Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience.
The Behavioral and brain sciences December 1, 2007 Ned Block 1,123 citations
A puzzle arises in trying to separate the brain basis of phenomenal consciousness—the raw subjective experience—from the machinery needed to report that experience. The standard method of identifying neural correlates in clear cases (where people are certain and authoritative) is circular: it already assumes whether report-related machinery is part of the conscious state. The paper argues for an abstract solution and points to empirical evidence that phenomenal consciousness can overflow cognitive accessibility—that is, we can have conscious experiences we cannot report. It proposes that the neural basis of consciousness can be identified by excluding the neural basis of accessibility, an assumption justified by the explanations it enables.