Cognition Is Not Content: A Structural Account of Processing Conditions

Human cognition has been described in terms of content. This description becomes insufficient once artificial systems make output observable apart from subject attribution, intention, and relational context. Under this contrast condition, what becomes visible is a layered structure in which output, reconstruction, evaluation, and termination do not necessarily coincide. The same input may register as complete under one processing condition while remaining unresolved under another. This separability means that content-based description does not merely omit an additional variable: it can mislocate a processing difference as a difference in meaning, personality, intention, ability, or attitude. This is not a proposal for another criterion demarcating cognitive from non-cognitive processes. This paper specifies a minimal structure consisting of Core-foregrounded (CF) and Modulation-foregrounded (EF) configurations, which differ in how processing is constrained and how it terminates. Human cognition operates under internal constraint and dependency that are not freely generated or revised by the processing operations they govern. Failure takes the form of layer mismatch, consisting of termination mismatch and interpretation mismatch. Differences in processing conditions produce mutual unintelligibility as a structural result. Artificial systems provide a contrast condition under which the layered processing conditions behind output become observable without subject attribution. A content-based description would locate such differences in meaning, personality, intention, or attitude; this account locates them instead in the conditions under which processing proceeds and terminates.