## 2 Phenomenal Consciousness Aka Sensory Experience
### The Central Dogma of Cognitive Science  
The central dogma of cognitive science is 'consciousness is a process, not a thing'. Although the truth of this maxim is taken for granted in the field, its origin is not entirely clear. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [1] attribute it to [PERSON], saying \"Consciousness, as [PERSON] pointed out, is not a thing, but a process or stream that is changing on a time scale of fractions of seconds [2]\". However, although [PERSON] certainly originated the'stream of consciousness' idea, the closest I can find to a statement by him that consciousness is a process not a thing is a passage in Chapter 6 of Volume 1 of his 1890 magnum opus [2], where we are exhorted to:  
_\"ask ourselves whether, after all, the ascertainment of a blank unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness with the succession of total brain-processes, be not the simplest psycho-physic formula, and the last word of a psychology which contents itself with verifiable laws, and seeks only to be clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses\"_. Such a mere admission of the empirical parallelism will there appear the wisest course. By keeping to it, our psychology will remain positivistic and non-metaphysical; although this is certainly only a provisional halting-place, and things must some day be more thoroughly thought out...\". [Italics in original]. This hardly seems a ringing endorsement for a maxim that has since achieved such incontestable status. 'Correspondence' is not, after all, the same as identity. In the post-James era, the study of consciousness was temporarily derailed by the Behaviorist paradigm. The founder of this movement, [PERSON], announced that 'The time has come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness; when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation.' [3]. However, after thirty or forty years, this approach failed to satisfy. In the late 1950s, Behaviorism was largely supplanted by the functionalist, information processing theories of cognitive science. By 1962, one of the main founders of this cognitive revolution, [PERSON], felt justified in stating unequivocally that \"Most psychologists confess that they do not know what consciousness is. They are sure it is not a substance--a material thing--but a process or group of processes, which occurs in some objects and not in others\" [4] p. 27. To be fair, [PERSON] was using this precise form of words to point out the similarities between the prevailing view of psychologists about consciousness and the prevailing view of biologists about life, so it is possible that he himself did not implicitly believe that consciousness is a process, not a thing. Certainly, less than 30 pages later in the same book he makes cogent arguments for the contradictory claim that 'No activity of mind is ever conscious' [4] p. 56. Apparently even the originators of the 'consciousness is a process not a thing' meme were more than a little ambivalent about its accuracy. However it remains true that most cognitive scientists, then and now, are as [PERSON] said sure that consciousness is a process, not a thing. In fact though, no empirical evidence has ever been offered to support the contention that consciousness is identical with (rather than just usually associated with) any particular neural process. This complete lack of evidence may well be due to the fact that it is not clear what experiment could possibly falsify the claim that consciousness _is_ a particular process. There are plenty of experiments capable of showing that any given process is or is not necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness: see Section 2.2 below for some of them. But this is not at all the same as showing that some process that might in the future turn out to be both necessary and sufficient is actually identical with consciousness.