Cognitive Phenomenology and Its Consequences for the Content Internalism/Externalism Debate in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

The default view in philosophy of mind and cognitive science is a separatist one, seeing consciousness and mental content as two separate facets of the mental. Whereas the connection between the two has largely been explored by attempting to reduce consci ousness to its intentional character (what a conscious state is about), this project explores the reverse possibility of studying intentional character in terms of conscious content. The cognitive phenomenology thesis states that thoughts, just like perce ptual experiences and bodily sensations, possess phenomenal qualities, or a "what it is like", experiential aspect. Thus, an entire set of questions, some of them traditionally raised for consciousness independently of mental content, resurface for consci ous cogitations: is there an explanatory gap between neuroscientific explanations of cognitive mental states and their phenomenal, experiential feel? Are thoughts only access-conscious, but not phenomenally conscious? What is the relationship between the sorts of conscious thoughts we undergo and our physical and social environments? Are the experiential qualities of our conscious thoughts shaped in some way (e.g., evolutionary) by the sorts of physical environments we inhabit? The goal of this project is to clarify the thesis of cognitive phenomenology and to evaluate its implications for a debate concerning the role of physical and social environments in individuating the contents of our thoughts. By considering that thoughts have phenomenal qualities, and by conceiving of those qualities as internal, environment-independent properties, one can derive an internalist thesis, emphasizing that in thought experiments in which the inner life of a subject is duplicated, the doppelganger's cognitive life will mirror that of the replicated subject, independently of the external physical or social environment.