[cross-posted @ Philosophy Sucks!]
In Ned Block’s recent paper, published in Trends In Cognitive Science, he has defended his argument that perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access from several recent objections (including from me). It is important that Block is defending overflow from cognitive access since he admits that perceptual consciousness does not overflow all access. Phenomenal consciousness consists in there being something that it is like for the subject of the experience and this suggests that there must be some kind of access to the experience. Block has elsewhere argued that some non-cognitive form of access can account for this but no account of non-cognitive access to date can explain what needs to be explained. Given this the anti-overflow position should remain the default until/unless we have much stronger evidence than what Block presents. Block suggests that there is a philosophical fallacy in the assumption that non-overflow is the default and in the insistence that we need strong evidence to overthrow the non-overflow position but this is not fallacious. It is the reasonable thing to do when you have very weak evidence that is consistent with two competing theories and one of those theories appeals to a mysterious place-holder concept while the other doesn’t.
Block suggests two possible forms of non-cognitive access. The first is a deflationary account and the second is a version of a self-representational theory. On the deflationary account we are aware of our mental states just in the having of them, in much the same way that we smile our own smiles just by smiling. Recall that what we are trying to explain is how a particular experience comes to be for the person who has it. When I feel a pain, not only do I experience the painful quality but I also experience it as mine. How can the deflationary account handle this? The deflationary account applies equally well to any state that happens to be instantiated in the brain. We can say that we are aware, in this way, of a state in the LGN, for instance, but surely we don’t want to say that it is phenomenally conscious.
The same problems arise for a self-representational account. One kind of self-representational account, holds that the higher-order awareness is itself a part of the state that it represents. But this is a variant of a cognitive access theory. Block seems to want a notion of self-representation that amounts to the state in question merely being instantiated (in the way a color sample represents the color just by being that particular color). But then every state would be conscious since every state represents itself merely by being instantiated. In fact every representation self-represents itself in this way but we don’t want to say that sentences are phenomenally conscious!
These notions of non-cognitive access are too weak to distinguish conscious mental states from unconscious mental states, or from any kind of brain activity at all. On the other hand a higher-order cognitive representation explains how a mental state can be for me; I am representing myself as being in that state, in some suitable way, so I will naturally experience the state as mine.
Block endorses only the reasonableness of tentatively accepting the overflow conclusion. But until we have a notion of non-cognitive access that can explain how a mental state can be experienced as mine that is at least as satisfactory as that given by cognitive access we need much stronger evidence than what Block presents to accept overflow.
Cross posted from Philosophy Sucks:
Richard, You acknowledge that I present genuine (if weak) evidence for consciousness without actual cognitive access. This evidence as you acknowledge is NOT evidence for consciousness without accessIBILITY. However, you maintain that we should reject consciousness without cognitive access despite the evidence for it because the evidence is not strong enough to overcome a default presumption against it. That default presumption is supposed to derive from the fact that conscious experience is experience that in some sense is accessed by what one might call the subjective self. But given the notorious obscurity of intuitions about access to the subjective self it would be better to accept—at least tentatively—consciousness without cognitive access and look for some other kind of access-related property to explain the relation to the subjective self. Maybe cognitive accessIBILITY will do for that purpose, or maybe—as seems plausible to many of us, the kind of access-related property that is involved in there being something it is like for the subject is not cognitive at all. You introduce into the debate the conflict between higher order and same order theories of awareness. But that conflict only becomes relevant to the issue at all on your highly theoretical assumption that the access-relation to the self is the same issue that is addressed by these theories of consciousness.
Conscious experience is a global subjective experience; i.e., an experience in perspectival relation to ones self (I!). Cognitive access of conscious experience is the capture and detection of some selected features/content of the global subjective event by non-conscious mechanisms. Our attentional mechanisms are unable to access/capture the entirety of our global conscious experience at any given time. So phenomenal consciousness naturally “overflows” cognitive access. See pp. 328-329 and Fig. 8 here:
https://people.umass.edu/trehub/YCCOG828%20copy.pdf