Disregarding phenomenology does not help us understand consciousness

parsimonious account of conscious access they present in their recent TiCS contribution1. In their view, conscious access to visual information is not limited to a fixed number of high-level representations such as objects. Also lower-level representations can be accessed, making that what is accessed at any moment in time a highly complex amalgam of features, objects and meanings. So far, we agree. However, following this, several claims are made about phenomenology, such as phenomenology overflowing access being an illusion, and that phenomenal and access consciousness should be collapsed. That is a mistake. From a strictly behavioral point of view, the fact of the matter is that several representations of a visual scene exist at any moment in time. There is a capacity-limited representation linked to reportability, attention, and cognition, that is converted into working memory once the stimulus disappears. Numerous experiments show that in addition there are larger capacity sensory representations, reflected in iconic2 and ‘fragile ’ sensory memory3, 4. There is nothing illusory about this: sensory memory holds a large number of objects (up to 164) in a state where features ar