Metacognition, Qualia, and Consciousness: A Generative Chain and Hierarchical Model

Discussions of qualia have long hovered around the terminal report level of statements such as “red just looks like this,” while paying relatively little attention to how subjective experience is generated, captured, processed, and hierarchically organized before such a sentence is ever uttered. Building on an earlier draft, this paper systematizes the intuition that “qualia are a mass of thought recursively processed by metacognition” and proposes a generative-chain model that traces the route from stimulus to qualia and onward to verbal report. It introduces metacognitive strength M and metacognitive difference ΔM to characterize the subjective and neural-layer structure of “qualia density.” Specifically, I first distinguish “bare feeling” (F) from “pre-conceptual experiential configurations,” and formalize the latter as Q ≈ K(F) = know(feeling): following an initial metacognitive operation K, bare feeling F is logically pre-structured and tagged to form a cluster of feeling. Second, I insert an intermediate stage of “captured feeling” between “feeling” and “qualia,” and, drawing on body schema and global workspace theory, argue that only those feelings that are pushed into the foreground of the organism’s overall state enter the subsequent chain of metacognition–qualia–language. On this basis, I propose that the “concentration” of qualia is determined primarily by the metacognitive dimension rather than by logical-computational capacity, and I capture the achievable qualia density per unit time by the formula Q ∝ N·M, where N is the amount of captured feeling. Furthermore, the sense of “high/low density” is not an originally given absolute scalar, but a relational product of cross-state metacognitive difference ΔM = M_now − M_then. Phenomena such as dreaming, mind-wandering, dissociation, and “dreams within dreams” can be understood as “inclusion relations among qualia” formed at different levels of M. On this basis, I further distinguish Q, L, and feel (φ), and recast Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness”—from the abstract questions “why is there qualia at all?” and “why this kind of qualia?”—into structural questions concerning K(F), M, and their neural realizations. To avoid sliding into metaphysical idealism, I put forward a brain-based “non-idealist physicalism”: the ontological location of qualia is on the subject’s side, as the subjective appearance of the brain under certain organizational forms. By introducing M_neural and ΔM_neural, we can search for testable neural correspondences in metacognition-related networks such as prefrontal and fronto-parietal circuits. Finally, I systematically situate this framework in dialogue with Descartes’ cogito, Locke’s inner sense, higher-order thought theory (HOT), global workspace theory, and several contemporary naturalistic theories of consciousness. Taking M, ΔM, Q ≈ K(F), and M_neural as a common vocabulary, I attempt to build a continuous and empirically constrained bridge model between subjectivity and physicalism.