CONCEPT
Access Consciousness
Ned Block's functional half of the consciousness distinction: a mental state is access conscious when its content is poised for global control—available for reasoning, verbal report, and the guidance of action—without any commitment about whether there is a felt quality accompanying that availability.
Access consciousness is the concept
Ned Block coined in 1995 to name the functional dimension of mind that theories of consciousness succeed in explaining—and to separate it clearly from the phenomenal dimension they typically fail to explain. A mental state is access conscious, on Block's definition, when its content is poised for use in reasoning, for the rational guidance of speech and action, and for global broadcast through the cognitive system. It is, in Block's compressed phrase, “information poised for global control.” Notice what this definition does not say: it says nothing about experience, nothing about felt quality, nothing about whether there is something it is like to be in the state. Access consciousness is purely a functional property, characterizable entirely in terms of how information is wired into the cognitive economy, and it was defined this way deliberately. Block's purpose was to mark exactly what successful functionalist theories explain, and to show