(tl;dr: I think a lot of this is about one-way (read-only) vs. two-way communication)
As a long-term meditator and someone who takes contents of phenomenal consciousness as quite “real” in their own way, I enjoyed this post—it helped me clarify some of my disagreements with these ideas, and to just feel out this conceptual-argumentative landscape.
I want to draw out something about “access consciousness” that you didn’t mention explicitly, but that I see latent in both your account (correct me if I’m wrong) and the SEP’s discussion of it (ctrl-F for “access consciousness”). Which is: an assumed one-way flow of information. Like, an element of access consciousness carries information, which is made available to the rest of the system; but there isn’t necessarily any flow back to that element.
I believe to the contrary (personal speculation) that all channels in the mind are essentially two-way. For example, say we’re walking around at night, and we see a patch of grey against the black of the darkness ahead. That information is indeed made available to the rest of the system, and we ask ourselves: “could it be a wild animal?”. But where does that question go? I would say it’s addressed to the bit of consciousness that carried the patch of grey. This starts a process of the question percolating down the visual processing hierarchy till it reaches a point where it can be answered—“no, see that curve there, it’s just the moonlight catching a branch”. (In reality the question might kick off lots of other processes too, which I’m ignoring here.)
Anyway, the point is that there is a natural back and forth between higher-level consciousness, which deals in summaries and can relate disparate considerations, and lower-level e.g. sensory consciousness, which deals more in details. And I think this back-and-forth doesn’t fit well in the “access consciousness” picture.
More generally, in terms of architectural design for a mind, we want whatever process carries a piece of information to also be able to act as a locus of processing for that information. The same way, if a CEO is getting briefed on some complex issue by a topic expert, it’s much more efficient if they can ask questions, propose plans and get feedback, and keep them as a go-to-person for that issue, rather than just hear a report.
I think “acting as an addressable locus of processing” accounts for at least a lot of the nature of “phenomenal consciousness” as opposed to “access consciousness”.
(tl;dr: I think a lot of this is about one-way (read-only) vs. two-way communication)
As a long-term meditator and someone who takes contents of phenomenal consciousness as quite “real” in their own way, I enjoyed this post—it helped me clarify some of my disagreements with these ideas, and to just feel out this conceptual-argumentative landscape.
I want to draw out something about “access consciousness” that you didn’t mention explicitly, but that I see latent in both your account (correct me if I’m wrong) and the SEP’s discussion of it (ctrl-F for “access consciousness”). Which is: an assumed one-way flow of information. Like, an element of access consciousness carries information, which is made available to the rest of the system; but there isn’t necessarily any flow back to that element.
I believe to the contrary (personal speculation) that all channels in the mind are essentially two-way. For example, say we’re walking around at night, and we see a patch of grey against the black of the darkness ahead. That information is indeed made available to the rest of the system, and we ask ourselves: “could it be a wild animal?”. But where does that question go? I would say it’s addressed to the bit of consciousness that carried the patch of grey. This starts a process of the question percolating down the visual processing hierarchy till it reaches a point where it can be answered—“no, see that curve there, it’s just the moonlight catching a branch”. (In reality the question might kick off lots of other processes too, which I’m ignoring here.)
Anyway, the point is that there is a natural back and forth between higher-level consciousness, which deals in summaries and can relate disparate considerations, and lower-level e.g. sensory consciousness, which deals more in details. And I think this back-and-forth doesn’t fit well in the “access consciousness” picture.
More generally, in terms of architectural design for a mind, we want whatever process carries a piece of information to also be able to act as a locus of processing for that information. The same way, if a CEO is getting briefed on some complex issue by a topic expert, it’s much more efficient if they can ask questions, propose plans and get feedback, and keep them as a go-to-person for that issue, rather than just hear a report.
I think “acting as an addressable locus of processing” accounts for at least a lot of the nature of “phenomenal consciousness” as opposed to “access consciousness”.