Response to Fahrenfort and Lamme: Defining reportability, accessibility and sufficiency in conscious awareness

摘要

In their letter to TiCS [1], Fahrenfort and Lamme (F&L) bring up two issues in response to our position [2] that we address here. The first issue concerns the relationship between access and reportability. F&L write that we 'propose that consciousness is inextricably tied to one's ability to report about the contents of an experience'. Their criticism seems to rest on the belief that we claim that consciousness is tied to the ability to do things such as talk or press a button. This is not our view. If it were, it would clearly be wrong: information can be conscious yet verbally unreportable.