Ned Block proposed a distinction between two types of consciousness that he called phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access (A-consciousness).
In unified conscious states, the things that we experience are "experienced together", "enter into the same phenomenal content" (p. 36, his emphasis) — which phenomenal content could be the content of a single non-composite experience.
The evolutionary hypothesis seems to be an adaptive one for what concerns 'the virtual actor, the ego', where syntactical language played a boosting role: During the evolution of primates, increases in demands of action planning, strategic thinking, and complex syntactical language probably necessitated the construction of a conscious phenomenal world (p. 228).
Ned Block has pointed out an important distinction between two concepts of consciousness that many of these proposals might be thought to run together: "access" (or "A-") consciousness and "phenomenal" (or "P-") consciousness.
A third clarification has been Ned Block's (1995) distinction between access consciousness (or A-consciousness) and phenomenal consciousness (or P-consciousness).
Second, things (and their posited but unproven existence) remain nothing but "ideas indispensable for the intelligibility of the changeable phenomenal world" (Micro, II, p. 584).
One cannot have a phenomenal concept of a phenomenal property P, and, hence, phenomenal beliefs about P, without having experience of P, because P itself is (in some way) constitutive of the concept of P. (Cf. Jackson 1982 , 1986and Nagel 1974).
Suppose objective, physical state P can occur without phenomenal state S in some appropriate zombie replica (in the metaphysical sense of 'can' noted above).
It's also possible challenge premise 5, which asserts the semantic stability of the basic phenomenal and microphysical terms used in 'P' and 'Q'.
(p. 37) Merely having phenomenal states might seem too little but Bayne and Chalmers are talking about phenomenal states where, for them, to have the state is for the state to be like something.
Roughly, the worry is that the zombie hypothesis, (P & ¬Q), is apriori coherent only if we assume that phenomenal properties satisfy certain abstract theoretical presuppositions.
