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PHI220

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Assignment Title

Block on consciousness

Due Date

27/05/2012

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Body and Mind

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Email:joseph.zizys@gmail.com

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Student Name:

Family Name Zizys

Student Number:

42351979

Date:

25/05/2012

Given Name Joseph

According to Ned Block's "Concepts of Consciousness", what is the relationship between

phenomenal-consciousness (P-consciousness) and access-consciousness (A-consciousness)?
Do you think that Block's account is plausible? Defend your answer.

1500 words

According to Block (Block 1995) phenomenal-consciousness is the biological given, the "what it
is like" to have experiences at all. Access-consciousness is the "consciousness of" that is
involved in things like knowing, thinking and believing, that is in some sense related to the
cognitive aspect of the mind, to representations of the world (including the internal world of the
mind). Block takes phenomenal-consciousness (hereafter Pc) to be fundamental in some sense,
to represent the "hard" problem of philosophy of mind, while acknowledging the reality and
usefulness of access-consciousness (Ac).

Block suggests that we may characterize the relationship between Pc and Ac as two related but
partially independent systems of the mind, that is he allows that we may be Ac of some things
that have no (or very limited) Pc and vice versa. For example in the phenomena of "blindsight" a
person with damage to the area of the brain that permits Pc of visuals is nevertheless able to
exhibit behavior indicative of Ac by being able to identify objects in their (blind) visual field
without having any Pc experience of "seeing" them. An example of the converse case (Pc
without Ac) that Block gives is the case where you realize that a noise has been going on for a

long time, but you had not 'noticed' it until now, that is you always had Pc of the noise but only
had Ac (accompanied by Pc) when you noticed the noise.

In simpler, and perhaps misleading terms, Block is saying that we can be aware of something
without any conscious experience to go with it, as in the blindsight example, and we can be
having an experience (that is something can be occurring in our consciousness) that we are
unaware of, as in the example of the ongoing noise that is only noticed later to have been going
on for a long time. When we have both we have "conscious awareness" (APc).

The preceding picture is simplified somewhat from Blocks actual presentation. In order to avoid
certain arguments Block feels it necessary to narrow his case somewhat in, for example, taking
up the thought experiment version of blindsight; super-duper-blindsight. The reason for this is
because it is hard to see how, on Blocks description, it would be possible to have Ac without
any Pc whatsoever; there must be something it is like to grope for an answer that is felt to be
only a guess at what is in the blind field, but this is not the particular Pc that Block is interested
in highlighting in this case. Likewise conversely it is hard to see how any communication of ones
Pc experiences could be possible at all without the cognitive machinery of Ac. Nevertheless the
above outline clearly indicates the distinction Block wishes to make.

The arguments that Block is defending his thesis from come from other positions in the
philosophy of mind. There are at least two camps regarding what constitutes consciousness; the
biological, non-reductive picture adopted most famously by the likes of Nagel (Nagel 1974) and

Searle (Searle 1983), and various representational or otherwise structural-functional pictures

advocated in different forms by Dennett (Dennett 1998) and Roesenthal (Rosenthal 2002),
amongst others. Block belongs, tentatively, to the biological camp (Brown 2010), while his
position is most clearly contrasted to the approach of Daniel Dennett.

I think Blocks distinction is plausible in that he correctly points out a useful distinction between
two different kinds or aspects of mental property, one of which is intimately related to
'knowledge' 'awareness' 'recognition' 'attention' and so on, and one of which is related to
qualities sensations seeming feels and what-it-is-like-ness. Two clusters of concepts that
all fall within or near to the larger concept of 'consciousness' or the mental.

This distinction implies that while there are useful insights to be gained by attempting to model
consciousness as fame in the brain (Dennett) or a higher order thought (Rosenthal) it is
important to recognize that the subject is not exhausted by such explanations and conversely
that any account of Pc will be mute without an account of Ac to model the ways in which Pc
functions in a process of conscious life.

It seems to me that almost no philosopher or cognitive scientist is interested in flatly denying the
usefulness of the Ac concept, though no one seems to agree on exactly what a plausible model
of it looks like. However several philosophers, most famously and notably Dennett, would clearly
identify Pc as qualia in disguise and deny that there is any such thing. Defending the

plausibility of Blocks distinction therefore amounts to some kind of defense of the usefulness of
qualia against the kind of criticism that Dennett and others might level against it.

Dennett says, in Quining Qualia;

I want to shift the burden of proof, so that anyone who wants to appeal to private, subjective
properties has to prove first that in so doing they are not making a mistake.
(Dennett 1988 p227)

Pc is precisely this feature of consciousness, that is it is not what is known or available to

ratiocination, but rather what is lacking in the blindsight patients, some internal experience, from
which knowledge may certainly be extracted but which is more than merely the sum of
knowledge or potential knowledge but rather the rich, experiential content of what-it-is-like. An
example of the distinction is given by Dretske (Dretske 2010) who shows that while we may not
be able to know or report particular facts about individual elements within large visual
ensembles we nevertheless experience very small changes of individual elements in such
ensembles when we see them change, having Pc of them without being able to pin down any
Ac (at least not without help).

Dennett spends much of his argument pointing out that there are various ways that we might be
mistaken in our own assessment of Pc, for example if we woke up one morning with inverted
spectra how would we know that it was our Pc that had changed and not our memory of what

our Pc used to be like? This and other arguments, called by Dennett Intuition Pumps are
deeply unconvincing to me. Firstly because it seems that by this thought experiment a kind of
absolute skepticism follows, an absolute skepticism actually developed on exactly the same
grounds by Jonathan Shaffer (Shaffer 2010) whereby he shows that Descartes demon may
deceive about anything at all, if we allow that he may arbitrarily alter our memories at any time.
Secondly Dennetts argument, even if we allow that in some kind of least harmful case we might
use it in a way that avoids absolute skepticism, seems to attack the wrong idea; regardless of
whether it is the memory of the quality or appearance of the old Pc that has been altered or if
the new Pc is genuinely different, there is still Pc to account for, the Pc of the experience of the
memories themselves, and that Pc is still noticeably different from Ac in either case. Dennett
seems to want to make a kind of inverted qualia for reductionists argument where thinking
about inverted qualia convinces you of the non-existence of Pc rather than the existence of it,
but my intuition is not pumped.

The fact that Pc cannot have the same kind of public utility as objective knowledge in a scientific
program does not invalidate it as experience, Nor do I think that it renders it impenetrable to
science, which is I think at base Dennetts motivation for attacking it. It is perfectly possible to
have a science of something that nevertheless remains mysterious in its fundamental ontology,
Newton famously said that he framed no hypothesis as to the bearer of his force of gravity,
nevertheless his mechanics formed the bedrock of physical theorizing for the next 300 years.
(Chomsky 2010 p12)

In conclusion Blocks distinction highlights an aspect of our experience in a clear way and any
coherent theory of consciousness must account for it and not deny it. That there is currently no
such theory may or may not be because of the impossibility of reconciling the third and first
person accounts but more likely it seems to me that the phenomena is simply much more
complex and difficult than those recently disposed of by the physical and biological sciences in
the last 3 centuries, and we may simply be living at a point in history before a true foundation for
a science of the mind has been discovered.

Bibliography

Block (1995) Concepts of Consciousness reprinted in Chalmers (ed) (2002) Philosophy of Mind
Classical and Contemporary Readings p207-217 Oxford University Press

Brown, Richard (2012) Zombies and Simulation forthcoming in Journal of Consciousness

Studies vol. 19 (7-8) accessed at http://faculty.lagcc.cuny.edu/rbrown/zombies%20and
%20simulation%20JCS.pdf

Chomsky, Noam (2010) Chomsky Notebook Columbia University Press

Dennett, Daniel (1988) Quining Qualia in Chalmers (ed) (2002) Philosophy of Mind Classical
and Contemporary Readings p226-246 Oxford University Press

Dretske, Fred (2010) What we See: The texture of conscious experience in Nanay, Bence (ed)
Perceiving the World Oxford University Press

Nagel, Thomas (1974) What is it like to be a bat? in Chalmers (ed) (2002) Philosophy of Mind
Classical and Contemporary Readings p229-226 Oxford University Press

Rosenthal, David M. (2002) Explaining Consciousness in Chalmers (ed) (2002) Philosophy of

Mind Classical and Contemporary Readings p406-421 Oxford University Press

Schaffer, Jonathan (2010) The Debasing Demon in Analysis Vol. 70 Number 2 pp. 228-237
Oxford University Press

Searle, John (1983) Can Computers Think? in Chalmers (ed) (2002) Philosophy of Mind
Classical and Contemporary Readings p669-675 Oxford University Press