some degree, but apparently without consciousness. And Block (1995)
describes cases of epileptics who continue their activities when undergoing
a mildWt, but who do so without conscious awareness. Indeed, the psycho-
logical literature is nowrifewith examples of non-conscious perceptual
processing, including the equivalent of blindsight in other sense-modalities
- ‘deaf-hearing’, ‘insensate-touch’, and so on (see Baars, 1988, and Weis-
krantz, 1997, for reviews).
Furthermore, it seems highly likely that beliefs and desires can be
activated without emerging in conscious thought processes. Consider, for
example, a chess-player’s beliefs about the rules of chess. While playing,
those beliefs must be activated – organising and helping to explain the
moves made and the pattern of the player’s reasoning. But they are not
consciously rehearsed. Chess-players will not consciously think of the rules
constraining their play, except when required to explain them to a begin-
ner, or when there is some question about the legality of a move. Of course
the beliefs in question will remainaccessibleto consciousness – players can,
at will, recall and rehearse the rules of the game. So considered as standing
states (as dormant beliefs), the beliefs in question are still conscious ones.
We have nevertheless shown that beliefs can be non-consciously activated.
The same will hold for desires, such as the desire to avoid obstacles which
guides my movements while I drive absent-mindedly. So thoughts as
events, or mental episodes, certainly do not have to be conscious.
Essentially the same point can be established from a slightly diVerent
perspective, by considering the phenomenon of non-conscious problem-
solving. Many creative thinkers and writers report that their best ideas
appear to come to them ‘out of the blue’, without conscious reXection
(Ghiselin, 1952). Consider, also, some more mundane examples. I might
go to bed unable to solve some problem I had been thinking about
consciously during the day, and then wake up the next morning with a
solution. Or while writing a paper you might be unable to see quite how to
construct an argument for the particular conclusion you want, and so
might turn your conscious attention to other things. But when you come
back to it after an interval, everything then seems to fall smoothly into
place. In such cases you must surely have been thinking – deploying and
activating the relevant beliefs and desires – but not consciously.
One thing which a good theory of state-consciousness needs to do, then,
is to provide a satisfying explanation of the distinction between conscious
and non-conscious mental states, explaining what it is about the various
phenomena in question which makes them fall on one or other side of the
divide.
Preliminaries: distinctions and data 233