A prominent view in cognitive science and philosophy of mind holds that consciousness is metacognition—that subjective experience is reducible to the brain monitoring, evaluating, and commenting on its own operations. This article challenges that claim. We argue that qualia—the elementary, irreducible qualities of lived experience—are fundamentally distinct from metacognition, which is...
Contemporary neuroscience and the philosophy of mind have long operated under the implicit assumption that subjective experience—qualia—is generated exclusively by the brain. Despite remarkable progress in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, this assumption has failed to explain why objective physical processes give rise to subjective, felt experience. We demonstrate that...