COUNTING THE WRONG CONSCIOUSNESS OUT

Commentary on Dan Dennett on:

 "On a Phenomenal Confusion about Access and Consciousness"

Dan Dennett: "Many researchers on consciousness have adopted Ned Block's purported distinction between "access" consciousness and 'phenomenal' consciousness (Block, 1995, 2005, 2007), but in spite of its evident appeal, it is not a defensible distinction. Earlier critiques (Dennett, 1994, 1995, Cohen and Dennett, 2012) have not deterred those who favor the distinction, but perhaps one more exposition of the problems will break through"

Yes, there was a phenomenal confusion in doubling our mind-body-problems by doubling our consciousnesses.

No, organisms don't have both an "access consciousness" and a "phenomenal consciousness."

Organisms' brains (like robots' brains) have access to information (data). 

Access to data can be unconscious (in organisms and robots) or conscious (in organisms, sometimes, but probably not at all in robots, so far).

And organisms feel. Feeling can only be conscious, because feeling is consciousness.

So the confusion is in overlooking the fact that there can be either felt access (conscious) or unfelt access (unconscious).

The mind-body problem is of course the problem of explaining how and why all access is not just unfelt access. After all, the Darwinian job is just to do what needs to be done, not to bask in phenomenology.

Hence it is not a solution to say that all access is unfelt access and that feeling -- or the idea that organisms feel -- is just some sort of a confusion, illusion, or action!

If, instead, feeling has or is some sort of function, let's hear what it is!

(Back to the [one, single, familiar] mind/body problem -- lately, fashionably, called the "hard" one.)

Harnad, S. (2011) Minds, Brains and Turing. Consciousness Online 3. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22242/

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