Questions: Phenomenal vs Access Consciousness

Question 1

According to Ned Block, which of the following best describes access consciousness (A-consciousness)?

• A. The subjective, 'what it is like' quality of an experience
• B. The availability of mental content for use in reasoning, verbal report, and behavioral control
• C. The unconscious processing that occurs below the threshold of awareness
• D. The capacity to experience emotions rather than purely cognitive states

Answer: (B)

A-consciousness is defined functionally: a mental state is A-conscious when its content is available to the cognitive systems that control reasoning, action, and report. This is different from the subjective, qualitative character of experience (P-consciousness). Block's key point is that these two properties can come apart — you can have one without the other.

Question 2

Block's distinction implies that phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness seldom occur together in the same mental state.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Block explicitly acknowledges that P-consciousness and A-consciousness typically co-occur — most conscious experiences are both phenomenally rich and accessible for report and reasoning. The distinction is conceptual and (potentially) empirical: the two properties are separable in principle, and Block's overflow argument suggests they come apart in specific cases like Sperling's iconic memory paradigm. But he is not claiming they are usually dissociated.

Question 3

What is the 'overflow' argument, and what does it claim about the relationship between phenomenal and access consciousness?

Model answer: The overflow argument claims that phenomenal experience is richer than what cognitive access can capture at any moment — we experience more than we can report or reason about, so P-consciousness overflows A-consciousness.

Block draws on Sperling's partial-report experiments, where subjects can report any row of a briefly flashed letter array but quickly lose access to the others. Block argues the subjects phenomenally experienced the full array even though only part of it was cognitively accessible. If true, this shows that phenomenal consciousness can exceed the bottleneck of cognitive access.