Abstract:

The ineffability and subjective nature of conscious experience—how it feels to be something—pose central challenges for scientific accounts of consciousness. We employ a representationalist perspective to analyze the cognitive and neural systems that could plausibly contribute to ineffability and subjectivity. This poster introduces the "self-modeling problem" as key to understanding the ineffable aspects of consciousness. The self-modeling problem arises when the system that evaluates perceptual representations attempts to evaluate itself and fails to do so due to the structure of the system. This limitation could partially underlie the difficulty in explaining the nature of consciousness and in introspecting subjectivity.

This poster also introduces a basic cognitive system of awareness based on the functions of the cortex and basal ganglia, as well as their interactions with the thalamus and hippocampus. This cognitive system is then used to inform a philosophical argument for the emergence and structure of subjectivity. Subjectivity, as generated by the system of awareness, is categorized into three types. Semantic Subjectivity, the 'what it's like' evaluative quality of experience; Affective Subjectivity, the 'what it’s like' emotional aspect of experience; and Perceived Subjectivity, the 'I am a thing experiencing the world' quality of experience.

The overall objective is to contribute to the task of understanding why con- sciousness is perceived as difficult to comprehend and to explain how Repre- sentational Subjectivity, Affective Subjectivity, and Perceived Subjectivity arise from a mechanistic and neurologically informed perspective.

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