Unconscious Belief and Conscious Thought

Abstract

Are conscious thoughts and sensations conscious in the same way? The chapter gives an affirmative answer to this question. The chapter argues first for two independent claims: first, that Block's notion of access consciousness must be understood in terms of phenomenal consciousness, and in this sense phenomenal consciousness is the more fundamental notion; and second, that beliefs are never phenomenally conscious, though episodes of thinking are. This provides us with the sense in which thoughts and experiences are conscious: they are both a certain kind of occurrence or episode, that the chapter calls an episode in the stream of consciousness. This provides the answer to the initial question: there is a single way of being conscious which thoughts and experiences exhibit.

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