Unconscious aliens

Lately I’ve been starting my philosophy of mind course with Carolyn Gilman’s short story about unconscious but highly intelligent aliens.

We can imagine such aliens having thoughts, beliefs, concepts, representational and motivational states. After all, we have beliefs even when totally unconscious, and we have subconscious thoughts, concepts, as well as representational and motivational states.

I’ve wondered what unconscious aliens would think about our philosophical arguments about physicalism and consciousness. They might not have the concept of consciousness or of an experiential state, but they could have the concept of “that special mode of representing reality that humans have and we don’t”. And so now I ask myself: Would these aliens have any reason to think that consciousness-based arguments for dualism have any force? Would they have any reason to think that “special mode” is a non-physical mode?

Of course, the aliens might be convinced of dualism on the basis of intentionality arguments. But would something about humans give them additional evidence of dualism about humans?

The aliens shouldn’t be surprised to discover that humans when awake have some ways of processing inputs that they themselves don’t, nor should that give any evidence for dualism. Neither should the presence of some special “phenomenological” vocabulary in humans for describing such processing.

But I think what should give the aliens some evidence is the conviction that many humans have that their “experiences” lack physical properties, that they are categorically different from physical properties and things. If someone describes an object of sensory perception as lacking color, that gives one reason to think the object indeed lacks color. If someone describes the object of introspective perception as lacking charge or mass, that gives one reason to think the object indeed lacks charge or mass.

The aliens would need to then consider the fact that some people have the conviction and others do not, and try to figure out which ones are doing a better job learning from their introspection.