A case where access implies qualia ?

Block (1995) famously warns against the confusion of ‘access-consciousness’ and ‘phenomenal consciousness’. Access consciousness occurs when the content of a mental state is poised for the control of rational action, for verbal report and for use in reasoning. Phenomenal consciousness, by contrast, involves the harder-to-define presence of experiential properties, of there being ‘something it is like’ to see red, to hear a distant bell, and so on. It is the explanation of phenomenal consciousness that constitutes the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness highlighted in Chalmers 1996. Block, like Chalmers, believes that many attempted explanations of phenomenal consciousness are really just explanations of (various forms of) accessconsciousness, and that the two notions are conceptually quite distinct (Block 1995: §3, Chalmers 1996: ch. 1). I shall argue, however, that there is at least one kind of case in which facts about access seem to imply the presence of full-blown phenomenal consciousness – a kind of case, that is, in which given the facts about access it is impossible to conceive of the absence of phenomenal consciousness. Consider a system (being, organism, whatever) capable of perceptually detecting a variety of differences between stimuli. And suppose also that this system can be interrogated about its own acts of perceptual differencedetection. Take a particular incident in which the system detects, for example, the colour difference between two visually presented stimuli. Interrogated about this act of detection, the system must (I suggest) say one of two things. It must say either: