All we have to do… is to define âconsciousnessâ explicitly to mean what you call âfeelingâ (I usually use the word âexperienceâ to avoid âconsciousâ, and define âexperienceâ accordingly). We know what we mean!
A conscious/mental/experiential/phenomenological/subjective state is a state that it feels like something to be in. Hence I prefer to stick to feeling: its much the simplest, most direct and face-valid descriptor.
I think [stones] may be constituted of experientiality.
It feels like something to be a stone? (Or a part of a stone?)
I can even accept âdecorativeâ. I understand this to mean that classical zombies are logically possible even though Kirk zombies arenât.
I think leptons, stones, toasters — and probably also microbes and plants — are zombies. But I canât explain how and why we (sometimes) aren’t. (It never feels like anything to be them, but it [sometimes] feels like something to be us.) (âDecorativeâ because we cannot explain feelingâs function.)
Mistake to think [feeling] is a theoretical âcostâ, for [1] radical emergence is a greater theoretical cost, [2] non-feeling reality is already a cost, because itâs a unwarranted theoretical posit.
I have no problem with molecules and stones and toasters and microbes and plants being zombies. Nothing to explain. Their states are unfelt. I have enormous problems explaining how or why other organisms are not zombies too. But theyâre not. Having (genetically coded) traits is surely more costly than not having them.
the biologist doesnât need an explanation for the very existence of feeling, and has an excellent explanation for the existence of feeling tuned to serve adaptive purposes.
I have yet to hear that adaptive explanation; if (as I believe) feeling is a biological trait, it does need a causal (adaptive) explanation.
One useful terminological option here is to define âmindâ in such a way that feeling doesnât entail mind (see e.g. Russell, perhaps also Damasio) ⊠feeling is v low-level, mind is essentially useful in some way
Hi or lo, I see no causal explanation of this âusefulness.â Itâs doings, and the capacity for doing them, that are useful. And if a state is not felt, I have no idea what is meant by calling it mental (and vice versa).
[feeling is physicistsâ] problem insofar as they propose to offer a general theory of concrete reality
It seems to me feeling’s just biologistsâ problem, just as, say, digestion or photosynthesis is. No new physics there.
[functing, ordinary causal explanation, whether in physics or in biology] doesnât explain the existence of non-feeling matter ⊠to explain that, one would need to answer the question âWhy is there something rather than nothingâ?
Here I show my non-metaphysiciansâ pedestrianism: Try as I might, I canât help but feel that that sort of onticism is otiose.
the view that consciousness is everywhere but isnât all there is) is [1] independently motivated and [2] explains this for free. Biological evolution sometimes produces an organism O that is not simply made of feeling stuff, in such a way that it (O) isnât itself a subject of experience, but is also itself a subject of experience, be it is adaptive.
Unfortunately, to my naive realistsâ ears this sounds more speculative (and complicated) than explicative. Shouldn’t the explanans be simpler than the explanandum? All I wanted was to know how and why (some) organisms (sometimes) feel rather than just funct!