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Commentary on On the Nature of RepressedContentsDavid Livingstone Smithaa Director, New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology,Portland, Maine, U.S.A.Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

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Neuro-Psychoanalysis, 2003, 5 (2) 147

Commentary on On the Nature of Repressed ContentsDavid Livingstone Smith (Portland, Maine)

David Livingstone Smith: Director, New England Institute forCognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, Portland, Maine,U.S.A.

I would like to thank Prof. Adolf Grnbaum for his helpful com-ments on an earlier version of this paper.

ARE UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES REALLYNEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL DISPOSITIONS?

WHY SEARLES MODEL OF THE UNCONSCIOUSWONT DO

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned torepeat it.

George Santayana

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science provideimportant concepts and tools for making sense ofthe architecture of mind. One of the most prominentcontributors to the debates in this arena is the phi-losopher John Searle. Vesa Talvitie and JuhaniIhanus have taken the very useful step of exploringhow Searles approach might clarify our conceptionof the unconscious. Although I do not share theirevaluation of Searle, I applaud their effort.

I shall first explore the historical background ofthe debate that Searle has revived (a position verymuch like the one that he espouses was widely heldin the nineteenth century) and then go on to presentSearles theory and some objections to it, culminat-ing in an argument against the dispositionalist posi-tion derived from the work of Sigmund Freud.Finally, I shall comment on some reservations ex-pressed by Talvitie and Ihanus about my interpreta-tion of the strength of this argument.

Historical Background

In order to come to grips with the debate about thenature of unconscious mental states, one must beginin the seventeenth century, when Ren Descartespropounded his highly influential model of themind. The Cartesian platform was built from threeplanks, each resting upon the previous one, namely:

1. Minds and bodies are different kinds of thing,which interact with one another. Bodies are ma-terial things, operating on mechanical principles,whereas minds are nonmaterial things.

2. Minds are entirely conscious. They can neitherbe mistaken about nor ignorant of their owncontents.

3. Introspection provides a true account of mentalcontents.

Over the centuries, aspects of the model were modi-fied (most notable, the notoriously problematicclaim that body and mind interact), but the funda-mental notion that mind is a nonphysical and entirelyconscious entity remained the dominant psychologi-cal perspective until at least the early decades of thetwentieth century.

During the nineteenth century, developments inthe sciences were undermining the Cartesian con-ception of the mind from five directions. In 1847Helmholz, Joule, and Meyer discovered the Law ofConservation of Energy, which effectively ruled outcausal relations between material brains and imma-terial minds. In 1859 Darwin published his Origin ofSpecies, which hinted that human beings evolvedfrom other creatures under the impact of physicalselection pressures. He made this explicit in TheDescent of Man (1871) and argued for the psycho-logical continuity between human beings in TheExpression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872). The birth of neuroscience demonstrated thatmental processes were at the very least dependentupon the physical brain. In particular, the birth ofaphasiology demonstrated that language itself,which had been hailed as a distinctive feature of theimmaterial mind, was neuroanatomically and neuro-physiologically based. Systematic clinical observa-tions of neurological conditions such as the ag-nosias, and psychiatric conditions such as hysteria,suggested the existence of mental phenomena be-yond the reach of introspection. The revival of Mes-merism in the new and more scientific form of hyp-notism demonstrated that it is possible to act underthe influence of ideas of which one is unaware.

For the purpose of this discussion, we will mainlyconcentrate on the implications of the mountingevidence for the existence of unconscious ideas,which created a terrible bind for the advocates of theCartesian point of view. How could the existence ofunconscious mental contents be squared with thebelief that all mental states are conscious? Therewere two possible moves. One was to claim that thestates in question are mental but not really uncon-scious. Putatively unconscious mental states were

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148 David Livingstone Smith

understood as the mental states occurring in a disso-ciated portion of ones own consciousness. If a mindcontains a split-off secondary consciousness, thecontents of this consciousness might be inaccessibleto the primary consciousness in much the same waythat the contents of another persons consciousnessare inaccessible to it. The other alternative was toclaim that the states in question were unconsciousbut not really mental. Advocates of this viewpointargued that what appeared to be unconscious mentalstates were actually neurophysiological dispositionsto form conscious mental states and were not them-selves intrinsically mental. Franz Brentano, GustavFechner, John Stuart Mill, William Carpenter, JohnHughlings Jackson, and Henry Maudsley were allproponents of this approach, which defined themind as The individuals conscious process, to-gether with the dispositions and predispositionswhich condition it (Baldwin, 1902, p. 83). Fechnergave a very concise summary, as follows:

Sensations, ideas, have, of course, ceased actuallyto exist in the state of unconsciousness, insofar aswe consider them apart from their substructure.Nevertheless something persists within us, i.e. thebodymind activity of which they are a function,and which makes possible the reappearance of sen-sation, etc. [Fechner, cited in Brentano, 1874, p.104]

Freud toyed with both the dissociationist and thedispositionalist approaches early in his career butcame to reject both, along with the entire Cartesianscheme, arguing that the mind is a function of thebrain, that introspection is methodologically un-sound, and that cognitive processes are intrinsicallyunconscious (Smith, 1999, 2002).

Dispositionalism Redux

John Searle has revived a version of the dispo-sitionalist thesis, arguing that conscious mentalstates are occurrent, and unconscious mentalstates are really dispositions to form conscious men-tal states. According to Searles theory, unconsciousmental states are not really mental: they are sim-ply the causal substrate for conscious mental states.They are called mental because of what they cando, rather than because of what they are.

Searle calls the claim that unconscious mentalstates are really just possible conscious mentalstates the Connection Principle (CP). He has twoversions of CP. The version that I have just de-scribed is concerned with the causal features of therelationship between conscious and unconsciousstates. The other version, which focuses on thelogical relationship between the two, asserts that inorder for a state to be an unconscious mental state it

must be the sort of thing that could be conscious inprinciple (Searle, 1995, p. 548).1 In the remainderof this discussion I will confine my attention to thecausal version of CP, as Searle for the most partdoes himself.

Searle writes:Mental states are supervenient on neurophysiologi-cal states in the following respect: Type-identicalneurophysiological causes would have type-identi-cal mentalistic effects. Thus, to take the famousbrain-in-a-vat example, if you had two brains thatwere type-identical down to the last molecule, thenthe causal basis of the mental would guarantee thatthey would have the same mental phenomena.[Searle, 1992, pp. 124125]

This entails that physical states are causally suffi-cient, though not necessarily causally necessary, forthe corresponding mental states (p. 125).

This is a very peculiar conceptualization of su-pervenience. Supervenience is normally regarded asconstitutive rather than causal. It is a relationshipbetween what are commonly called levels of or-ganization. So, for instance, the liquidity of watersupervenes upon its molecular composition. Therelationship between the micro-constitution of wa-ter and the property of liquidity is not at all like acausal relationship. It makes sense to say that firecauses smoke, but it does not make sense to say thatthe micro-composition of water causes its liquidity:the composition of water does not cause its liquid-ityit is its liquidity at temperatures between 0oCand 100oC under normal atmospheric pressure. Thefact that water displays liquidity only within thistemperature range illustrates that constitutive super-venience is causally sensitive. Causal relations be-tween changes in temperature and changes in thestate of the microstructure of a sample of waterdetermine which of its supervenient dispositionalproperties will manifest at any given time.

Supervenience holds between properties (in thisexample, the property of having the microstructureH2O and the macroproperty of liquidity), whereascausal relations hold between events. Event tokensare temporally ordered (event a is either before,after, or simultaneous with event b) whereas proper-ties are not. Searle goes on to claim that he isproposing a causal form of supervenience (Searle,1992), which he dubs vertical causation to distin-guish it from the usual horizontal causation, butit is unclear how if at all the causal form of super-venience differs from ordinary constitutive su-pervenience.

1 The two conceptions of CP seem to be at odds with one another, inthat the neural states claimed by Searle to supply the dispositional basisfor conscious thoughts are, by his own account, not the sort of thingsthat can in principle become conscious because they allegedly lack thecrucial element of aspectual shape.

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On the Nature of Repressed Contents Commentaries 149

According to Searle, intentional states necessar-ily possess a property that he calls aspectual shape(the term intentional is used in its philosophicalrather than its vernacular sense to mean content-bearing). An intentional state possesses aspectualshape insofar as it presents its conditions of satis-faction under some aspects and not others (Searle,1995, p. 548). This seems to be a nonlinguisticversion of what philosophers call the sense of aterm. Although they all have the same referent,Mark Twain, Sam Clemens, and the author ofHuckleberry Finn each have a different sense. It isthis difference in sense or intensionality that ac-counts for the fact that if the statement Paul be-lieves that Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer is true,it does not follow that the sentence Paul believesthat Sam Clemens wrote Tom Sawyer is also true.Aspectual shape is, as it were, the sense of amental state. Although Searle is a self-avowed ma-terialist, he believes that mental properties are irre-ducibly subjective, supervening upon the physicalproperties of the central nervous system. Theaspectual shape of mental states exemplifies theiressential subjectivity, which cannot be exhaus-tively or completely characterized solely in third-person, behavioral or even neurophysiologicalpredicates (Searle, 1992, p. 168).

We can now bring these various points togetherand examine Searles argument on behalf of thedispositionalist thesis. Unconscious mental statespossess a purely neurophysiological ontology.

1. Neurophysiological phenomena can be exhaus-tively characterized in third-person terms.

2. Truly mental states possess aspectual shape.3. Aspectual shape cannot be exhaustively charac-

terized in third-person terms.4. Therefore, unconscious mental states are not

truly mental.

If unconscious mental states are not really mental,what are they? The dispositionalist thesis is broughtin to answer this question. They are, says Searle,states possessing an objective neurophysiologicalontology which has power to cause conscioussubjective mental phenomena (Searle, 1992, p.168).

Dispositionalism and its discontents

Searles story about the nature of those items thatare commonly (albeit in his view, mistakenly) calledunconscious mental contents is riddled with diffi-culties. I regard Searles account as so problematic

that it would be foolhardy to adopt it as a workabletheory of unconscious mental states.

Searle asserts that aspectual shape cannot beexhaustively characterized in third-person terms.This may be true, but he supplies us with no argu-ments or evidence that it is. In any case, his framingof the issue appears to be misconceived. The morepertinent question is whether or not aspectual shapeis constitutively fixed by a set of subvenient neuro-physiological properties that can be characterized inthird-person terms. Clearly, if aspectual shape isneurally coded in some fashion, it must in principlebe possible to describe this neural code exhaustivelyin third-person terms. What if aspectual shape isntneurally coded? This alternative seems incompat-ible with physicalism. After all, if aspectual shape isnot constitutively fixed on the neural level, if thereare no neural properties that vary systematicallywith the conscious states supervening upon them,then even the aspectual shape of conscious mentalstates is inexplicable within a physicalist frame-work. I therefore find myself in agreement with MaxVelmans, who writes that It is likely . . . that allneural representations of internal or external eventscode those events under some aspects and not oth-ers. Indeed it is difficult to envisage how any repre-sentational system could be constructed differently(Velmans, 1990, p. 629).

Additional problems arise when Searle gets downto the specifics of the relationship between neuraldispositions and conscious mental items:

This sort of dispositional ascription of causal ca-pacities is quite familiar to us from common sense.When, for example, we say of a substance that it isbleach or poison, we are ascribing to a chemicalontology a dispositional causal capacity to producecertain effects. [Searle, 1992, p. 161]

Notice that although these dispositions operatecausally (in the horizontal sense) rather than con-stitutively, Searle takes the dispositional powers ofbleach and poison to be analogous to the dispo-sitional power of unconscious neural states to pro-duce conscious states. Is it really plausible to claimthat neural events bring about mental events in thesame kind of way that bleach turns a washrag white?In order for the brain to produce conscious states inthe manner that bleach turns a rag white, brain andmind would have to be separate things (the bleachacts upon the rag). This cant be right. For aphysicalist it has got to be neurons all the waydown!

Freud developed a powerful argument against thedispositionalist position, which I call the ContinuityArgument (CA) (Freud, 1912, 1913, 1915, 1926a,1926b, 1940a, 1940b). CA takes as its starting pointthe observation that conscious mental life is seman-

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150 David Livingstone Smith

tically discontinuous. Our thoughts are often inter-rupted, or jump from subject to subject, and yetdespite these discontinuities there is something thatsecures the overall continuity of mental life.

The data of consciousness have a very large numberof gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick peoplepsychical acts often occur which can be explainedonly by presupposing other acts, of which, never-theless, consciousness affords no evidence. . . . Ourmost personal daily experience acquaints us withideas that come into our head, we do not know fromwhere, and with intellectual conclusions arrived atwe do not know how. [Freud, 1915, pp. 166167]

How can the discontinuity of conscious thought bereconciled with its overall continuity? What is itthat supplies the semantic glue? Whatever it is, itcannot be conscious, because, as we have alreadynoted, conscious mental life is discontinuous, but itmust be mental, because only mental processes cansecure mental continuity.

All these conscious acts remain disconnected andunintelligible if we insist upon claiming that everymental act that occurs in us must also necessarily beexperienced by us through consciousness; on theother hand, they fall into a demonstrable connectionif we interpolate between them the unconscious actswhich we have inferred. [p. 167]

Freud is well aware that the dispositionalist willclaim that these ideas existed in a nonmental stateprior to making their appearance in consciousness.

At this very point we may be prepared to meet withthe philosophical objection that the latent concep-tion did not exist as an object of psychology, but asa physical disposition for the recurrence of the samepsychic phenomenon. [p. 167]

He then responds:The obvious answer to this is that a latent memoryis, on the contrary, an unquestionable residuum of apsychical process. [p. 167]

Note that Freud does not assert that the latent statesare nonphysiological. Freud was a physicalist andheld that latent or unconscious mental states possessboth a neural ontology and mental properties. Un-conscious mental states are states of the centralnervous system that encode representational con-tent. But doesnt Freuds response to the dis-positionalist position simply beg the question? Notif we carefully unpack its implicit content.

The example of unconscious problem-solving isparticularly useful for driving home the importanceof CA. Consider Melvin Calvins discovery of themechanism of carbon-dioxide assimilation in photo-synthesis, for which he won the Nobel Prize forchemistry in 1961. Calvin records that, although hehad been working on this problem for a long time,

the answer came to him quite suddenly and unex-pectedly at a time when he was not consciouslyoccupied with it. In Calvins own words:

One day I was sitting in the car while my wife wason an errand. For some months I had had somebasic information from the laboratory that was in-compatible with everything that, until then, I knewabout the cycle. I was waiting, sitting at the wheel ofthe car, probably parked in the red zone, when therecognition of the missing compound occurred. Itoccurred just like thatquite suddenlyand sud-denly, also, in a matter of seconds, the cyclic char-acter of the path of carbon became apparent to me.But the original recognition of phosphoglycericacid, and how it got there, and how the carbondioxide acceptor might be regenerated, all occurredwithin a matter of 30 seconds. So, there is such athing as inspiration, I suppose, but one has to beready for it. I dont know what made me ready atthat moment, except that I didnt have anything elseto do but sit and wait. And perhaps that in itself hassome moral. [Calvin, 1992, pp. 6768]

Let us assume that the last time Calvin had con-sciously thought about photosynthesis had beenthree hours prior to his revelation in the parkinglot (the exact interval is unimportant). I will referto these moments as T1 and T2, respectively. Calvindid not consciously understand the mechanism ofcarbon-dioxide assimilation at T1 and had not con-sciously thought about it at all between T1 and T2.The obvious inference is that he had thought aboutthe problem unconsciously between T1 and T2, forotherwise his sudden enlightenment at T2 would benothing short of miraculous! From a materialiststandpoint, we can say that a subset of the neuro-physiological processes occurring in MelvinCalvins brain during the interval between T1 and T2instantiated thoughts about the mechanism of car-bon-dioxide assimilation. Notice that we must inferthat during the interval Calvin was thinking aboutphotosynthesis; in other words, we cannot imaginethat these thoughts were devoid of content.

We can set out the Continuity Argument moreformally as follows:

1. There are gaps in the semantic continuity ofconscious mental life.

2. Only content-bearing mental processes can pro-vide mental continuity. Nonmental processes donot possess semantic content and therefore can-not provide semantic continuity.

3. All mental events are caused.4. In cases where a conscious mental event at T1 is

followed by (a) a period of conscious mentalactivity semantically discontinuous with it, or (b)a period during which conscious mental activityhas ceased entirely, and (c) which is in turn

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On the Nature of Repressed Contents Commentaries 151

followed by the involuntary occurrence of a con-scious mental event at T2 the content of whichprovides a solution to the problem addressed atT1, which (c) cannot reasonably be attributed toany cause other than the subjects own mentalactivity, then:

5. The subjects unconscious mental activity is anecessary cause for the event at T2.

6. Therefore, unconscious mental states can be oc-current.

But this conclusion is precisely what Searle wouldhave us disbelieve! According to Searles concep-tion, the relevant neurophysiological processes oc-curring in Calvins brain between T1 and T2 werenot about carbon-dioxide assimilation. In fact, theseneural states were not about anything. They merelyhad the dispositional powers to produce thoughtsabout carbon-dioxide assimilation given the rightcircumstances. This is more than implausible, it isarguably incoherent.

Talvitie and Ihanus remark of my interpretationof CA in a previous publication (Smith, 1999) thatit is not self-evident whether aspectual shape isneeded for continuity between T1 and T2. Whenlooking at the performance of computers . . . we canfind continuity between different inputs and out-puts, yet in computers there are surely no mentalprocesses and later remark that it is . . . hard to saywhat it means to say that mental processes areneeded for continuity when it is not known whatthe mental meansSmith does not define theterm. It is worth noting that the question of whetheror not computers instantiate mental functions re-mains a lively debate in cognitive science. Indeed,Searle is a prominent contributor to this debate.However, the heart of the issue is this. Whateverones theory of what constitutes mental life, it seemsintuitively self-evident that whatever goes on be-tween T1 and T2 in Calvin-style examples (and thereare many of these in the history of scientific discov-ery and in everyday life) seems inescapably mental.Is it really conceivable that the solution to a pro-found problem in biochemistry is accomplishednonmentally? If we grant that Calvins discoverywas produced by mental processes, we must con-clude either that (a) only syntactic processes occurbetween T1 and T2 and that, contrary to Searle,syntax is sufficient for mentality, or (b) semanticprocesses occurred between T1 and T2 and that,

contrary to Searle, neurophysiological processespossess content. The implications of the ContinuityArgument appear to trap the Searlean between arock and a hard place.

Talvitie and Ihanus remark quite rightly that It isproblematic to show how repressed contents wouldexist other than as neurophysiological structures.But what is at stake is not the neural ontology ofmental events, it is the question of whether thatneural ontology allows occurrent unconscious men-tal events: whether unconscious thoughts are merelyconscious thoughts that might occur, or whetherthey are thoughts occurring now.

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