Cognition As Opposed to Qualia

Even among people who accept the Hard Problem as real there is a distinction made between cognition on one hand and qualitative subjective consciousness on the other. Cognition, presumably, is amenable to analysis in terms of information processing, and may in principle be performed perfectly well by a computer. Subjective consciousness, or qualia, is the answer to "what is it like to see red?". Qualia is the spooky mysterious stuff that no purely informational or functional description of the brain will ever approach.

I would like either to clarify or eliminate the distinction. What exactly do we mean by "cognition"? When we speak of cognition in a computer, is it really the same thing that we are talking about when we speak of cognition in a human being? When we speak of "cognition" and "qualia", what are the distinguishing characteristics of each, such that we can be sure that some event in our minds is definitely an example of one and definitely not the other? The line between what we experience qualitatively and what we think analytically or symbolically is very hard, if not impossible, to draw.

Philosophers often talk about intentionality, which is the property of being about something. That is, something has intentionality to the extent that it is representational, or symbolic. Among the things that are often cited as being intentional are beliefs, desires, and propositions. People who talk about intentionality do not usually talk about qualia in the same breath, and vice versa. I believe that this is a mistake.

Recall that my zombie twin is an exact physical (and presumably cognitive) duplicate of me, but without any subjective phenomenal experience. It walks and talks like me, but is blank inside. There is nothing it is like for it to see red. Horgan and Tienson (2002) suggest an interesting thought experiment that turns the zombie thought experiment on its head. Imagine that I have a twin whose phenomenal experiencings are identical to mine throughout both of our whole lives, but who is physically different, and in different circumstances (perhaps an alien life form, plugged into the Matrix, or having some kind of hallucination, or a proverbial brain in a vat). The question that screams out at me, given this scenario, but that Horgan and Tienson do not seem to ask (at least not in so many words) is this: to what extent could my phenomenal twin's cognitive life differ from my own? If the what-it-is-like to be it is, at each instant, identical to the what-it-is-like to be me, is it possible that it could have any thoughts, beliefs, or desires that were different from mine? Now, we may quibble over defining such things in terms of the external reality to which they "refer" (whatever that means), and decide on this basis that my phenomenal twin's thoughts are different than the corresponding thoughts in my mind, but this is sidestepping the really interesting question. Keeping the discussion confined to what is going on in our minds (that is, my mind and that of my phenomenal twin), is there any room at all for its cognition to be any different from mine?

Think of a cognitive task, as qualia-free as you can. Calculate, roughly, the velocity, in miles (or kilometers) per hour, of the earth as it travels through space around the sun. Okay. Now remember doing that. Besides the answer you calculated, how do you know you performed the calculation? You remember performing it. How do you know you remember performing it? Specifically, what was it like to perform it? There is an answer to that question, isn't there? You do not automatically clatter through your daily cognitive chores, with conclusions and decisions, facts and plans spewing forth from some black box while your experiential mind sees red and feels pain, and never the twain shall meet. You are aware, consciously, experientially, of your cognition. But what exactly is the qualitative nature of having an idea?

David Chalmers has asked whether you can experience a square without experiencing the individual lines which make it up. This question nicely underscores the blurriness of the distinction between qualia in the seeing red sense, and cognition in the symbolic processing sense. When you see a square, there is an immediate and unique sense of squareness in your mind which goes beyond your knowing about squares and your knowledge that the shape before you is an example of one. What is it like to see a circle? What is it like to have a train of thought at all? What is it like to prove a theorem? What is it like to compose a poem? In particular, how do you know you have done so? Do you see it written in your head? If so, in what font? Do you hear it spoken? If so, in whose voice? You may be able to answer the font/voice questions, but only upon reflection - when pressed, you come up with an answer, but up to that point you simply perceived the poem in some terms whose qualitative aspects do not fit into the ordinary seeing/hearing categories.

Anything we experience directly, whether it is the kind of thing we usually associate with sensation and emotion or with dry reasoning and remembering, is qualitative: a song, a building, a memory, or a friend. By definition, all I ever experience is qualia. Even when I recall the driest, most seemingly qualia-free fact, there is still a palpable what-it-is-like to do so. To the extent that our cognition is manifest before us in the mind in the form of something grasped all at once, whether in the form of something which is obviously perceptual or something more abstract, it is qualitative. Otherwise, how would we be as directly aware of our thoughts as we are? How do you know you are thinking if you in no way express your thought physically (writing or speaking it)? A thought in your mind is simply, ineffably, manifestly before you, as a unitary whole, the object of experience as much as a red tomato is.

That we are aware of our thoughts at all in the way we are is no less spooky and mysterious than our seeing red. If you were blind since birth, the "what is it like to see red?" argument for the existence of qualia would not work so well. If you were deaf, neither would "what is it like to hear middle C on a piano?". If you were a severe amnesiac in a sensory deprivation tank, assuming your mind were otherwise functioning normally, would you have any reason to worry about these mysterious qualia that philosophers think about so much? I think you would, simply by virtue of noticing that you had a train of thought at all.

Just as qualia are not just the alphabet in which we write our thoughts, neither are they merely the raw material that is fed into our cognitive machinery from our senses. The qualia are still there in the experience as a whole after it has been digested, parsed, interpreted and filtered. Qualia run all the way down to the bottom of my mental processing, but all the way up to the top as well. We are not, to steal an image from David Chalmers, a cognitive machine bolted onto a qualitative base. Nor, as Daniel Dennett says (derisively), is qualitative consciousness a "magic spray" applied to the surface of otherwise "purely" cognitive thought. Each moment of consciousness has its own unique quale; new qualia are constantly being generated in our minds.

While the entire scene before us on the stage of the Cartesian theater may be inherently qualitative, its qualitative nature is nonetheless extremely dependent on our cognitive, symbolic interpretations. Not everything is necessarily a symbol (as Freud might have said, sometimes red is simply red), but symbols ubiquitously modify and determine our qualitative experiences. Almost everything we experience has the phenomenal, experiential properties it does for us by virtue of its associations, its context, and our interpretation of it. What it is like to see the printed word "cat" depends to a large extent on your being able to read English.

There are qualitative sensations that accompany particular, cognitively complex situations, but which are nevertheless no more reducible to "mere" information processing than seeing red is. Once, looking down from the rim of the Grand Canyon, I saw a hawk far below me but still quite high above the canyon floor, soaring in large, lazy circles. I was hit with a palpable, visceral sense of sheer volume - there is no other way to describe it. I felt the size of that canyon in three dimensions, or at least I had the distinct sense of feeling it, which for our purposes is the same thing. This was definitely something I felt, above and beyond my cognitively perceiving and comprehending intellectually the scene before me. At the same time, the feeling is one that is not a byproduct or reshuffling of sense data. After all, as a single human being I only occupy a certain small amount of space, and can have no direct sensual experience of a volume of space on the order of that of the Grand Canyon. Had I not experienced this feeling, I still would have seen the canyon and the hawk, and described both to friends back home. The feeling is ineffable - there is no way to convey it other than to get you to imagine the same scene and hope that the image in your mind engenders the same sensation in you that the actual scene did in me.

Nevertheless, the feeling that the scene engendered in me only happened because of my parsing the scene cognitively, interpreting the visual sensations that my retinas received, and understanding what I was looking at as I gazed out over the safety railing. The overall qualitative tone of a given situation depends crucially on our cognitive, symbolic interpretation of what is going on in that situation. Further, the individual elements of a scene before us have qualia of their own apart from the quale of the whole scene (e.g. there may be a red apple on a table in a room before us - it has the "red" quale, even though it is part of and contributes to the overall quale we are experiencing of the entire room at that particular moment).

There is no pure cognition in the mind, at least none that we are directly aware of. The cognition vs. qualia distinction (and thus the hard vs. easy problem distinction) is a vestige of the fact that for a long time philosophers and cognitive scientists generally held that all there was was cognition. When some felt forced to acknowledge qualia, they grudgingly pushed cognition over a bit to allow qualia some space next to it in their conception of the mind, so the two could coexist; now they wonder how the two interact. The peaceful coexistence of cognition and qualia is an uneasy truce. Qualia can not be safely quarantined in the "sensation module", feeding informational inputs into some classically cognitive machine. We must radically recast our notions of cognition to allow for the possibility that cognition is qualia is cognition.

"Information" is a terribly impoverished word to describe the stuff we play with in our minds, even though much of what is in our minds may be seen as information, or as carrying information. Shoe-horning mind-stuff into the terms of information theory and information processing, however, is a homomorphism, a lossy projection. I suspect that there are no easy problems in the easy vs. Hard Problem sense. The way the mind processes information has a lot more in common with the way the mind sees red than it does with the way a computer processes information.