A Case where Access Implies Qualia

Abstract

Block (1995) famously warns against the confusion of ‘access-conscious-ness’ and ‘phenomenal consciousness’. Access consciousness occurs whenthe content of a mental state is poised for the control of rational action, forverbal report and for use in reasoning. Phenomenal consciousness, bycontrast, involves the harder-to-define presence of experiential properties,of there being ‘something it is like’ to see red, to hear a distant bell, and soon. It is the explanation of phenomenal consciousness that constitutes the‘hard problem’ of consciousness highlighted in Chalmers 1996. Block, likeChalmers, believes that many attempted explanations of phenomenalconsciousness are really just explanations of (various forms of) access-consciousness, and that the two notions are conceptually quite distinct(Block 1995: §3, Chalmers 1996: ch. 1). I shall argue, however, that thereis at least one kind of case in which facts about access seem to imply thepresence of full-blown phenomenal consciousness – a kind of case, that is,in which given the facts about access it is impossible to conceive of theabsence of phenomenal consciousness.Consider a system (being, organism, whatever) capable of perceptuallydetecting a variety of differences between stimuli. And suppose also thatthis system can be interrogated about its own acts of perceptual difference-detection. Take a particular incident in which the system detects, for exam-ple, the colour difference between two visually presented stimuli.Interrogated about this act of detection, the system must (I suggest) say oneof two things. It must say