Abstract

The phenomenal overflow thesis states that the content of phenomenally conscious mental states can exceed our capacities of cognitive access. Much of the philosophical and scientific debate about the phenomenal overflow thesis has been focused on vision, attention, and verbal report. My view is that we feel things in our bodies that we don’t always process with the resources of cognitive access. Thinking about the question of phenomenal overflow from the perspective of embodied affect rather than the content of visual experience is the novel contribution of this paper. I argue that we have reason to think that hydranencephalic children are phenomenally conscious but incapable of cognitive access. Further, I claim that we should interpret the reactive behavior of these subjects in terms of a kind of access to content that is distinct from cognitive access, I call this novel form of access ‘affective access.’