Commentary on "Contentless Consciousness"

"Contentless consciousness," or "mystical consciousness," might seem to be a prima facie oxymoron: consciousness, after all, would seem to be such only if there is something that it is about; the mystic, however, is concerned to produce—or participate in—something that is emptied of content, and that, as a result, cannot be about anything at all.

This is the issue that Sullivan addresses in this interesting paper. If there is such a thing as mystical consciousness—and the experiences and subsequent research of the author suggest to him that there is—then the view espoused by some functionalists that consciousness is just a form of information-processing must be incorrect.

Sullivan replaces this one-sided account of consciousness with one that rests on three foundational building blocks—an informational content, which is owned by a self, through an act of awareness.

Two things emerge from this reformulation: (1) informational content, and the way it is processed, ceases to be a sufficient criterion for consciousness; (2) "decomposed" elements of the above triune form of more normal thinking may exist in exceptional circumstances, thus providing a plausible account of mystical and other forms of contentless consciousness—including the author's own experiences while suffering a severe brain trauma, where there was an awareness of "something that was not the nothing."

Sullivan carefully distinguishes between the occasions when the pure consciousness event itself occurs and the many transitional states that are gone through in the passages to and from normal consciousness, and which, in his view, certainly do have content. Since all conceptual and linguistic operations would appear to be confined to normal and transitional states, it is easy to conflate the ineffability and evanescense of the pure consciousness event with forms of meaninglessness and insignificance.

But this, Sullivan argues, would be a mistake. Within a naturalist and scientific framework, the triune account of the substructure of normal consciousness can make sense of a number of areas where this phenomenological unity has broken down. Sullivan's citing of examples—certain stroke patients and some schizophrenics who develop an impaired sense of ownership; thalamus and brainstem damaged individuals who lack conscious awareness—suggest that this is indeed a fertile area for further research.

In this brief commentary I would like to raise two areas for further discussion: (1) what are the implications for functionalism in this account? (2) What issues does this account raise for how we should understand mediated and unmediated experience?

(1) Functionalism

One response to this account might be to accept the triune analysis that Sullivan has given, but to go on to argue that all three of these elements in the substructure of normal consciousness are, in their different ways, information-processing. This would be an option for someone like Dennett (1993), for instance, who views the information-processing role of the brain as being distributed into a large number of permanently competing and permanently redrafting viewpoints, and in which the overwhelming bulk of this processing is unconscious. On this account one could preserve an understanding of mystical consciousness as something real, but the way to do this would be to explore the functional economy of this mode of being for the information-processing needs of persons as whole organisms. It might then turn out—following this line of reasoning—that mystical and other forms of contentless consciousness were indeed noninformational at the level of conscious awareness, but were, nonetheless, informational at a level below that—the "subdoxastic" level to use a term that Fodor (1983 and 1990) has popularized.

So when Sullivan concludes that "Since consciousness under some (unusual) conditions is separable from its contents, mechanisms underlying the emergence of consciousness must to a degree be distinct from the information-processing mechanisms that give rise to its content" (page 55), there is little here with which some functionalists at least would want to quarrel. Bare awareness or pure consciousness indeed could be distinct from the information-processing mechanisms implicit in the content of consciousness, but that would not imply in itself that other, different forms of information-processing did not underlie, in their turn, bare awareness or pure consciousness...