ABSTRACT
Descartes believed that the mark of the mental was that a mental state should be a conscious state. That view is now seldom espoused.1 Following Freud, unconscious desires and beliefs are recognized, and, at a less esoteric level, ordinary everyday desires and beliefs can be seen to guide our actions without being brought to consciousness in the shape of felt cravings or reflective thoughts. But what is a conscious state? The phrase is at least ambiguous. In one sense it is a state of consciousness, of being conscious of something, as in perceptual experience whether veridical or hallucinatory. In another, it is a state of which we are conscious, as when we turn our attention inwards upon our own experiences. Descartes seems to have thought that all conscious states were conscious in both senses, perhaps because to be conscious of something was for one’s mind to have a certain content whose intrinsic properties were both necessary and sufficient for one to be aware of the possession of that content. The occurrence of a mental image might be an example of this.
