I firmly endorse the idea that qualitative character overflows cognitive accessibility, because I believe we are often in sensory states that present qualitative features of which we are unaware. But Block makes a stronger claim based on a finer distinction. That distinction is unclear to me, and I invite him to explain it. He holds that there can be “phenomenology” and “awareness” without cognitive access by the subject.
First, I distinguish Block's distinction from the more familiar one between unconscious and conscious detection of a sensory quality. As noted, we often sense color or shape or sound or another environmental feature without being at all aware of doing so. But such nonconscious detection does not count as phenomenal for Block, since (a) as he uses that term, “when one has a phenomenally conscious experience, one is in some way aware of having it” (sect. 6, para. 1), and (b) for a mental state to be phenomenal, in Block's usual use of the term, there must be “something it is like” to be in it.
Yet according to him, such Awareness (his capital “A”) does not require cognitive accessibility. Why not? At least in part, because a mental state that includes it need not be one that “the subject notices or attends to or perceives or thinks about” (sect. 6, para. 3).
But awareness of any sort is intentional, especially when “of” is explicitly appended. If one is aware of having an experience, in particular, the experience is the intentional object of the awareness. And I assume, without fear of disagreement from Block or any of his readers, that intentionality is representation. Therefore, a phenomenally conscious experience in his sense is one that is represented by one of the subject's own psychological states. In light of Block's allegiance to “same order” accounts of Awareness (sect. 6), I do not say that the experience is represented by another of the subject's states; Block's view is that the experience “consists in part in an awareness of itself” (sect. 6, para. 2), perhaps as if it were a conjunction along the lines of “There is some cheese over there and it is this very experience that tells me so.”
But that “same order”–ness does not per se distinguish Awareness from noticing or (minimally) attending. As Block says, the awareness of itself is (only) part of the experience. So far as has been shown, it is a separable part, as is the foregoing cheese sentence's second conjunct: there is the first-order component of the experience and another part that represents the first-order component, as in Gennaro (Reference Gennaro1996). So how does that latter representational part differ from noticing or attending?Footnote 1
The most obvious guess would be in terms of passive versus active introspection. “Higher order” theorist Armstrong (Reference Armstrong and Armstrong1981, p. 63) distinguishes between mere “reflex” introspective awareness and “scrutinizing” or actively exploratory introspection. The former is merely a “watching brief” and not really worth calling “introspection,” while the latter is “introspection proper.” Though Armstrong does not say so, I daresay this is a matter of a low and routine level of attention versus a high and active level of attention.
But that cannot be what Block means either. If the reflexive part of the experience were a matter of passive, routine “watching” and/or peripheral, low-level attention, it would still be watching and attention, which are what he is denying.Footnote 2
Of course there is representation in the brain that does not constitute either noticing or attending. But the awareness Block is talking about is person-level; it is the whole subject who is supposed to be aware of her/his own experience.
What, then, is Awareness, and how does it differ from the various forms and degrees of cognitive accessibility?
