Access Consciousness

Consciousness, according to the American philosopher Ned Block, is a “mongrel” concept—a conglomeration that picks out a number of very different mental properties that are nevertheless treated as undivided and denoted by a univocal concept. Access consciousness is one of these kinds of consciousness.

This entry will (a) discuss the notion of access consciousness—as distinguished from phenomenal consciousness—in the work of Block; (b) consider the introspective, experimental, and conceptual support for this distinction; (c) briefly consider Block's contention that much current work on consciousness conflates these two kinds of consciousness; and (d) conclude with a consideration of some criticism that may be directed at Block's approach.

To see what Block means by access consciousness (A-consciousness), consider the example of driving and being in the cognitive state of perceiving a stationary car on the road ahead of you. This is an A-conscious state inasmuch as its content (that there is a stationary car ahead) is freely available to your cognitive and action-regulating resources—which you may, in this instance, decide to employ in pressing the brake pedal of your own car, planning what to do next, and so on. Characteristically, A-conscious content is linguistically reportable (e.g., “I see that the car ahead of me isn't moving”), but is also attributable to the lower animals by virtue of their ability to use perceptual content to guide action.

To put it simply, an organism is in an A-conscious state if that state is poised for free use in controlling thought and action for that organism. More formally, A-consciousness consists in the broadcasting of representations for free use in reasoning and for direct rational control of action of the agent (with rational understood in a broad enough sense to include poor reasoning).

The notion of A-consciousness belongs to the family of information processing or functional theories of consciousness—but according to Block's distinctive account, this is only part of the story. The other main part is phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness)—the experiential dimension of conscious experience itself, that is, what it is like to experience pain, to see a building, to hear a bell, to smell a flower, and so forth. According to Block, it is not A-consciousness, but P-consciousness that seems to be a scientific mystery. In the vast majority of cases, A-consciousness and P-consciousness are coextensive—such as in the example of seeing the car ahead on the road, where one has both the content available to A-conscious control of thought and action and the P-conscious experience of seeing a large, stationary object ahead. In certain instances, however, a breakup, or disassociation, is thought to appear between the two types of consciousness. We shall consider such cases in more detail later.

In general, Block's theory of A-consciousness should be viewed as an integral part of a compromise position designed to accommodate both an information processing and a phenomenal view of consciousness. The main thrust of Block's work has thus been to emphasize the distinction between A-consciousness and P-consciousness and to argue that some current work in psychology, philosophy, [Page 2]cognitive science, and neuroscience is subject to fallacious inferences deriving from the failure to distinguish all the relevant meanings of consciousness.

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