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Article 4117 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Functionalist Theory of Qualia
Message-ID: <1992Feb28.070228.16926@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 92 07:02:28 GMT
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 48

Drew McDermott writes:

>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.

Those predictions are nice but irrelevant; I presume we're mostly
agreed on the kind of theory it will take to predict/explain our
behaviour, our neural organization, our verbal reports, etc.  But
the fundamental requirement on a theory of qualia is that it
explain *why we feel the way we do*; and you can't do that by
redefining "feeling" to be "makes certain verbal reports", any more
than you could do it by redefining it to mean "wears striped
underwear".  It may be a consequence of your theory that people
*behave* the way they do, but it's not a consequence of your theory
that people *feel* the way they do.

You might say that this is just reifying the notion of "feeling",
as a vitalist would reify the notion of life, or a "massist" might
reify the notion of mass, saying "you've explained these object's
behaviour, but you still haven't explained their mass/life/whatever".
In reply: damn right I am!  Qualia are real properties that we
experience directly; in that way they're quite unlike life, mass, or
whatever, which are more or less inferences or explanatory
constructs from other kinds of observations.  For mass and life,
once you've explained the observations -- e.g. reproduction,
metabolism, adaptive function for life, or inertia, falling objects,
etc, for mass -- you've explained mass and/or life, because there
was no reason to believe in mass or life, over and above those
observations.  Not so for qualia.  Qualia aren't inferences from
observations from behaviour; they're directly experienced properties
that are strictly independent of our knowledge of behaviour.  As
such they stand in need of independent explanation.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


