Can awareness be present without memory, report or attention?

{
 "schema_version": 1,
 "artifact_type": "argument_fabric_dossier",
 "question_id": "q:awareness-without-memory-report",
 "question": "Can awareness be present without memory, report or attention?",
 "why_it_matters": "This question isolates the minimal conditions of manifestness. If awareness can persist without memory, report or attention, then consciousness is more elementary than cognitive access and cannot be reduced to access or metacognition. This directly supports the phenomenal consciousness concept and challenges higher-order and global workspace theories.",
 "status": "live_crux",
 "resolution_level": "phenomenological",
 "parent_questions": [
  "q:prakasa-definition",
  "q:consciousness-fundamental"
 ],
 "candidate_explanations": [
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:phenomenal-consciousness-minimal",
   "tradition_scope": "block_chalmers_phenomenal",
   "name": "Phenomenal consciousness without access",
   "best_case": "Phenomenal consciousness is distinct from access consciousness and can occur without memory encoding, verbal report, or attention. Evidence includes: inattentional blindness paradigms where unreported stimuli may still be experienced briefly, fringe consciousness, and anaesthesia awareness with amnesia. The presence of experience is independent of cognitive access.",
   "hard_to_vary_core": [
    "Subliminal and fringe consciousness studies show that experience can occur without report or attention.",
    "The distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness (Block) is supported by cases where subjects report having experienced something but cannot recall or report what.",
    "Non-retentive awareness in meditation and absorption states suggests awareness can be present without memory encoding."
   ],
   "current_problems": [
    "All evidence for awareness without report relies on eventual report, creating a verification problem.",
    "Fringe consciousness still involves attention, even if diffuse; defining awareness without any attention is challenging.",
    "The phenomenal/access distinction is contested; some theorists argue phenomenal consciousness without access is conceptually incoherent."
   ],
   "falsifiers": [
    {
     "type": "empirical",
     "condition": "A demonstration using real-time neural measures that no awareness is present when report, memory, and attention are absent, with controls against confounds.",
     "status": "untested"
    }
   ],
   "initial_status": "live"
  },
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:awareness-requires-access",
   "tradition_scope": "global_workspace_higher_order",
   "name": "Awareness requires access or higher-order representation",
   "best_case": "Awareness is constituted by access: whatever is experienced is available for report, reasoning, and action control. The supposed cases of awareness without report are either confabulated or involve brief access that is rapidly forgotten. Global workspace theory and higher-order theories maintain that awareness without access is incoherent.",
   "hard_to_vary_core": [
    "The content of awareness is precisely what is available to the cognitive system for flexible use.",
    "If no report, memory, or attention is present, there is no evidence for awareness and no functional role for it.",
    "Inattentional blindness shows that unreported stimuli are not experienced, not that they were experienced and forgotten."
   ],
   "current_problems": [
    "The access account must explain anaesthesia awareness with retrograde amnesia: patients who later report awareness but cannot recall at the time.",
    "It must account for the phenomenological sense that experience is richer than what can be reported.",
    "The equation of awareness with access may be a methodological convenience rather than a metaphysical truth."
   ],
   "falsifiers": [
    {
     "type": "empirical",
     "condition": "A case of awareness confirmed by independent neural signature (e.g. face-specific N170, coherent cortical dynamics) that occu