Critical Synopsis (Perceptual Consciousness Overflows Cognitive Access, Ned Block, 2011)

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Ned Block is the originator of the idea that there is a clear distinction between the mere feeling and sensations of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness, and the kind of consciousness that we can report on, can behaviorally react to is known as access consciousness. In other words, he holds a first-order theory that states that one can have conscious perceptions in the absence of any kind of higher-order awareness. Block presented a phenomenological overflow argument where phenomenal consciousness is richer than access consciousness, so when we observe a complex scene, we are actually conscious of more than we can report or think about. In his 2011 paper, he reviews the controversy of overflow and explains his attempt to defend his argument by utilizing recent experiments. Two experiments are used to backup this idea: change blindness and the Sperling task. For example, Block believes the Sperling Task demonstrates that our phenomenal consciousness has a superior capacity to our access consciousness. Our phenomenal consciousness, he claims, holds information about all 12 items. But our access consciousness only has space for 4 items, so there is an overflow situation, with most of what is in our phenomenal consciousness not being available for our access consciousness. The outcome of this is that the form of consciousness that we can report on, can attend to, and so on is very limited compared to the much vaster expanse of our phenomenal consciousness. But is this really the case? Dehaene et al. (2006) attempts to respond with the refrigerator-light illusion where we assume that this rich phenomenology is present even when we are unaware of the relevant mental states; that is analogous to assuming the refrigerator light is on even when the refrigerator door is shut, since it is on whenever we can tell directly whether it is on. However, Block argues
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