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Phenomenal consciousness, representational content and cognitive access: a missing link between two debates

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Abstract

Two debates loom large in current discussions on phenomenal consciousness. One debate concerns the relation between phenomenal character and representational content. Representationalism affirms, whereas “content separatism” denies, that phenomenal character is exhausted by representational content. Another debate concerns the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognitive access. “Access separatism” affirms, whereas, e.g., the global workspace model denies, that there are phenomenally conscious states that are not cognitively accessed. I will argue that the two separatist views are related. Access separatism supports content separatism by undermining the most prominent sort of arguments in favor of representationalism, namely ones that appeal to the phenomenology of perceptual experiences.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that content separatism is different from – and specifically, weaker than – the view sometimes referred to as “qualia realism”, namely the view that experiences have intrinsic (non-intentional) features of which we are directly aware via introspection. Content separatism is simply the denial of representationalism.

  2. The representationalists include Byrne 2001; Dretske 1995; Harman 1990; Lycan 1996, and Tye 1995, 2000, 2002a and 2002b. The content separatists include Block 1990, 1996, 2003 and 2007a; Burge 2003; Kind 2003 and 2008; Loar 1990 and 2002, and Peacocke 1983.

  3. In its weak version, representationalism is a supervenience thesis: identity in representational content implies identity in phenomenal character.

  4. Worries of the a priori sort are expressed by, e.g., Levine (2007) and Siewert (2004). I will discuss such worries in section V.

  5. For presentations of the global workspace theory, see, e.g., Baars 1988; Dehaene and Naccache 2001; Naccache and Dehaene 2007; Dehaene and Changeux 2004; Dehaene et al. 2006; Kouider et al. 2007 and 2010. Among leading access separatists are Block 1995, 2005, 2007b, 2008 and 2011; Lamme 2003, 2006 and 2010, and Raftopoulos 2009.

  6. For Moore’s famous formulation of the “diaphanousness” of experiences, see his 1903, especially p. 25. For a thorough discussion of the notion of phenomenal transparency, see Metzinger 2003.

    For versions of the transparency argument, see, e.g., Harman 1990, and Tye 1995, 2000 and Tye 2002a, b. For criticisms of the argument, see, e.g., Block 1990, 2003; Kind 2003; Loar 2002; Molyneux 2009; Siewert 2004 and Stoljar 2004. For an objection to many of those criticisms, see Jacobson (forthcoming).

  7. See, e.g., Block 2003; Burge 2003; Kind 2003 and 2008; Loar 2002. A notable exception is Shoemaker (see, e.g., his 1994a and 1994b).

  8. There are familiar difficulties with retrospective observations, namely ones that concern past and so remembered experiences. I cannot dwell here on this issue. But it is worth noting that, first, retrospective observations do not have the kind of authority that synchronic observations have, and, relatedly, that once representations that originally were not accessed are retrieved from memory they get further modulated, and so some of their phenomenological features may be due to the further processing they have undergone.

  9. These considerations are the upshot of the joint reflections and still-unpublished writing of XX and myself.

  10. An anonymous referee suggested these moves to me.

  11. For such arguments, see, e.g., Kind 2003, and Byrne 2001.

  12. Hillary Putnam and I elaborate on what we call “The attention counterfactual” in Jacobson and Putnam (forthcoming).

  13. Plausibly, each ‘simpler’ phenomenal state can be subsumed under many different phenomenal states. According to the “Phenomenal Unity Thesis” advocated by Bayne and Chalmers (2003), ultimately, all simultaneous phenomenal states are subsumed under a ‘total phenomenal state’ that encompasses all the phenomenal states the subject undergoes at that time.

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    Hilla Jacobson

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Jacobson, H. Phenomenal consciousness, representational content and cognitive access: a missing link between two debates. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 1021–1035 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9399-2

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