Consciousness as a social construction

Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "c onsciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally c onscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use In reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an exam ple a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness" based on the ph enomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field i s represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their corre ct "guesses." They cannot harness this information in the service of action , however, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal conscious ness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide act ion. But stimuli in the blind held are both access-unconscious and phenomen ally unconscious. The fallacy: is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.