States Of Consciousness

Stimulants like alcohol and drugs are popular precisely because their usage correlates to altered states of consciousness to one extent or another.  The very pronounced possible effects of alcohol, to name just one example, though, are far from the only things that influence conscious perceptions.  Mental states are the specific experiences within a perceiving mind no matter their diversity or intensity (as well as all unexperienced but logically possible conscious states).  As mentally inactive as some people can become, even their blankness is still a just another state of mind, yet one that entails the absence of focusing on particular sensory stimuli, memories, logical truths, or emotions.  Any experience with color, exhaustion, motivation, or something like food is a mental state, as is every emotion and every physical sensation--the mind is not the body, whichever metaphysically sustains the other, but there could be no bodily experiences apart from a mind to have them.

A whole array of things people might regularly consume which have nothing to do with alcohol or any kind of drug still alters states of consciousness, though in differing ways.  Anything from coffee to fruit to energy drinks to sandwiches affects your mental states as long as you can taste them, and in the case of stimulants like coffee or energy drinks, it is not just taste that is experiences by the mind, but potentially higher levels of alertness or concentration.  Any change in perception regardless of its causal origin is a change of mental states, as perception can only exist within a consciousness, a mind that does the perceiving.  The most casual of introspection (inward perception) and the most basic of sensory experiences, whether or not they connect with any external environments or objects, are all subcategories of possible kinds of mental states.

The linguistic emphasis on how certain substances like medications, narcotics, and alcohol can "change someone's mental states" is seldom joined with emphasis on the fact that literally everything could trigger a change of mental states.  Medicine that relieves a headache does this, as does any sort of substance that is chewed or swallowed which one can feel or taste.  All food, all medicines treating a condition that one can physically or mentally feel (all feeling is mental, but not all feeling has to do with the body), anything one could drink, and all manner of very commonplace sensory stimuli, even if they are only illusions of the senses, are still things that impact or trigger specific states of consciousness.

Drugs and alcohol do not have a monopoly on influencing mental perceptions, as every conscious experience is a mental perception, with or without stimulants.  It is not any sort of stimulus that is directly experienced in the first place, but only the phenomenological perception of them, and consciousness is more epistemologically central that any sort of sensory experience could possibly be.  There is no experience through the senses without a mind equipped with those senses, regardless of what physical things exist perceived or unperceived.  The inverse is not and cannot be true.  A mind could perceive itself, while inescapably relying on the immaterial, necessary truths of logic that are neither physical stimuli or mental constructs, even if it had no sensory experiences whatsoever.

This, too, would be a state of consciousness even in the total absence of sensory stimulation from the external world.  In fact, many states of consciousness are still possible without senses, for someone could still grasp logical truths and could still have emotions and desires.  The difference would be that their mental states feelings and desires would not be reactions to sensory stimuli or accompanied by any kind of perception of a world of matter.  States of mind are far more varied than those prompted by any particular stimuli both in the sense of logical possibilities and in the sense of ordinary experiences.  Some stimuli like alcohol might serve as a stimulant, leading to a more blatantly distorted or altered state of consciousness when consumed to a given extent, but every experience is a state of mind with the potential to influence how other mental states are perceived by coming alongside or replacing them.