MARKS OF THE MENTAL

• Two levels of approaching or dealing with the question of the mind’s identity.

  First is the general level, which focuses on how to distinguish between minds and non minds, or between mental states and physical states,

  Second is the particular level, which focuses on how to distinguish mental states from one another.
• Five major properties of the mind or of mental states, namely, consciousness, subjective quality or qualia, intentionality, ontological subjectivity, and privacy.
• Contemporary philosophers of mind often refer to these defining features of the mind as the marks of the mental
• Consciousness is ordinarily identified with awareness.
• John Searle, in this regard, defines consciousness as the “states of sentience or awareness that typically begin when we wake up in the morning from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until we fall asleep again.”
• Subjective Quality refers to the particular way that an individual person is conscious of his/her own mental states, or undergoes his/her own conscious experiences.
• Philosophers of mind technically refer to the subjective quality of our conscious experience as the quale or the “phenomenal/experiential feel” of these experiences.
• ✓Thomas Nagel explains that qualia are best understood as answers to the questions of what it is like to experience something.
• Intentionality is the property of mental states to be about something or to be directed at some objects or events in the world.
• Ontological Subjectivity is the property of mental states to exist only in so far as there is a subject (a person or any other thing) who has them or who experiences them.

  For instance, there are pains only because there are entities (persons or animals) that experience them.

  One simply cannot say that there are pains and that these pains are not the pains of some entity.
• Ontological subjectivity contrasts with ontological objectivity —which is the property of certain things, like physical objects, to exist by themselves or to exist even without a subject that is conscious of them.
• Privacy is the property of mental states to be directly known only by the subject or person who has them.

  Other people can know of my headache only in an indirect way, through inference from my behavior or my verbal expressions.

  • My headache, in this regard, is private to me
• Non-mental states such as physical objects and events in contrast, are objective for any person, in principle, can directly know them.
• Among these five marks of the mental, consciousness is considered the most fundamental for the other marks can also be regarded as properties of consciousness.