Three propositions about conscious experience and their implications for theories of consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition March 1, 2026 Peter A White
Consciousness is not a property of brain processes themselves, only of the information those processes handle. The paper argues three points: first, the fact that information is conscious must be kept separate from the content of that information; second, in an information-processing brain, only information—not the operations on it—can be conscious, as illustrated by voluntary actions like verbal reports; third, access consciousness is merely access, and adding 'consciousness' to it changes nothing—a system identical to the human brain but lacking conscious information would function identically. Conscious experience requires a generative mechanism, but none has been proposed.