Arguably, explaining the nature of consciousness is an important and perplexing area of philosophy despite the fact that the concept has been shown to be highly ambiguous. According to Ned Block, consciousness connotes several different mongrel concepts and phenomena (Block, 1995). By consciousness, he means the subjective state of awareness or even sentience that often begins when an individual wakes in the morning and goes on all through the entire time a person is awake to a time when he or she goes back to a dreamless sleep, becomes unconsciousness or even dies. According to Block, (1995), he apparently brought out a clear difference between access (A) and phenomenal (P) consciousness. The P-consciousness specifically comprises of the subjective experiences while A-consciousness comprises of information availability information within the cognitive system for reasoning purpose.
Ned further went on to argue that both phenomenal and access consciousness often do not concur in human. Most critics of Ned argument have noted that if there are zombies, then it will follow that cases of both access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness are not conscious in any sense of the term. Ned’s rationale to call access consciousness a kind of consciousness is that it precisely fits important kind of quasi-ordinary usage and further, it is a kind of consciousness relevant to use of words such as aware and conscious in the cognitive neuroscience (Block, 1995). Access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness in most occasions tend to occur together, and it follows that in case one of them is missing, then unconscious states might happen. In virtue of a missing access consciousness, then one will think of the Freudian state of unconsciousness then by virtue of missing phenomenal consciousness, a person can think of super blind sighter or the unfeeling robot or computer as unconscious.
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Chalmers is well known for his work on the concept of the hard problem of consciousness in his paper, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness". According to Chalmers (1995), the hard problem of consciousness according to Chalmers entails the challenge of describing how physical practice in human brain results to the subjective conscious experience. In his analysis, Chalmers brings out a clear distinction between “easy"(cognitive) problems of consciousness which focuses on the discrimination of objects and the “hard” (phenomenal) problems of consciousness that focuses on explaining why the feelings that accompany awareness of sensory information exist at all. Chalmers further holds onto the notion that there are numerous problems of consciousness. According to Chalmers (1995), he went further to state that Consciousness is also an ambiguous term that illustrates various phenomena.
According to Chalmers, Neuroscience has the potential to answer every question that focuses on how experiences occur, but it can never answer a consciousness question on why this often happens. According to Chalmers (1995), among the ‘easy’ problems as brought out by Chalmers include focus of attention, a capability to discriminate and even react to the stimulus in the environment, deliberate control of behaviour, information integration through a cognitive system and lastly mental states’ reportability. Therefore, all of these factors lead to various conscious experiences which will include both deliberate reaction and actions. According to Chalmers (1995), Chalmers expressed his disagreement with the aspect that we tend refer to any organism as conscious by stating that it is awake, therefore, this does not significantly fit his overall definition of consciousness but fits precisely his description of the aspect of awareness. Chalmers further illustrated that “why" actual experiences occurs is the real foundation of consciousness and the "hard problem."
The knowledge argument is a major challenge to the concept of physicalism, the doctrine that holds that the world is physical. The arguments often begin with an assertion that there exist truths concerning consciousness that could not be deduced from the complete physical truth. Contrary to the concept of physicalism, the total physical fact might not be the whole reality. Therefore, the physical fact might not necessarily establish or metaphysically dictate the entire world’s truth. According to Ned Block, he assumes that physicalism is probably true and the inverted spectrum argument specifically targets functionalism. Block makes the point that physicalism and functionalism are orthogonal. Block approached the concept of physicalism as the problem of causal drainage. Block thus firmly believes that if it happens that the supervenience case holds it would follow that the physiological and molecular causations might not exist (Block, 1995). When the mental causation’s possible problem is a definite setback, a parallel issue should thus emerge for the rest of the special science, except for causation at the primary physical level. You could be a causal role functionalist dualist (nonphysical mental stuff fills the right causal roles).
David Chalmers focused his interested on the ontology of mind and apparently interchanged the concepts physicalism and functionalism. According to Chalmers (1995), Chalmers believes that the world is causally closed and further, everything in it save conscious experience tends to reduce to the physical. He went on to state that the soft science often is ultimately connected to the physical through their functionalizability. It follows that in case something is proven to be functional, then it is true that is it also physical. Chalmers explicitly argues for the ‘explanatory gap’ from objective to subjective and further clearly criticizes the physical explanation of the mental experience which makes him a dualist. Based on his "naturalistic dualism" point of view, he firmly believes that the mental states are caused by the physical systems and the concept of dualism because he strongly believes that the mental state is ontologically different from the physical system.
According to Chalmers (1995), Chalmers is well known for his argument of logical possibility of philosophical zombies which are physical duplicates of human but lacks qualitative experience. According to Chalmers, since these zombies are significantly conceivable to man, then it follows that they are logically possible; therefore he stated that consciousness is a major property ontologically autonomous of any known physical properties. To him, all information-bearing system are conscious that leads him to entertain the likelihood of the conscious thermostats in addition to a qualified panpsychism that referred to it as panprotopsychism.
Chalmers firmly believes that the distinction brought out by Block is one of the most useful tools. According to Chalmers (1995), a clear conceptual distinction could be easily made between both access and phenomenal consciousness especially when an individual considers the notion that one can imagine possibilities of P-Consciousness without A-Consciousness and A-Consciousness without P-Consciousness. In addition to this, A-Consciousness can be accounted for by the cognitivist explanations while P-Consciousness is resistant to such explanations. Unlike Block, it is clear that Chalmers firmly believes that P-Consciousness and A-Consciousness in most instances occur together. Chalmers went further to provide an alternative approach to describing A-Consciousness through playing down the function of rationality.
Block clearly defined the concept of content as being A-Conscious particularly if it was poised for a direct rational control of action (Block, 1995). According to Chalmers, it might not be enough to state that the content is A-Consciousness if it is directly available for utilisation in directing behaviours. Chalmers thus pointed that the issue with differentiating between P-Consciousness and A-Consciousness is that one is left with the question, why the two concepts often happen together. It might be the case that, there is no precise function of P-Consciousness in the collective cognitive economy. Therefore, if Chalmers is right, then it is true that A-Consciousness will be enough for the control of organism’s behaviour. Further, this leaves open the argument of potential likelihood of zombies that are identical to human beings in all aspects except that they do not have P-Consciousness. In concluding his argument, Chalmers notes that P-Consciousness has no significant function in the cognitive functioning and further, A-Consciousness does all the work. Despite the fact that Chalmer has pointed the problem of Block’s argument, he still accepts that phenomenal consciousness is different from the functional or physical property (Chalmers, 1995).
Arguably, it is clear that Chalmers makes an interesting point especially in the analysis of the hard problems in addition to how the neuroscience fails to address most of the hard issue of the consciousness. Block on the other has put forward a clear argument on access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness (Block, 1995). Block was very precise in bringing out the distinction between consciousness - phenomenal and access a concept that has also been supported by Chalmers. It sounds reasonable for Block to argue that A-Consciousness and P-Consciousness in most instances occur together however in other cases they do not occur together and his argument is a useful approach to explaining the consciousness problem. Block went further to emphasize his argument to ensure that people get the full understanding of the dissimilarity between access and phenomenal consciousness using clear examples (Block, 1995). Arguably, the cases can be said to have cleared up a potential confusion that one might have between the two consciousness categories. Block’s argument helps one to seek the cognitivist explanations of an individual behaviour without necessarily having to find a strategy to include the phenomenal features of experience in his statement.
Chalmers seems to have made certain generalizations that might not add any concept of validity to the suggested situation (Chalmers, 1995). For instance, it is evident that thermostat does not fit any definition of consciousness. The other argument that might not be true is that consciousness has to be a baseline. He used to matter in his argument, but everything including matter has drastically changed and dissected more than he supposed. Therefore, arguing that consciousness can be dissected might be true, but his argument that experience is the building block of consciousness and can never be broken down further might not be correct. The acceptance of the zombie argument would, therefore, us to accept the failure of the totality of the physical facts to include the phenomenal because the zombie world is physically a duplicate.
References
Block, N. (1995). Some concepts of consciousness. Sciences , 18 (2).
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of consciousness studies , 2 (3), 200-219.
