Can You Have Phenomenal Consciousness Without Access Consciousness?

"P-without-A" is shorthand for phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness. It is the idea that you can have a raw, subjective experience (the "what it is like" to experience something) without being able to report it or use it in reasoning or action[citation:3].

An example often given is the sound of a refrigerator running. You might not notice it, but if it stops, you notice something changed. Did you experience the sound without having access to it?

Another example is the "overflow" argument: when observing a complex visual scene, we feel that we have a rich visual experience even if we can report only a few elements[citation:15].

Proponents of P-without-A argue that these examples show that phenomenal experience can be richer than what we have cognitive access to.

Until recently, direct empirical evidence for P-without-A was hard to come by. Once participants report having an experience, they already have access to it[citation:3].

A 2023 study by Amir and colleagues claimed to have found the first direct empirical evidence using a novel auditory paradigm. Participants heard a mixture of sounds and were asked to report if they could hear certain sounds. In some trials, participants denied online access to the stimulus but later noticed when it stopped[citation:3][citation:10].

The study further showed that participants could retrospectively discriminate the qualitative aspects of the stimulus they denied hearing in real time. The authors argue that this suggests P-without-A exists[citation:10].

Other evidence includes the "overflow" argument (the sense that we have rich experiences beyond what we can report) and studies on inattentional blindness and the attentional blink[citation:15].

Critics of the P-without-A hypothesis argue that the evidence can be explained without positing a dissociation between phenomenal and access consciousness.

One prominent alternative is the "partial awareness" hypothesis. This suggests that what looks like P-without-A is actually cases where lower and higher levels of representation are accessed independently[citation:15].

According to this view, subjects are partially aware of the stimulus. They have access to some features but not enough to report it fully. This would explain why they can perform above chance on discrimination tasks without having full access.

Critics also argue that some studies confound phenomenal consciousness with unconscious processing, and that the "overflow" argument can be explained by illusory content rather than genuine rich experience[citation:15].

The debate is not settled.