The functionalist must deny that pain’s qualitative character is what makes it pain. They may grant that pains always accompany feelings of certain kinds, but a state counts as pain because of its causal role. Here the argument…
The functionalist must deny that pain’s qualitative character is what makes it pain. They may grant that pains are always accompanied by feelings of certain kinds, but, for the functionalist, a state is pain because of its causal role. This is where the absent-qualia argument arises. If we can imagine a creature that behaves exactly as we do when we suffer—so that the causal roles are present—but does not undergo our experience of pain, functionalism would be false. This possibility “implies that conscious qualia are not essential to minds, or are not essential at all if functionalism is true. Zombies meet every functional criterion for possessing a complete set of mental states, yet lack anything like the qualitative feeling that permeates our conscious experiences. It follows that you could have your full set of psychological states, including the belief that you are not a zombie, and the very same psychology, while being entirely devoid of conscious experience. You would inhabit a world outwardly indistinguishable from the actual world, but inwardly very different: a world with no inside.” Critics of functionalism therefore ask how a creature completely devoid of an inner life could resemble our feeling of pain. The functionalist cannot deny the creature’s possibility, since they concede that the laws of nature could have been different. Alternatively, rejecting it merely because it has not been instantiated invites all the criticisms directed at that primitive criterion throughout the history of logical positivism.
- Reza Zeidan.
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Source: Published on Facebook's "Braheen Center" page