That’s an interesting case! I am tempted to deny that this (putative unconscious desire to be near the ocean) is really a mental state at all. I get that it can be explanatorily convenient to model it as such, using folk (belief-desire) psychology, but the same is true of computer chess programs. I’d want to draw a pretty sharp distinction between the usefulness of psychological modelling, on the one hand, and grounds for attributing real mental states, on the other. And I think it’s pretty natural (at least from a perspective like mine) to take consciousness to be the mark of the mental, such that any unconscious state is best understood as mere information-processing, not meaningful mentality.
That’s an initial thought, anyway. It may be completely wrong-headed!
That’s an interesting case! I am tempted to deny that this (putative unconscious desire to be near the ocean) is really a mental state at all. I get that it can be explanatorily convenient to model it as such, using folk (belief-desire) psychology, but the same is true of computer chess programs. I’d want to draw a pretty sharp distinction between the usefulness of psychological modelling, on the one hand, and grounds for attributing real mental states, on the other. And I think it’s pretty natural (at least from a perspective like mine) to take consciousness to be the mark of the mental, such that any unconscious state is best understood as mere information-processing, not meaningful mentality.
That’s an initial thought, anyway. It may be completely wrong-headed!