Bridging Block and Bundesen: A Functionalistic Account of Consciousness

Consciousness seems to present a special challenge for scientific investigation. Much research has been done on the so-called "easy" aspects of consciousness such as perception, attention, and memory. The "hard problem", however, still seems to elude scientific methods. In this paper I argue that some fields in cognitive science are already gaining ground on the hard problem. An interesting model is Claus Bundesen‘s (1990) Theory of Visual Attention (TVA) that seems to be compatible with Ned Block‘s (1995) distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. TVA proposes a two-part stochastic model where 1) every stimulus is given a weight in terms of belonging to a certain visual category and 2) every stimulus then enters a race for a place in a limited-capacity visual short-term memory store. TVA seems to be a good model to describe access consciousness; by expanding this model to account for how we learn categories we may advance our understanding of the "harder" problems of phenomenal conciousness.