Knowing without Experiencing: A Non-Experiential Structural Cognition Model of a Creator

A creator could lack subjective feelings and emotions yet still have complete structural knowledge of all possible and actual realities. This article develops the Non-Experiential Structural Cognition Model (NESCM), which describes a creator as a noetic source that directly cognizes structures, causes, and consequences without experiencing phenomenal states. The creator exercises analogical agency, relates to an open future with graded freedom, and does not intervene in natural order. Possible worlds are compared through criteria like coherence, viability, resilience, and diversity. The model offers an alternative to anthropomorphic theism while acknowledging its own limitations regarding non-phenomenal agency, objective probability, and relational change.

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Abstract

This article develops a conditional, non-anthropomorphic model of a creator from a distinction between two epistemic relations: phenomenally undergoing a state and cognitively grasping its structure, causes, modal profile, and consequences. The distinction does not entail substance dualism or solve the hard problem of consciousness. It supports a narrower claim: complete structural cognition need not require tokening the phenomenal state cognised. On that basis, the article proposes the Non-Experiential Structural Cognition Model (NESCM). The model describes a creator as a noetic source that lacks creaturely phenomenal experience and reactive emotion, yet directly cognises actual and possible structures and exercises an analogical form of agency. It then connects this account to an open future, graded freedom, creator-world dependence, and a non-interventionist account of natural order. Future contingents may be unsettled without being unintelligible: the creator cognises every accessible history, conditional probability profile, counterfactual consequence, and subsequent change in those profiles, without selecting each token outcome. The creator is constitutively atemporal with respect to the grounding of the world but relationally temporal with respect to newly actualised states. Possible worlds are compared through structural robustness: coherence, viability, resilience, generativity, differentiated complexity, diversity, and open development. These criteria are not moral goods or a proof of creation; they state the bridge assumptions under which the model operates. The article argues that NESCM offers a more internally explicit alternative to anthropomorphic theism while acknowledging its central liabilities: non-phenomenal agency, the ontology of objective probability, and relational change in the creator.