Redefining the Cognitive Process through Differentiation of Perceptual Structure: Resolving Hard Problems in Cognitive Science via a Nine-Stage Cognitive Operation Model

This paper redefines the cognitive process by differentiating it into a nine-stage model, thereby establishing the boundary between ‘pure perception’ and ‘knowledge intervention’ as an independent domain of inquiry. Current cognitive science tends to treat perception and knowledge as a single integrated process. This conceptual conflation has been a structural source of persistent hard problems, including the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the Symbol Grounding Problem, the Frame Problem, the Chinese Room Argument, the Philosophical Zombie Argument, the Qualia Problem, and AI Hallucination. The proposed model structures cognitive operations into nine stages: Observer, Stimulus Generation, Pure Perception, Knowledge Intervention, Interpretation and Meaning Assignment, Internal Action Demand, Psychological Arousal, Action Execution, and Experience Completion with Feedback. These stages are further divided into the Functional Mind (Stages 1–4), which operates on factual processing, and the Psychological Mind (Stages 5–9), which generates derivative emotional and psychological responses. The critical contribution lies in isolating Stage 3 (Pure Perception)—the primordial moment of sensing “something is there” before any knowledge intervenes—as structurally distinct from Stage 4 (Knowledge Intervention). By establishing this separation, the paper demonstrates that the aforementioned hard problems originate from a category error: the failure to distinguish between different cognitive layers. This framework also provides a structural account of AI hallucination as the absence of Stage 3 combined with the reverse intrusion of Stage 7 pressure into Stage 4 processing.