 Other responses to the objection remain (Carruthers 2000, 2005). One would be to allow that unconscious phenomenal consciousness is possible, and to appeal to the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness to explain away the seeming contradiction involved. Remember, phenomenally conscious states are those that it is like something to be in, and that possess a subjective feel; whereas access-conscious states are those that are available to interact with some specified cognitive processes (for example, they might be those that are reportable in speech). So all we would be saying is that states with feel can occur in ways that aren’t (for example) reportable by the subject. There is no contradiction here. An alternative possible response would be to extend the higher-order theory in question to include the relevant sort of access-consciousness as a further component. A dispositional HOT theorist, for example, might say that a phenomenally conscious state is one that both possesses the right sort of dual content and that is reportable by the subject. I shall not attempt to adjudicate between these possibilities here.