[1]
The material in the previous five paragraphs is adapted from Dennett (2013).
[2]
I once had an occasion to point out this prospect to Block. He had just participated in a laterality test, to see how strongly lateralized for language his brain was. There are two oft-used ways of testing this: with dichotic headphones, which send different words into each ear, where the subject is asked to identify the word heard (typically you only hear one of them!). A second, visual test involves looking at a center target on a screen and having a word or non-word (e.g., “flum” or “janglet”) flashed briefly in either the left or right visual field. The subject presses the word button or the non-word button and latencies and errors are recorded. If you are strongly lateralized left (your left hemisphere is strongly dominant for language and does most of the work of language processing), you are faster and more accurate on words and nonwords flashed to the right hemifield. Ned had taken the visual test, and I asked him what he had learned. He was, he said, strongly lateralized left for language, like most people, and he added “the words flashed on the left actually seemed blurry!” I asked him whether the words seemed blurry because he noted the difficulty he was having with them, or whether he had the difficulty because the words were blurry. He acknowledged that he had no introspective way of distinguishing these two hypotheses. Supposing that Block doesn’t have some remarkable problem with his eyes, in which the left half of each lens is occluded or misshapen, producing a blur on the left side of his retinas, it is highly likely that the blurriness he seemed to experience was an effect of his felt difficulty in responding, not the cause of this difficulty.
[3]
Thanks to David Gottlieb for drawing my attention to this way of looking at access consciousness.
[4]
Isn’t the Global Neuronal Workplace the derided Cartesian Theater after all? No, because what goes on there is not transduction-and-rendering, but informational integration: the coalition and consilience of competing elements. There is no transduction threshold that determines the time-of-entry “into consciousness”, and none of the multiple drafts competing in it are singled out as being conscious except retrospectively. This is the point of my admonition always to ask the Hard Question: “And then what happens?” (Dennett 1991, p. 225)
[5]
Note that I am not saying that our day-to-day consciousness wouldn’t occur in the absence of human company, but an implication of my speculation is that a Robinson Crusoe human, somehow raised from birth without human contact, would have subjectivity more inaccessible to us—once we discovered him and attempted to communicate with him—than the speech acts of the Rossel Islanders.
[6]

In Cohen & Dennett, we point out that limbic or emotional responses to colors have to count as instances of “access” to color-representing states “however coarse-grained or incomplete, because such a reaction can obviously affect decision making or motivation” (2011, p. 5).