Three propositions about conscious experience and their implications for theories of consciousness.

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.

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to make and defend three simple propositions about what can and cannot be conscious in the human brain and to elucidate their implications for research and theory on consciousness. The first proposition is that the fact that some information is conscious should be, but often is not, distinguished from the information itself. The second proposition is that, treating the brain as an information processing system, information can be conscious (or not) but processes that operate on information cannot be conscious. This is illustrated with analysis of voluntary action generation, such as making a verbal report. The third proposition is that access consciousness is just access. Adding the word "consciousness" to it makes no difference to how it operates. An information processing system exactly like the human brain but in which no information was conscious would function in exactly the same way as human brains in which some information is conscious. Conscious experience must be explained by means of a generative mechanism; no such mechanism has yet been proposed.