Ned Block’s philosophy had been a key element of almost every article I have written here on The Cognitive Approach. The reason is that, although I do not support his positions about consciousness, I find them educational: they are not trivial errors, but rather very tempting errors. And tempting errors deserve attention.

Psychologist Paul Bloom (2004) has once written that we are all “natural-born dualists”, meaning that intuitively our subjective reality seem something radically different from objective world. Therefore, we tend to separate consciousness from brain processes, considering it something special, intrinsic, private, essential. Ned Block was often accused to rely excessively on this kind of feelings, building theories on folk psychology, using infalsifiable intuitions as proofs of existence and drawing differences that do not make a real difference. Therefore, most of the reviews to Block’s 1995 paper , where he presents his ontological split-up between access (A) consciousness and phenomenal (P) consciousness, were skeptical. Using Block’s words, “the controversial part is that I take P-conscious properties to be distinct from any cognitive, intentional and functional property”.

Despite the cold reception, the theoretical distinction between phenomenal and functional side of experience imposes itself and can be found nowadays in the growing dissociationist approach to consciousness. The reason for the enduring of Block’s position is easy to acknowledge: we are all natural-born dualists. The concepts of A-consciousness and P-consciousness were so familiar that even who was contrary to their use employed them to point at components of the folk appearance of experience. Therefore, “P-consciousness” became spontaneously a synonymous of “qualia” and “A-consciousness” a synonymous of “awareness”. At a certain point, to avoid philosophical controversies, some researchers started to make clear that they are working on the access aspect of consciousness, not the phenomenal one – inevitably, because the phenomenal problem is the hard problem (Chalmers, 1995), impossible to grasp!

And here we are. All these happenings turned an useful mistake into a consolidate philosophical result, tainting consciousness debate.

Said this, I must take a strong position: Block’s separation of P and A is plain wrong. Things in the brain do not go the way he claim. We cannot draw a line between the subjective qualities that arise from perceptual elaboration and other representational mental process like attention, memory, reasoning and language: these two aspects of consciousness are not independent, double dissociated, or whatever dualists like to say. Firstly, because the presence of a first person experience can be detected only through the correlation with a combination of these cognitive abilities, a correlation that see the vanishing of one consciousness side in the absence of the other. Secondly, because in every moment of our life a modification of content, salience, or relational attitude of cognitive functions could modify subjective experience. If both presence and qualities of consciousness depend on cognition then or phenomenology is a product of awareness, or they are the same thing. And I don’t think there is a real difference between this two possibilities. It is not important if we call the relationship between P and A “dependence”, “overlap”, “identity” or “supervenience” (Kim, 1998): the central point is their effective bound, the fact that when one changes the other changes too, and when one miss, the other miss too. I can concede to Block that there are two aspects of the consciousness phenomenon with different appearances, but they are no way detached one from another. We can describe them independently, as historical phenomenology illustrates, but not explain them as separate processes: they are two sides of the same coin, two ways to view the same thing, the holy trinity of mind.

A couple of examples. We can think of the relationship between awareness and phenomenology as the one between genotype (A) and phenotype (P): P is the product of A, but not in a deterministic way, since there can be contingencies that change the translation process; P, although being A realization, has some specific qualities dictated by the means of its implementation (flesh and blood, instead of DNA helix); the smaller change in A can change P and the smaller change in P can be brought back to A. Basically, genes and bodies are not the same thing, but they are related in a very specific way. If we want to find out the specific relationship between our subjectivity and our brain, we should not assume that they are independent realities, even if they intuitively seem to be. The characteristics of phenomenology do depend on cognition as the characteristics of phenotype do depend on genotype.

Second example. Block claims that phenomenal consciousness is perceptual consciousness, also known as qualia. Some researchers, in particular Alva Noe and Kevin O’Regan (2001; 2011), were able to attack the presumed undispositional nature of the subjective qualities of perception. However, their model is not a good example of the overcome of dualism by cognitivism, due to his counterintuitiveness. So, let’s choose a straight scenario: the redness of red or the smell of roses are not the only subjective experiences we have; indeed our emotions are as phenomenally connoted as cognitively denoted. Fear includes the realization of danger, bore features lack of excitability and motivation, envy has at its core a comparison of fulfillment – which needs a pretty developed theory of mind. Even pain, often considered a sort of sixth sense, has a cognitive core, since morphine is able to change its qualities affecting the way patients attend to it.

(I have drawn a thought experiment about the cognitive influence on perception HERE, claiming that expectations about the goodness of a wine may effectively change its conscious taste).

All these evidence allow us to overcome the separation between two aspects of consciousness. The next step is to employ the developed framework to counter Block’s progeny, the already cited dissociationist school of thought. That will be the topic of my next article.

Click HERE to access the bibliography.