Phenomenal Access Dissociation: Blindsight, Aphantasia, and the Structural Unity of Identity Without Phenomenal Channel

A structurally unified class of neurocognitive phenomena exists in which functional processing remains intact while phenomenal access through a specific modality is absent or degraded. This class includes blindsight (visual processing without visual experience), aphantasia (cognitive imagery processing without mental images), anendophasia (linguistic processing without inner speech), alexithymia (emotional processing without affective self-awareness), numbsense (tactile discrimination without tactile experience), and dissociation (identity-preserving regulation without coherent experiential access). Current clinical taxonomy scatters these conditions across neurology, personality psychology, neurocognitive variation research, and psychiatry, with no unifying diagnostic category. Neither the DSM-5 nor the ICD-11 recognizes their shared structural signature. This paper argues that Identology provides the missing framework. Each of these conditions represents a case in which the identity-maintenance infrastructure—autoteria (whose minimal operation is Eigenbehauptung) and orthesis—operates normally while one or more channels through which awareness delivers phenomenal content are selectively offline. The paper introduces the term phenomenal access dissociation (PAD) to name this structural class, maps each member condition onto the Identological functional-layer architecture, derives predictions about comorbidity patterns and independent dissociability of phenomenal channels, and argues that the taxonomic incoherence of current classification systems reflects a conceptual gap that identity-first theory resolves. In the course of this analysis, the paper proposes an extension to Identology: that awareness, defined in the framework as a unitary regime property, is realized through multiple independently dissociable phenomenal channels. PAD is therefore channel-specific degradation of awareness—a recognition that the regime property admits internal structure without ceasing to be a regime property.