Head to head
Higher-Order Thought Theory vs Spinoza’s One Reality
Rosenthal’s Higher-Order Thought and Spinoza’s One Reality: Embodied Mind and Graded Consciousness, compared field by field from their entries in the Atlas.
At a glance
- Higher-Order Thought Theory belongs to the Materialism family in Kuhn's Landscape of Consciousness, Spinoza’s One Reality to Neutral Monism.
- Higher-Order Thought Theory treats consciousness as emergent; Spinoza’s One Reality treats it as fundamental.
- They give the same kind of answer on AI consciousness.
- On meaning and purpose, Higher-Order Thought Theory says “Humanistic only” and Spinoza’s One Reality says “Cosmic/Ultimate”.
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The claim
In brief
Higher-Order Thought TheoryDavid Rosenthal holds that a mental state is conscious when its subject has a higher-order thought that he or she is in that state, a thought that need not itself be conscious and does not seem to rest on inference. Mental qualities such as the redness of a sensation exist whether or not they are conscious; Rosenthal explains them separately, by how they map the perceptible properties we can discriminate.
Spinoza’s One RealityBaruch Spinoza holds that there is only one substance, God or Nature, known to us under two attributes, thought and extension. A human mind is the idea of an actually existing human body: one and the same thing as the body, conceived under thought. Because every body has a corresponding idea, mind runs through all of nature, and consciousness varies by degree with the complexity and power of the body.
What consciousness is
Higher-Order Thought TheoryA state’s being conscious consists in the subject being aware of it by way of a suitable higher-order thought that one is in that state.
Spinoza’s One RealityThe mind is the idea of the body, the same individual conceived under the attribute of thought rather than extension. Spinoza does not single out phenomenal consciousness as a category; his interpreters read consciousness as higher-order awareness, cognitive access, power or complexity of thinking, or affective awareness.
Big questions
Can AI be conscious?Both agree
Higher-Order Thought TheoryPossibleSince consciousness depends on having suitable higher-order thoughts about one’s own states, a system able to form such thoughts would meet the condition in principle.
Spinoza’s One RealityConditionalSince every body has a corresponding mind whose richness tracks the body's complexity and power, a sufficiently complex artificial body would have a correspondingly rich mind; whether that mind would be conscious in the human sense is contested.
Higher-Order Thought TheoryNoConscious states are natural states of an organism, so nothing remains conscious once those states stop occurring.
Spinoza’s One RealityNo position
Higher-Order Thought TheoryPossibleIf the relevant first-order states and higher-order thoughts were reproduced, the view gives no principled reason the copy would lack consciousness.
Spinoza’s One RealityNo position
Higher-Order Thought TheoryHumanistic onlyThe theory is a naturalistic account of mental states and carries no cosmic purpose.
Spinoza’s One RealityCosmic/UltimateMinds are modes of God or Nature, and freedom lies in understanding the causal order of Nature through more adequate ideas.
Nature of mind
Ontology
Higher-Order Thought TheoryPhysicalism (naturalistic functionalism)
Spinoza’s One RealitySubstance monism (dual-attribute)
Mind and body
Higher-Order Thought TheoryMental states, their qualities, and the higher-order thoughts that make them conscious are all natural states of the organism; Rosenthal expects neural correlates of consciousness to be whatever mechanism produces the higher-order awareness.
Spinoza’s One RealityMind and body neither interact nor merely correlate; they are one thing under two descriptions. ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (Ethics 2p7), so thought is explained only through thought and extension only through extension.
Fundamental or emergent
Higher-Order Thought TheoryEmergent
Spinoza’s One RealityPrimitive
Qualia
Higher-Order Thought TheoryMental qualities are fixed by their role in perceptual discrimination and occupy a ‘quality space’ that mirrors the similarities among perceptible properties. Because these qualities do not depend on consciousness, a sensation can have qualitative character without being conscious, as in subliminal perception.
Spinoza’s One RealitySpinoza has no explicit theory of phenomenal character. Interpreters reconstruct it from his accounts of sensation, imagination and affect, where an affect is both a change in the body's power of acting and the idea of that change.
How it works
Mechanism
Higher-Order Thought TheoryA non-inferential higher-order thought that one is in a given state, which makes that first-order state conscious even when the thought itself is unconscious.
Spinoza’s One RealityPsychophysical identity under parallel attributes: whatever happens in the body as extension happens in the mind as an idea, so no causal bridge between them is needed.
Where it is
Higher-Order Thought TheoryNot stated
Spinoza’s One RealityMentality is everywhere in nature, since all individuals are ‘animate’ in some degree (2p13s). Whether this means every physical thing has phenomenal experience is contested, and Spinoza does not treat God or Nature as one human-like conscious subject.
What it does
Higher-Order Thought TheoryNot stated
Spinoza’s One RealityMind never causes bodily motion and body never causes thought. Affects make ideas matter to behavior by increasing, decreasing or fixing the mind's striving, and freedom comes from forming more adequate ideas of the causes acting on us.
Evidence and criticism
Testability
Higher-Order Thought TheoryConceptually testable
Spinoza’s One RealitySpeculative
Tests so far
Higher-Order Thought TheoryNot stated
Spinoza’s One RealityNot stated
Criticisms
Higher-Order Thought TheoryFirst-order theorists argue that higher-order awareness is an unneeded extra ingredient, and deflationists say being aware of a conscious state is like ‘smiling a smile’. Rosenthal replies that a deflated awareness cannot explain the contrast between conscious and unconscious states.
Spinoza’s One RealityThe identity formula says mind and body are one thing but not what makes the thought side felt. The ideas-of-ideas reading makes every idea conscious, which Bennett called absurdly excessive, and LeBuffe notes that a mind's overall power and the power of its ideas can diverge, giving odd verdicts on degrees.
Sources
Key sources
Higher-Order Thought Theory
- Rosenthal’s Higher-Order Thought, Landscape of Consciousness, David Rosenthal (2005)
Spinoza’s One Reality
- Ethics, Baruch Spinoza (E. Curley, Ed. and Trans., The Collected Works of Spinoza) (1677)
- Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, E. Curley (1969)
- A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, J. Bennett (1984)