27 Jun
1994
27 Jun
'94
2:54 a.m.
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article by:
Ned Block
on:
"ON A CONFUSION ABOUT A FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS"
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
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____________________________________________________________________
ON A CONFUSION ABOUT A FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Ned Block
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA 02139
block(a)psyche.mit.edu
ABSTRACT: Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of
very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is
experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it
is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by
contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally
guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or
totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an
example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness"
based on the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about
stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of
blindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses," but they
cannot harness this information in the service of action, and this
is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is
somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide
action. But stimuli in the blind field are BOTH access-unconscious
and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function
of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred
to phenomenal consciousness.
KEYWORDS: access, attention, awareness, blindsight, consciousness,
function, retrieval, subjective experience.
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