Ned Block on consciousness

Daniel Tippens interviews philosopher Ned Block about his work on the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness.

So the one that I’m most interested in is what I call phenomenal consciousness, which some people cash out as the redness of red, what it’s like to see or smell or hear, that internal experience that you get when you have a sensation or images in your mind. That’s what I call phenomenal consciousness. Now, I think that’s something we share with animals — certainly other mammals. And you know I believe that it does not require language or much in the way of cognition — maybe nothing in the way of cognition.

Another sense of conscious and consciousness is the one in which we are conscious of things. We are conscious of our own thoughts. We can be conscious of our pains, of our perceptions. That involves some notion of monitoring, some feedback and maybe some awareness of yourself. So that is another notion. That’s called monitoring consciousness or self-consciousness.

Another idea is what I call access consciousness. And that’s when you have an episode of phenomenal consciousness and it is available to your cognitive systems. So you can think about it. You can reason about it. So you smell a certain smell — smoke. And that fact of your smelling smoke can be used by you to think about calling the fire department, or to think about investigating the source of the smoke. That’s what I call access consciousness.

Ned Block on phenomenal consciousness, part I | Scientia Salon