Dreams: an empirical way to settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness

The conclusions to be derived from Block's conceptual distinction between Access consciousness and Phenomenal consciousness (phenomenology or simply consciousness in what follows) have remained controversial since the publication of the paper in 1995. Do they pick up di erent properties? This debate has moved away from the conceptual domain into the empirical one. Whereas in the original paper, Block mainly made use of mental thought experiments to motivate his distinction, in the recent literature (Block, 2007, 2011) he deals exclusively with empirical evidence from current research in cognitive sciences. To do so, Block ne-grains the notion of A-consciousness to that of Cognitive Access. Cognitive theories claim whereas Non-cognitive theories deny that the cognitive access underlying reportability, which seems to depend on the working memory, is constitutive of consciousness. Block arguments are based on the high capacity of participants in partial report experiments compared to the capacity of this memory. In reply, defenders of cognitive theories have search for alternative interpretations of these experiments that make it compatible visual awareness with the capacity of the working memory. Instead of entering the debate among alternative interpretations of partial reports experiments, this paper aims at o ering an alternative methodology to contribute to settle the discussion between Cognitive and Non-Cognitive theories of consciousness. This methodology combines research in the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive access and the neurophysiological research in the study of sleep. It also avoids a classical objection that claims that consciousness should inextricably be tied to reportability on pain of falling outside the realm of science, which has been recently brouhgt back by Cohen and Dennett (2011). Section 1 presents the insights of Block's arguments against the constitutive role of cognitive access in phenomenology, as well as some replies from his opponents. Section 2 o ers an alternative empirical experiment recently presented by Fahrentfort and Lamme to assess the possibility of phenomenology without cognitive access and shows that it begs the question against Cognitive theories of cosciousness. Finally, section 3 presents the intended methodology and argues that it supports the claim that phenomenology is independent of cognitive access.