Terrapin Station wrote: ↑December 2nd, 2021, 5:47 pmIn my view, attempts of a distinction between "phenomenal consciousness" and "(non phenomenal) consciousness,"…
A prominent role in contemporary philosophy of mind plays Ned Block's distinction between
phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) and
access consciousness (A-consciousness).
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access consciousness n. According to a distinction introduced by the US philosopher Ned J(oel) Block (born 1942) in a co-edited book entitled
The Nature of Consciousness (1997), a non-phenomenal category of consciousness involving cognitions and representations that are poised or ready for use in controlled processing. A state is A-conscious if it is not experienced directly but is poised for the control of thought and action, as might occur if a thirsty person with blindsight responded spontaneously (without prompting) by reaching for a drink perceived without conscious visual experience. Representations that would be available for use if re-activated are not necessarily access-conscious unless they are poised and ready to control behaviour. Also called
A consciousness."
(Colman, Andrew M.
A Dictionary of Psychology. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 4-5)
"
phenomenal consciousness n. According to a distinction introduced by the US philosopher Ned J(oel) Block (born 1942) in a co-edited book entitled
The Nature of Consciousness (1997), aspects of consciousness that are phenomenal in the sense of being directly experienced, often (but perhaps not always) accompanied by access consciousness. An example of phenomenal consciousness initially without access consciousness arises when a person involved in a conversation suddenly notices that the sound of a ticking clock has been clearly audible throughout the conversation. Up to that moment, the person was phenomenal-conscious of the sound but not access-conscious of it, because the sound was available to conscious perception but not poised for control of action until it was noticed. Also called
P consciousness."
(Colman, Andrew M.
A Dictionary of Psychology. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 570)
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Block's concept of access consciousness has been criticized by colleagues, and I agree with their criticism:
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"Block’s distinction has been widely influential. But it now seems to me entirely wrongheaded. The ordinary concept
consciousness is not a mongrel concept. There is no such thing as access consciousness. Consider again my belief that Stockholm is the capital of Sweden. That’s a belief I have at times at which it does not manifest itself in a conscious thought or speech. At such times, it is unconscious. Yet it meets all the conditions for access consciousness, as noted above. The simple fact is that Block’s notion of access consciousness is a technical notion. It has
nothing to do with the ordinary concept
consciousness. What is true is that my belief is rationally
accessible, but it hardly follows from this that my belief is a certain sort of conscious state (or for that matter that I am conscious of it).
If there is no such thing as access consciousness, then there is no need to talk of phenomenal consciousness. There is just consciousness simpliciter. …Block has introduced a certain sort of cognitive accessibility and claimed without foundation that it is a sort of consciousness. The concept
consciousness is not analyzable in terms of Block’s accessibility, nor does his accessibility provide an a priori sufficient condition for consciousness. This is shown by the fact that there is no incoherence in supposing that a being might undergo all Block’s conditions for having “access conscious” states and yet not be conscious at all."
(Tye, Michael.
Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious? New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. 23)
"[T]he term “access consciousness” is a misnomer. So-called access consciousness is just access."
(Tye, Michael.
Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious? New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. 89)
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"Consider, first, a distinction that Block (1995) draws between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. As we have seen, phenomenal consciousness can be equated with experience. Access consciousness is what we have when information is poised for reporting and deliberation. Block thinks these two can come apart. For example, we might have phenomenality without access when we hear the background buzz of an air conditioner but fail to notice it. Access without phenomenality is alleged to arise in pathological cases in which a person can act on sensory information in the absence of experience. For example, some people with blindsight have brain injuries that prevent visual experience, but they nevertheless avoid obstacles when walking, and, we can imagine, they might come to report the placement of those obstances (de Gelder, 2010).
I reject this distinction. I don't believe there is any form of access that deserves to be called consciousness without phenomenality. After all, access is cheap. When an ordinary desktop computer calls up information from a hard drive or responds to inputs from a user, it is accessing information, but there is little temptation to say that the computer is conscious. Information access seems conscious in the human case when and only when it is accompanied by phenomenal experience. When we retrieve memories or deliberate, we experience mental imagery and inner speech. Presumably, people with blindsight who can readily report on the locations of obstacles also experience inner speech before issuing such reports. In saying that they are conscious, we implicitly presume that they are having experiences. If it turned out that obstacle avoidance in blindsight was totally devoid of experience, in the way that we might imagine insects having no experience when they fly from place to place, the temptation to say that such people are conscious of obstacles would disappear. The other half of Block's distinction can also be challenged. Phenomenal consciousness may always involve access or at least accessibility. But, with Block, I don't think this link is conceptually obvious. That task of establishing the link will have to await empirical evidence."
(Prinz, Jesse J.
The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. pp. 5-6)
"'[C]onsciousness' always refers more fundamentally to phenomenal experience and…any cognitive access we have to our mental states deserves to be called a form of consciousness only if those cognitive states have phenomenal qualities."
(Prinz, Jesse J.
The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. p. 35)
"The term 'phenomenal consciousness' implies that there is another kind of consciousness, perhaps what Ned Block calls 'access consciousness'. I side with those who reject this distinction. I think phenomenal properties do not come into existence without being accessible, and I think mere information access is not sufficient for consciousness. Consciousness properly so-called is both phenomenal and accessible."
(Prinz, Jesse. "Against Illusionism." In
Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, edited by Keith Frankish, 186-196. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017. pp. 187-8)
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"[T]his redefinition of information access as “access consciousness” risks
inflating a brain function to a conscious status that it does not possess. Information access and information availability have been widely recognised aspects of human information processing since the advent of cognitive psychology in the 1960’s, and it is true that information which enters phenomenal consciousness can be accessed, rehearsed, entered into long-term memory, used for the guidance of action and so on. However, the processes that actually enable information access, rehearsal, transfer to long-term memory and guidance of action are not themselves conscious (if they were there would be no need to subject such processes to detailed investigation within cognitive psychological research—see Velmans, 1991a). In short, “access consciousness” is not actually a form of consciousness. The conscious part of “access consciousness” is just phenomenal consciousness, and the processes that enable access to items in phenomenal consciousness are not conscious at all."
(Velmans, Max. "How to Define Consciousness – And How Not to Define Consciousness." 2009. Reprinted in
Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness: Selected Works of Max Velmans, 23-36. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. p. 28)
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"Functionalists in particular try to reduce consciousness to some input-output function or causal role in the control of behaviour. Along the functionalist lines of thought, consciousness has been defined as 'access consciousness'. Access refers to the output function of conscious information: Consciousness is the type of information that accesses many other cognitive systems – motor systems – and thereby also is able to guide or control external behaviour, especially verbal reports about the contents of (reflective) consciousness. According to the functionalist definition, then, conscious information is only the information in the brain that fulfils the access function. 'Access' refers to global informational access, especially the access to output systems within the human cognitive system.
If consciousness is identified with the global access function of information, the ability to report the contents of consciousness verbally or to respond externally to stimuli is at least implied as necessary for consciousness, because 'access' generally means access to output systems. Furthermore, the access definition of consciousness reduces consciousness to a certain type of information processing (or input-output function) and hence suffers from all the same problems as functionalism does as a theory of consciousness. It leaves out qualia, and it rejects the possibility that there could be pure phenomenal consciousness that is independent of selective attention, reflective consciousness, verbal report or control of output mechanisms."
(Revonsuo, Antti.
Consciousness: The Science of Subjectivity. New York: Psychology Press, 2010. p. 95)
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free will vs determinism debate.
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