The importance of a consideration of qualia to imagery and cognition

Experiences of qualia, subjective sensory-like aspects of stimuli, are central to imagistic representation. Following Raffman (1993), qualia are considered to reflect experiential knowledge distinct from descriptive, abstract, and propositional knowledge; following Jackendoff (1987), objective neural activity is distinguished from subjective experience. It is argued that descriptive physical knowledge does not provide an adequate accounting of qualia, and philosophical scenarios such as the Turing test and the Chinese Room are adapted to demonstrate inadequacies of accounts of cognition that ignore subjective experience. Arguments by Dennett and others that qualia do not exist or that qualia do not provide additional explanatory power are addressed, and it is suggested that consideration of qualia is necessary in order to explain (and not just predict) objective behavior. The hypotheses of functional equivalence, second-order isomorphism, and psychophysical complementarity between imagery and perception are discussed, and the ability of analog and schematic models of imagery to account for qualia is examined.