He brings up a couple of points in this passage. If someone is misrepresenting the world, how would that change what the feelings are vs if they represented it accurately? What does that mean anyway - to misrepresent the world? It isn't like people can expect how exactly something is going to or supposed to feel, or understand completely how something feels. It seems there is a conscious filter of sorts that is conscious in the sense that it is unique to humans because humans have such a developed sense of emotion and breadth of feeling, but is unconscious in the sense that it is how their mind naturally functions (how it interprets and feels emotions, thoughts, experiences etc).
Phenomenal or 'experience" consciousness vs functional consciousness
What if someone only had phenomenological experiences without consciousness? Ned Block distinguishes between what he calls 'access' consciousness and 'phenomenal' consciousness. He states that A-consciousness is representational and has direct control of thought and action (A-consciousness is the functional aspect of mind while P-consciousness is the experiential aspect). If A=P then information processing theories are right and the mind can be made that way. If, however, a humans realizations matter then there is a more subjective element and experience cannot be described or programmed. Something with only A-consciousness would be a zombie or robot - since it would be functioning like a human but it would have no experience or sensation of experiences.
That makes sense, if someone only had feelings and had no rationality (similar to an animal) then it would only be phenomenally aware. If someone had direct control over their consciousness, and didn't experience things very much then it would be easy to create a machine that duplicated that behavior since machines don't feel. Searle, 1990 mentions Blocks theory of access consciousness and criticizes it for confusing levels of attention and consciousness:
- There are lots of different degrees of consciousness, but door-knobs, bits of chalk, and shingles are not conscious at all... These points, it seems to me, are misunderstood by Block. He refers to what he calls an "access sense of consciousness." On my account there is no such sense. I believe that he .. [confuses] what I would call peripheral consciousness or inattentiveness with total unconsciousness. It is time, for example, that when I am driving my car "on automatic pilot" I am not paying much attention to the details of the road and the traffic. But it is simply not true that I am totally unconscious of these phenomena. If I were, there would be a car crash. We need therefore to make a distinction between the center of my attention, the focus of my consciousness on the one hand, and the periphery on the other ... There are lots of phenomena right now of which I am peripherally conscious, for example the feel of the shirt on my neck, the touch of the computer keys at my finger-tips, and so on. But as I use the notion, none of these is unconscious in the sense in which the secretion of enzymes in my stomach in unconscious.
