Abstract

People possess phenomenal experience; or to follow Thomas Nagel, there is something it feels like, to be in a mental state. I take this to be a fact beyond dispute. The aim of my dissertation is to ask if the possession of experience is significant: does it play a role in producing behavior? ;The current stance among cognitive scientists is no, experience does not play any role in producing behavior. I call this position "cognition in the dark". This position is primarily motivated by the acceptance of computational approaches to the mind. Certain of the assumptions underlying the computational approach lead to splitting the mind into two parts, the phenomenal mind and the computational mind. It is then argued that only the computational mind is required for cognition. This split leads to a solution of the mind-body problem. Many cognitive researchers feel that the mind-body problem is an obstacle blocking us from studying the mind. By offering a solution, the computational approaches represent an viable methodology for studying the mind, even though they lead to cognition in the dark. In the first part of the dissertation I discuss the relationship between cognition in the dark and the computational approaches. I then show that the mind-body is not a serious obstacle to studying the mind and hence we can look beyond the computational approaches. ;The second part of the dissertation explores how experience might be significant. A substantial problem facing any theory of the mind that makes use of representations is explaining how a system can interpret or know the meaning of its own representations. According to the analysis in my dissertation, computational systems are inherently unable to solve this problem. I further claim that none of the other approaches to understanding the mind, currently at our disposal, are capable of solving the problem. Finally, I argue that experience can be used to solve the problem. Hence, I claim that experience plays a very real and very significant role in producing behavior: experience is what allows the mind to interpret it own representations.