Consciousness operationalized, a debate realigned

Abstract

This paper revisits the debate about cognitive phenomenology. It elaborates, defends, and improves on our earlier proposal for resolving that debate, according to which the test for irreducible phenomenology is the presence of explanatory gaps. After showing how proposals like ours have been misunderstood or misused by others, we deploy our operationalization to argue that the correct way to align the debate over cognitive phenomenology is not between sensory and (alleged) cognitive phenomenology, but rather between non-conceptual and (alleged) conceptual or propositional phenomenology. In doing so we defend three varieties of non-sensory (amodal)¹ non-conceptual phenomenology: valence, a sense of approximate number, and a sense of elapsed time.

Keywords: Access consciousness; Amodal experience; Cognitive phenomenology; Hard problem; Phenomenal consciousness; Zombie.