Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One issue that has been raised time and again in philosophy of mind and more recently in cognitive science is the question of qualia, or "raw feels." What are qualia and how do they fit into the cognitive science conception of mind? We consider some of the classic qualia thought experiments and two proposed solutions to the qualia problem, eliminativism and content-dependence. While neither of these solutions are actually able to dismiss or explain qualia as claimed, the content-based solution does clarify the relation between cognitive science and qualia. Because qualia are precisely the part of our experiences that are not related to informational content (and therefore intersubjective), and cognitive science is primarily based on information content, qualia are not within the domain of cognitive science.