced to add this missing ingredient only.

The question of course is how the pure consciousness of puruṣa combines with nonconscious representations in the mind to produce the phenomenon we have been calling conscious mentality. Schweizer explains the process as follows:

“[O]n this model, the representational content of thought is carried in the unconscious physical configurations of the mind, and certain of these patterns or configurations become illuminated by an external and undifferentiated awareness, resulting in the phenomenon of particular conscious thoughts and subjective experiences.” [Schweizer, 1993, p. 850]

And he gives the same story more recently as follows:

“According to the Sāṃkhya-Yoga model, thought processes and mental events are conscious only to the extent that they receive external 'illumination' from puruṣa. Consciousness is standardly compared to a light, which illuminates the specific material configurations or 'shapes' assumed by the mind.” [Schweizer, 2019, p. 236]

For Sāṃkhya then, conscious mentality is a composite phenomenon, constituted by mental representations infused with awareness, treated as two distinct but integrated components of conscious mentality. The mental component contributes the contents of thought, and the conscious component contributes the awareness that makes those thoughts conscious. And this awareness is conceived of as a kind of ‘illumination’, a ‘subjectivising’ of the contents of thought, rendering them as ‘phenomenally present’ to and for a subject.

In this regard, Schweizer offers an analogy to illustrate how nonconscious mental representations become ‘illuminated’ by the light of consciousness:

“The representational content of qualia is due to the respective material structures or patterns which comprise them, while conscious illumination is external, and ontologically independent of structure… Thus representational content is comparable to the geometrical patterns of a stained glass window, which exist independently of their illumination by the sun. The illuminated patterns are a composite, consisting both of structured glass, which is analogous to the thought-shapes assumed by [the mind], and of luminescence, which is the consciousness of puruṣa.” [Schweizer, 2019, p. 238]

The main point here is that the mind is such that it is intrinsically nonconscious, but its representational contents can become illuminated by the external light of consciousness. This consciousness imbues those representational contents with awareness, rendering them phenomenally present to and for a subject. This accounts for the difference between the kind of mentality that is like nothing for its subject, as in blindsight or subliminal perception, and the kind of mentality that is like something for its subject, as in everyday conscious experience.

So far, I have been outlining the basic contours of the Sāṃkhya account of conscious mentality, but as I noted at the outset, I do not want to take on board the wider commitments of the view. Because although this account is broadly representative of the Hindu view of the mind, there is substantial disagreement within the tradition about some of the broader details, especially about the subject who experiences these conscious mental states.

On the Sāṃkhya account, the subject from whose perspective a conscious experience occurs is actually a part of the material mind, specifically the ahaṁkāra (ego) that we touched on earlier, and so is ontologically distinct from the pure consciousness of puruṣa. For them, consciousness is just the illumination that renders mental states phenomenally present for a subject, but it is distinct from the subject itself. Confusingly however, Sāṃkhya actually considers the ahaṁkāra to be a false self, and instead identifies the true self (ātman) with puruṣa, just pure consciousness itself, an impersonal light of awareness devoid of a first-person perspective.

But this unfamiliar picture is by no means the only formulation of the view, and as noted above, it is in any case a highly unintuitive one from a Western perspective. By contrast, consider the more familiar picture offered by prominent Vedānta philosophers like Rāmānuja and Jīva, who also subscribe to the basic Sāṃkhya separation between mind and consciousness, and who also identify the true self (ātman) with puruṣa, but who instead conceive of puruṣa as a substantial egoic entity like a soul which has consciousness as its essential attribute, rather than being pure consciousness itself (Dasti and Bryant, 2014). For them, consciousness belongs to a subject and so is necessarily subjective, even if not necessarily intentional, and the subject of conscious mentality belongs to the non-material side of the ontological divide. On this picture, the ahaṁkāra is a false designation (upādhi) only associated with the material mind and body.

Considering these disagreements, I will simply adopt the basic outlines of the Sāṃkhya theory of mind which have been broadly accepted by the other Hindu schools, according to which mind and consciousness belong to distinct ontological categories, with the mind responsible for mental representations and consciousness responsible for subjective awareness. Together, these constitute conscious mentality. At the risk of oversimplification, I will refer to this simply as the Hindu approach to conscious mentality, or the Hindu view of the mind. In what follows I consider how this view compares to the contemporary alternatives surveyed in Section 2.

1. Comparing the Hindu approach to contemporary views

In this section I will consider how the Hindu view compares to contemporary approaches to conscious mentality, and whether it can avoid the problems we encountered for them in Section 2.

Considering that the Hindu view treats mental states as part of prakṛti and hence intrinsically nonconscious, it would seem to be aligned with the higher-order approach to conscious mentality. Recall that on that view, mental states are only conscious if they are accompanied by a distinct higher-order mental state directed at them, and not otherwise. And this was one of the main advantages of that view, since it neatly accommodated the possibility of nonconscious mental states, like subliminal perception, subconscious emotions and the like. If mental states are not intrinsically conscious, then it’s no surprise that we aren’t conscious of all our mental states. By treating consciousness as extrinsic to mental states, both the Hindu and higher-order views accord well with the growing evidence in this space.

However, recall that this was also what led to the regress problem for the higher-order view – if mental states in themselves aren’t conscious, then it’s hard to see how other non-conscious mental states can make them so, triggering the need for higher and higher levels of mental states, with consciousness being forever deferred. If the Hindu view adopts the same kind of strategy, then perhaps it faces the same debilitating problem.

But the Hindu view doesn’t quite adopt the same kind of strategy. Yes, it does treat mental states as intrinsically nonconscious, and yes it does account for consciousness by means of something extrinsic to the target mental state, but where the higher-order view then appeals to just more of the same, more nonconscious mental states, the Hindu view introduces consciousness as a distinct and fundamental element in its own right. That is, the Hindu view doesn’t try to reduce consciousness to a combination of nonconscious mental states; rather it treats consciousness as a sui generis and primitive element in its own right. And so the regress problem never gets off the ground in the first place.

For the same reason, the Hindu view avoids the same problem for the reductive versions of the same-order view, since they also attempt to construct conscious mentality out of more basic nonconscious ingredients. The only difference is that they locate these ingredients within a single mental state. But as we have seen, the Hindu view is fundamentally opposed to this idea; it doesn’t really matter how you structure or combine nonconscious ingredients – the Hindu conviction is that you cannot generate awareness from nonconscious ingredients, period. You can’t get an ‘I’ from an ‘it’.

But what about the non-reductive version of the same-order view, of the sort advocated by philosophers like Levine (2016) and Zahavi (2014)? Is the Hindu view in principle compatible with that approach? Recall that on that view, consciousness is also treated as something sui generis and primitive, non-reducible to anything more basic. And for the same reason – because there is no intelligible way to construct conscious mentality out of nonconscious ingredients. But there is a crucial difference between this view and the Hindu approach. Because on the non-reductive same-order view, consciousness is a property of mental states themselves – it is intrinsic to mental states; whereas on the Hindu approach, consciousness is not a property of mental states at all – it is extrinsic to mental states, since the mind is part of prakṛti. And this gives the Hindu view an advantage over the non-reductive same-order view, in that it is able to neatly accommodate the possibility of nonconscious mental states. The non-reductive same-order view stands in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis the growing evidence for nonconscious mentality, whereas this evidence is just what we should expect on the Hindu view.

It would appear then that the Hindu approach to conscious mentality manages to sidestep the main problems that contemporary views face. But it might seem to do so rather cheaply, without really explaining what it is that makes a mental state conscious. After all, the Hindu view treats consciousness as a sui generis, primitive fact in its account, not as something to be itself explained. Whereas this is a driving motivation for most contemporary accounts, to explain how we get from something nonconscious to something conscious. That is, the most contemporary views about conscious mentality aim to give a naturalistic account of conscious mentality, not a non-naturalistic one. It is trying to get rid of the dualism, not embrace it. So it’s no wonder that the Hindu view avoids the problems encountered by contemporary accounts, since the Hindu view isn’t engaged in the same explanatory task.

This is an understandable complaint, but I think an unfair one. Because contemporary accounts of conscious mentality have not succeeded in explaining conscious mentality, as the various problems we discussed plainly indicate. It would be one thing to criticise the Hindu view for not offering an explanation of conscious mentality if the alternatives offered such an explanation, but they don’t. Consciousness remains as inexplicable on contemporary accounts as it is on the Hindu view. As Levine (1983) highlighted decades ago, there is an explanatory gap between the conscious and the nonconscious, and ignoring that gap doesn’t make it go away. Considering this, I don’t think it’s fair to criticise the Hindu view for not explaining consciousness. If anything, naturalistic accounts should be criticised for changing the topic, since they only succeed if we adopt a deflationary conception of consciousness.

Furthermore, if no theory is in fact capable of providing an explanation for conscious mentality, success will instead have to be measured by how well a theory accords with the relevant facts. That is, theories of conscious mentality ought to be compared on the basis of their consistency with the available evidence, for example whether they can accommodate both conscious and nonconscious mental states. And it is here that the Hindu view most clearly outperforms its competitors. Reductive contemporary views allow for nonconscious mental states but struggle with conscious mental states; non-reductive contemporary views allow for conscious mental states but struggle with nonconscious mental states. The Hindu view accommodates both.

1. Challenges for the Hindu view

In the previous section I argued that there are reasons to prefer the Hindu view to contemporary alternatives. In this section I will briefly consider three challenges for the Hindu view and suggest possible responses on its behalf. The first challenge is in making sense of the notion of nonconscious qualitative states like emotions and sensations; the second is the charge of conscious epiphenomenalism; and the third is an apparent violation of our basic intuitions about the privacy of conscious experience. I’ll tackle each of these in turn.

1. On the possibility of nonconscious qualitative states

According to the Hindu view of conscious mentality, there is a sharp ontological distinction between consciousness and the mind, with consciousness providing subjective awareness and the mind providing the contents of experience. At first glance this might seem like a sensible division of labour, but closer reflection reveals some strange consequences for the view. On the one hand, the model seems to work fine for propositional mental states – perhaps the mind encodes the propositional content of thought in such a way that it can later be brought to subjective awareness, but this story is far less compelling when it comes to qualitative content. For what would it mean for the mind to encode the qualitative contents of thought without their being conscious? For instance, how could the mind represent emotions and sensations independently of our being aware of them? Can one have a pain or worry for example that one isn’t aware of? This seems highly counterintuitive and almost contradictory, and yet this is exactly what the Hindu view suggests.

There are two points I want to make in response. The first draws on points I made earlier in Section 1. We do in fact often speak of qualitative mental states that we aren’t conscious of. It is becoming increasingly common to speak of nonconscious emotions and sensations, and this is corroborated by recent empirical evidence. So the notion of nonconscious mental states with qualitative content is not as counterintuitive as it initially appears, and it is an advantage of the Hindu view that it accommodates the growing evidence in this space.

The other point I want to make in this regard is that this problem, if indeed it is a problem, is not unique to the Hindu view, since the same problem arises on the higher-order view. Remember that on the higher-order view, mental states are only conscious in virtue of other mental states, and therefore that view also allows for the possibility of nonconscious mental states with qualitative content. But philosophers like Rosenthal (2005) and Polak (2023) for example suggest ways of thinking of mental states that render the notion of nonconscious qualitative states intelligible, and such strategies are equally available to the Hindu view. As such there is no special disadvantage for the Hindu view in this respect.

1. On rendering consciousness epiphenomenal

The unique ontological status of consciousness also leads to another concern about the Hindu view, which is that it deprives consciousness from having any causal efficacy in the physical world. If consciousness is isolated from all physical reality, existing separately in a distinct ontological realm of its own, then how could it affect what happens here in the natural world? Instead, consciousness would be epiphenomenal, unable to influence the course of physical events. And this contravenes our deepest intuitions about our place in the natural world – it just seems obvious to us that consciousness plays a role in much of what we do. It would be very strange indeed if it turned out that consciousness had no effect whatsoever on our behaviour. But that is exactly what the Hindu view seems to suggest. In fact, the Hindu view doesn’t merely suggest this, it positively embraces it. As Schweizer points out from a Sāṃkhya-Yoga perspective:

“[T]he purely conscious aspect of human experience is also rendered epiphenomenal on the Sāṃkhya-Yoga account… consciousness and the illuminated mental processes are entirely independent. Formless and immutable consciousness plays no causal role in the transformation of mental structures, but rather is a passive 'witness' to some small portion of these transformations. The representations and structural transformations that characterize mental contents and processes are part of the normal time-evolution of the physical universe. Some of these happen to be illuminated by an outside, non-physical source of consciousness, which itself does no work and does not alter the physical realm in any way.” [Schweizer, 2019, p. 240]

Again, there are two points I would like to make in response. The first is that, far from seeing this as a damaging problem for the view, the Hindu philosopher seeks to exploit it. Indeed, it is this utter separateness of consciousness which lies at the heart of Hindu soteriological aims – the true self is not the material mind and body, but by falsely identifying with the material mind and body we become embroiled in a world of temporality and suffering. The aim of the Hindu traditions therefore is to realise that we have nothing whatsoever to do with this material world, and by counteracting that false identification and consequent attachment we thereby eliminate the root cause of suffering in this world.

Of course, that will not convince a neutral examiner of the view, who isn’t already committed to Hindu theology and for whom the epiphenomenalist implications are likely to be an unwelcome consequence. This brings me to my second point, which is that the kind of epiphenomenalism at play in the Hindu account is not the radical and objectionable kind that we find in contemporary Western debates. Remember, on the Western dualist approach to mind, consciousness and mentality are inextricably bound together, so that it is not just consciousness that is epiphenomenal, mentality in general is epiphenomenal. And that is because they belong to the same nonphysical category. But this is what makes Western epiphenomenalism so radical and objectionable. Because it means that our thoughts, emotions and sensations for example make no difference whatsoever to our actions, and that is a very tough pill to swallow. But the Hindu view isn’t asking us to swallow that pill. Because as we’ve already discussed, mental states are part of the physical world on the Hindu view and so have no problem causing things to happen in the physical domain. It is only the pure awareness or ‘witnessing’ of those mental states that is being treated as epiphenomenal, and that is by far a much less radical claim.

1. On the privacy of conscious experience

The third challenge also stems from the sharp ontological separation of mind and consciousness, which leads to another curious consequence for the Hindu view – if mental states are part of the physical world and become conscious by receiving external illumination from an outside source, then what’s to stop one person from being conscious of another person’s mental states? That is, according to this theoretical setup, it seems at least possible in principle for your consciousness to illuminate the mental structures in my mind, and for my consciousness to illuminate the mental structures in your mind, and in this way for you to have my thoughts and me to have your thoughts. But that violates one of our deepest intuitions about conscious experience – that they are private, phenomenologically inaccessible from an outside point of view. Only you can be conscious of your thoughts, and only I can be conscious of mine. It’s one thing for you to have indirect and mediated access to my thoughts, for example by inferring them from my behaviour or if I tell you about them; but it’s another thing altogether for you to have direct and immediate access to my thoughts, like you have of your own. But by treating consciousness as distinct and separate from mental states and then treating those mental states like any other objective part of the physical world, the Hindu view arguably allows for the metaphysical possibility of publicly accessible mental states, and that undermines the credibility of the view.

This strikes me as a more serious problem, and I am not quite sure how the Hindu philosopher would handle it. It’s likely though that the problem would seem less serious from within the context of the Hindu worldview. As I touched on earlier, the Hindu view of conscious mentality is embedded within a broader soteriological framework, and so there may be theological reasons to suppose that each individual puruṣa is restricted to a specific mind only. For example, the doctrine of karma could be invoked to account for why a particular puruṣa is paired with a particular antaḥkaraṇa which has been uniquely tailored in accordance with that puruṣa’s own soteriological journey. Of course, that response is unlikely to satisfy anyone who hasn’t already bought into the Hindu theological framework, but my point here is that this issue may seem less of a problem from a Hindu perspective.

That said, I’m not convinced that this problem places the Hindu view at a serious disadvantage in the contemporary debate. For it seems to me that this problem is also not unique to the Hindu view. After all, reductive accounts of conscious mentality also treat mental states as objective parts of the physical world, and so in principle there is no reason why we couldn’t set up a physical arrangement to share mental states between distinct subjects. Consider the higher-order view again – if a mental state becomes conscious when it is targeted by a separate higher-order state, then why should it not be metaphysically possible for it to be targeted by someone else’s higher-order state? This is exactly analogous to the problem on the Hindu view – it doesn’t matter whether consciousness derives from another mental state or puruṣa, the point is that it derives from something external to the mental state, and that is what opens the door to the privacy problem. Of course, the problem doesn’t arise for non-reductive same-order views, since on that picture consciousness is treated as an intrinsic property of the mental states that have it, but my point is that this problem is not unique to the Hindu view alone, since the same problem arises for any view that treats mental states as being only extrinsically conscious.

1. Conclusion

The contemporary debate on conscious mentality stands at a deadlock. On one side we have a reductive approach which decomposes conscious mentality into more basic nonconscious constituents, either belonging to distinct mental states or integrated within the same mental state. The main trouble with this approach is that it cannot adequately explain how nonconscious mental ingredients combine to yield conscious mentality. On the other side we have the non-reductive approach which treats consciousness as a sui generis and primitive property of mental states, thereby avoiding the problem of having to construct conscious mentality out of nonconscious ingredients. But in so doing it struggles to explain how the same mental state can be either conscious or nonconscious. So we have to either give up on consciousness to save nonconscious mentality or give up on nonconscious mentality to save consciousness. We therefore seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Luckily, the Hindu approach to conscious mentality offers a possible way out. The fundamental mistake being made in the contemporary debate is that of conflating theoretically distinct components of conscious mentality by treating consciousness and mentality as belonging to the same ontological category. Consciousness is one thing; mentality is another. By clearly distinguishing between these two different phenomena, the Hindu view is able to do justice to both sides of the story – it can straightforwardly accommodate both conscious and nonconscious mental states. Of course, the Hindu view still faces a suite of other problems, but I have argued that these problems are not unique to the Hindu view, and in some cases they are even less severe than on contemporary Western accounts. Considering all this, the Hindu approach to conscious mentality merits further consideration in the contemporary debate.

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