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Article 3728 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Functionalist Theory of Qualia
Message-ID: <1992Feb14.043043.14861@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 14 Feb 92 04:30:43 GMT
References: <1992Feb6.055620.23808@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Feb7.203648.8033@cs.yale.edu> <1992Feb10.032900.27301@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
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  In article <1992Feb10.032900.27301@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

  >>Besides, the theory does not contradict our experience at all.  It
  >>predicts that our experiences should seem to us exactly as they do,
  >>even after the theory is understood.
  >
  >This is where I disagree, obviously.  You and I both know that this
  >talk of "self-models" and so on is just a shorthand way of talking
  >about certain kinds of behavioural dispositions, complex mechanisms
  >of internal causation, and so on.  If one were to predict a priori
  >what it would feel like to be such a system, there'd be no reason
  >to suppose that it would feel like anything at all. (Of course we
  >know that in practice, we're more or less such systems and we have
  >qualia, but that's the very fact that needs to be explained, so it
  >can't be used in making the prediction.)

We're getting down to a basic disagreement about what needs to be
explained.  I think we need to explain what "feeling like" actually is
in the physical world.  I propose a certain theory; it's a trivial
consequence of the proposal that systems fitting the theory would feel
like what the theory says they would feel like.  If I propose that
"having mass" = resisting changes in velocity, it is no big leap to
predict that particles that resist changes in velocity will have mass.
Of course, the theory will fail to the extent that it fails to fit
reality, i.e., fails to make predictions and explain things.  But I
would expect a fully fleshed-out functionalist account to make lots of
specific predictions about the neural organization of the brain, the
behavior of organisms, what subjects report when various parts of
their brains are damaged, etc.

                                             -- Drew McDermott


