The Mind, our Mental States and Consciousness
What are you as a human? (Part 2)
The previous post considered the brain as an integral part of what it is to be human - and celebrated the discipline of neuroscience as it helps us to understand this incredible organ. Put simply, the brain is fundamental to the functioning of the human body; but it is also integral to the functioning of the human mind. In this particular post, the mind, our mental states and our consciousness will begin to be introduced and explored before advancing in following posts to consider more fully the relationship of mind to the brain and what it is in particular that makes you unique as a human.
The Mind
Our mind is the centre in which all our hopes, our emotions, our dreams, thoughts, intentions, goals, sensations – our inner mental life – occur and are experienced. Again, with the help of neuroscience, the brain states correlated with our inner mental states are observable through a brain scanner, allowing us to see which neurons are associated with (for instance) a particular thought you’re having, a hope you’re experiencing, or a gladness you’re feeling (etc).
At base level, there are five primary mental states that we all have, upon which all the rest of our mental life is built, those five being: 1. Sensations - such as seeing the colour blue or smelling the scent of cheese, 2. Thoughts - such as thinking about the sun, or ‘I need to buy some tomatoes later’, 3. Beliefs – e.g. that the earth is spherical, or that ’I’m sitting in a room reading’, 4. Desires – e.g. desiring to visit Thailand, or desiring to keep healthy, and 5. Purposings or ‘volitions’ (some preferring the language of ‘acts of will’ or ‘intentions’) - such as purposing / ‘willing’ to visit the museum, or ‘I will (to) take you as my wife’. These are essentially the foundational states that occur in our minds upon/from which all other mental states are derived. ‘Hopes’ or ‘fears’, then, could just be categorised under the group ‘desires’ (you desire that something will or won’t happen), ‘dreams’ can be categorised likewise, and our ‘emotions’ are sensations that derive from a combination of these different primary mental states.1 But these five mental states – sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and purposings – are the foundational states, the primary states of the mind.2
Consciousness
Consciousness is our being / becoming aware of our mental states – being conscious of what’s going on in our mind. So, making you conscious of some of the mental states you might (or might not) be experiencing right now, in terms of sensation, you’re experiencing the colour of black on white, as you read the words on this page, and you might be feeling relaxed after having sat down for a while. In terms of beliefs, you might believe that reading online is easier in shorter rather than longer bursts, or, as a different example, that the place you are in is one of rest right now. Regarding desires, you might desire to go for a walk later-on or catch up with the news. In terms of thoughts, you might be thinking about the different kinds of conscious experiences going on in your mind right now, or ‘I didn’t realise that all our mental states are built upon these five’. Or purposings, maybe you are intending to engage with the contents of this blog, but at the same time, intending to not switch off your rational faculties when considering what it says.
As said, the paragraph above is not intended to be one to subliminally put thoughts, desires etc. in your mind but is rather to bring to conscious awareness some of the mental states you might (or might not) at this point be experiencing – it’s indeed to make you aware of what consciousness is and how it works. In actual fact, we all have reams of different thoughts, beliefs, sensations, purposings and desires going on at any one time, but to be conscious of them, is being aware of those states going on in our mind and allowing them to come into the light.
So as a basic introduction, the mind is the seat of our mental life, our consciousness is being aware of our mental states. As will be seen in the following post(s), the uniqueness of human beings is linked to the question of mind and the issue of human self-consciousness – so these will be explored further in the up-coming posts on these themes.
For example, when watching your team play a football match, you desire that they win, but being 4-0 down with 10 minutes left, you don’t believe they can pull it back, and you have the thought that they’re going to lose – the resultant emotional sensation being one of frustration, or sadness (where as your friend who doesn’t share your desire that your team win, may be experiencing alternative emotions – possibly indifference, calmness, maybe even amusement – that your team are about to lose)
I am indebted to Richard Swinburne, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, for identifying these five, and their foundational place in the mental life (cf. The Evolution of the Soul, [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 reprinted 1997], chs. 2-7)