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+--- Thread: Article Status quo finally realizes cognition is not necessary for phenomenal experiences? (/thread-21087.html)
Status quo finally realizes cognition is not necessary for phenomenal experiences? - C C - Aug 13, 2026
Well, you actually do need at least a quasi-sapient system to recognize and verify that a visual, auditory, tactile, etc thought or sensation is present or presenting itself. But otherwise, it was pretty daft all along to be construing intelligence as the cause or source of manifestation. "Identification, understanding & motivation" itself is just another dynamic organization of matter outputting results or body behavior. Information processing and machine interactions in general don't need to experience themselves as anything in order to perform. Nor does weather and geological activity. If not for the brain being responsive to and interested in the private manifestations, they would be superfluous or lacking a contributory role.
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The tantalizing possibility of locating consciousness in the brain
https://www.noemamag.com/the-tantalizing-possibility-of-locating-consciousness-in-the-brain/
EXCERPTS: The mainstream position in neuroscience is that cognition is a necessary ingredient of consciousness — that somehow, the capacity for complex thought goes hand in hand with this mysterious phenomenon of subjective experience. Yet now we have computers that can achieve such cognitive feats, and still, we seem no closer to understanding how the brain produces our conscious awareness.
Most discussions of AI and consciousness ask whether machines can experience anything. But maybe the real mystery is: If consciousness is not fundamentally related to higher cognition, then what kind of phenomenon is it?
[...] Beneath every conscious thought lies a vast ocean of subconscious computation. The cortex performs these calculations to support reasoning, planning, memory and decision-making, but what enters our conscious awareness may be an experiential readout of those processes. Subjective experience may be like the instrument panel of an aircraft, summarizing critical information from systems too complex to inspect directly.
[...] Engineers attempting to understand a complex machine generally don’t begin with the most complicated component. Instead, they identify simpler building blocks and ask how those elements combine to generate more sophisticated behavior. Consciousness research may require a similar strategy.
Let’s begin with the simplest case. It is not difficult to imagine that a particular pattern of neural activity could give rise to a simple subjective feeling. Hunger feels one way. Pain feels another. Unease, familiarity, anticipation and confidence all possess their own distinctive phenomenology. Each feels like something.
Now suppose that complex thoughts are assembled from these primitive felt states like recipes in a cookbook. Let’s say that two parts familiarity and one part coherence produce the thing we call “understanding.” Three parts anticipation and one part motivation produce a thing we call “hope.” The individual ingredients remain simple, yet together they generate experiences that feel qualitatively different from any one ingredient alone.
[...] From this perspective, the richness of human thought no longer requires an endless catalogue of irreducible mental states. It may arise instead from an enormous combinatorial space built from a small set of primitive feelings.
[...] Of course, the idea that consciousness requires intelligence might be pre-AI thinking. As that assumption has begun to weaken, researchers have become increasingly willing to consider the possibility that subjective experience arises from evolutionarily older structures deep within the brain.
[...] Structures deep within the brain are more anatomically discrete than the expansive networks of the cerebral cortex. If subjective experience originates within these structures, then the search for consciousness changes from the sprawling landscape of the cortex to a relatively small piece of neural anatomy. Few discoveries would be more consequential than identifying the specific neural structures responsible for subjective experience.
[...] Taken literally, the idea that conscious experience is like the instrument panel of an airplane carries an uncomfortable implication. Instrument panels do not fly airplanes; they simply report what the underlying machinery is doing. If consciousness merely summarizes neural computation, then it risks becoming little more than an epiphenomenon — a passive observer with no influence over behavior.
That conclusion would be difficult to reconcile with evolution, which is remarkably efficient at preserving biological functions that improve survival outcomes while eliminating those that do not. If subjective experience has accompanied animal life for so long, then it is reasonable to ask what function it serves. Why should evolution preserve the feeling of hunger rather than simply generate feeding behavior? Why should fear be experienced rather than simply triggering actions to escape?
The apparent contradiction disappears if we stop thinking of feelings as passive experiences and instead view them as the brain’s way of evaluating competing biological priorities. Long before animals evolved to demonstrate language, reasoning or abstract thought, they faced a much simpler problem: choosing among competing biological needs. Eat or flee. Drink or reproduce. Rest or explore. These drives can’t all be satisfied simultaneously. Somewhere in the brain, they must be compared, prioritized and translated into action.
The ancient structures of the upper brainstem and hypothalamus are ideally positioned to perform this role. [...] If this picture is correct, whatever physical mechanisms give rise to feeling must also influence the neural circuits responsible for selecting actions. Exactly how this interaction occurs remains one of neuroscience’s deepest puzzles.
[...] From this perspective, subjective experience is neither the computation itself nor a passive byproduct of computation. Instead, it may constitute the currency through which ancient brain circuits compare competing priorities and select actions. This is the kind of decision support that even an early vertebrate would have required hundreds of millions of years before the evolution of the cortex.
[...] This creates an unusual situation. Neuroscientists can spend their entire careers uncovering the neural circuits responsible for pain, fear, memory or decision-making. But the moment they ask how those circuits give rise to subjective experience, the scientific ground becomes shaky. They find themselves steeped in conjecture.
[...] By demonstrating that many hallmarks of intelligence can emerge from artificial neural networks, AI has weakened one of the central assumptions that guided consciousness research for decades. Rather than searching for experience within the distributed computations that support language, planning and reasoning, researchers are asking a different set of questions... (MORE - missing details)
RE: Status quo finally realizes cognition is not necessary for phenomenal experiences? - Magical Realist - Aug 13, 2026
VERY provocative article! The more we get away from thinking consciousness as something in-itself and discrete and substantial, like a property, the more we can realize it as an entirely relational agency-driven activity. This is good news for AI since it should be possible to generate consciousness and intention in any medium or substrate--from neurons to silicon chips to even gears and levers. What we may be seeing here are the rudiments of a functionalist view on consciousness---one based on form and structure rather than on brain tissue.
RE: Status quo finally realizes cognition is not necessary for phenomenal experiences? - Syne - Aug 13, 2026
Just because cognition may be necessary to consciousness doesn't mean that consciousness is necessary to cognition. If they were mutually necessary, they'd essentially be the same thing. Instead, cognition is necessary to consciousness, but not sufficient, in itself, to produce consciousness.
RE: Status quo finally realizes cognition is not necessary for phenomenal experiences? - Magical Realist - Aug 14, 2026
I feel like cognition comes after consciousness. It's higher in the heirarchal structure of the mind. First I may feel tired. That is just the phenomenal experience of tiredness. Then I know THAT I'm tired. Consciousness involves the senses, sensations, and felt bodily states. Cognition involves language and concepts and propositional truths. Consciousness is the raw and felt experience of the "is", and cognition is the knowledge of WHAT it is. Consciousness is somatic and tacit while cognition is semantic and inferential. Consciousness is presentational while cognition is representational. Consciousness manifests existence while cognition manifests essence.