Ep. 222: Debating Functionalism (Block, Chalmers) (Part Two)

0:00 Seth: That is intended to be a thought experiment that counters the intuition that you could conceive of something that's functionally identical to you, but without qualia, that's absent qualia. Is that a fair statement?

0:13 Mark: Yes. And I think one of the things that complicates this is that it confuses two things. It's hard to actually take the functionalist premises to heart, which is that this robot really is fully the same behavior as you. It acts just as cheery, it reports on its own experiences. Whereas when you imagine, you know, like a cyborg in a sci fi movie, like he wanted more power and so he started replacing parts of his brain with, you know, he had eyes and you replaced them with super eyes and, and he wanted ears, so he replaced him with super ears and, and he kept getting rid of.

But in, somewhere in there he lost his humanity and became more machine than man. Like that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the endpoint, acting just like you. It just happens to have, you know, a fake brain in the same way that you could have an artificial heart. So that's what you have to buy in the first place, that there really could be a functional isomorph of you that acts the same and yet is made of different stuff. And it could be that it just, you couldn't actually get that behavior out of different material. So if you believe that, then you just don't buy functionalism in the first place.

But this whole thing is supposed to be an argument against functionalism. So you do buy functionalism. You posit that there should be this thing, yet it has absent qualia. Is that right? Because actually Block doesn't buy functionalism.

1:32 Wes: No, no, Chalmers is doing a reductio,

1:36 Mark: but he's doing a reductio of reductio. That's what's confusing me here.

1:39 Wes: No, he's just saying if we accept that the robot doesn't have qualia and the person does, and we look at the gradual replacement between them and see that there are unacceptable consequences. We have to actually embrace the idea that the robot is conscious if it is functionally equivalent.

1:56 Mark: Right? If you're a functionalist, then you should believe that.

1:59 Wes: And he is a functionalist and he's trying to point out that yeah, we have to bite the bullet. So Block's worries about homunculi headed systems and the nation of China and all that. We have to be able to bite the bullet on those things and say, yeah, functional equivalence will imply mental states no matter how it's instantiated, as long as the inputs and the outputs are correct. And if you don't believe me, let's do this hypothetical and you could link this up to the China example, because you could have the little input output silicon chips, you could have their functioning link up to activity of actual people.

Right. It would slow things down. So it's not a great example, but you get the idea, and I think it's a powerful argument. I can't think of a good response to Chalmers thought experiment here, except to say, oh, no, a silicon chip. There's something about brain matter inputs and outputs that can't be replicated by a silicon chip, which Mark, I think you've already noted as a possible objection. Or one might say, well, maybe it's not really just a matter of inputs and outputs. It's something else that's going on with consciousness.

3:07 Mark: So we should make vivid though the problem with the halfway point. So he actually calls this Joe. Let's say Joe is the one half of the brain has been swapped out for silicon. What is it like to be Joe? Joe is functionally isomorphic to me. He says the same things about his experience as I do mine. So in other words, he says, I see colors brightly. Well, Joe says that he sees color brightly. But if we imagine what it would be like for these qualia to fade out, that at the end of the point at Robot, there's going to be no qualia at all. And it seems like if you're halfway through, either there has to be just a jagged discontinuity at some point that you're just experiencing colors in all the vibrancy, and then you're just not experiencing colors at all.

He says that would be really weird, suddenly disappearing qualia. There would be brute discontinuities in the laws of nature unlike those we found anywhere else. Any specific point for qualia to suddenly disappear would be quite arbitrary. As always in these matters, the hypothesis cannot be disproved, but the antecedent plausibility is very low. The other option is fading qualia. In other words, there are different ways the qualia could fade. Maybe the colors are less bright, maybe you can distinguish things less acutely. But it seems like you still have to be functionally equivalent.

Like if somebody asks you to distinguish this color from that color, Joe needs to be able to do so at the same level of acuity that Seth, the original, can.

4:26 Wes: Yeah, because you're functionally equivalent, all your behaviors are going to be the same.

4:29 Mark: He says the same things about his experience. I do mine. He exclaims about the vivid bright red and Yellow. By hypothesis, though, Joe is not having bright red and yellow experiences at all. Perhaps instead he's experiencing tepid pink and murky brown. Perhaps he's having the faintest of red and yellow experiences. Perhaps experiences have darkened almost a black. There are various conceivable ways in which red experiences might gradually transmute to no experience, and probably more ways we cannot conceive.

4:53 Wes: But.

4:53 Mark: But presumably, in each of these transmutation scenarios, experiences stop being bright before they vanish. The crucial point here is that Joe is systematically wrong about everything he's experiencing. He certainly says he's having bright red and yellow experiences, but he's merely experiencing tepid pink or whatever. If you ask him, he'll claim to be experiencing all sorts of subtle shades of red, but in fact, many of these are quite homogenous in its experience.

5:17 Wes: On a functional construal of judgment, Joe will even judge that he has all these complex experiences that he in fact, lacks. So it's not just that he's a behavioral replicant at this point with respect to color, it's that his judgment isn't even lining up with his qualitative experience at this point. So Joe is utterly out of touch with his conscious experience and is incapable of getting in touch.

5:42 Mark: Yeah. So then he goes on for quite a while about explaining why, okay, fading qualia are not logically impossible. It's possible we could be wrong about our experience, but it's really weird. It just seems much easier to imagine a functional isomorph that has no consciousness at all than a functional isomorph that is just wrong about their experiences. Like they have qualia. Doesn't it seem like the whole point of qualia is like, you know what they are if you're experiencing red, like, you don't know if the thing actually is red in the world, but. But you know, you're having a red experience. But on this, the guy is having a pink experience, and he says he thinks he's having a red experience, so that can't be what's happening. Does that make it any easier to swallow, Seth, adding those details, or it's basically the same issue you were having?

6:30 Seth: It doesn't help in the sense that it's yet another. Just I have to challenge an intuition with a thought experiment. It doesn't change that I don't need all of the details in order to either tease it out or not. I still just have to kind of sit with the idea of the possibility. Thought experiments don't help me get at any kind of intuition about Whether or not functionalism is a reasonable theory or not, or is defensible or not, like this particular thing, the inverted, we're functionally equivalent. We're having the same experience, but he's experiencing it as blue and I'm experiencing it as red. I don't really even know what that means.

7:09 Mark: That means that when I point to the sky and assuming it's a normal blue sky and say, what is that? You say blue, I say blue. We both say, oh, that that color is the same as the sea, which is also blue. So we're using the term blue the same way that experience is functionally analogous. But if you could actually look at qualia themselves, this inverted qualia thing, which is. This is the first time we're really bringing this up, but it's a variation on the absent qualia, instead of quality being absent, what if they're just different? If you could see inside my mind, you would be surprised.

You would say that thing that you're calling blue, that's actually red, you know, and then I look myself through my own eyes again. You know, you look through your own eyes again and see, no, no, that sky is blue. But then you look through the cerebroscope that reproduces. Didn't they have like this basically on black mirror that reproduces something, you know, so you basically see through somebody's eyes or the way they saw it. So presumably that would capture if the person. I guess the black mirror people just are ruling this out in advance and

8:16 Wes: we would never figure it out by talking to each other because you would just consistently use. The example was red and green for block.

8:23 Mark: And I guess even in the black mirror thing, it's like a camera mounted in your eye.

8:28 Seth: So it's.

8:28 Mark: The camera is just recording the light waves that are there. And so if you were always mistaken in seeing blue as red, when you see the recording, you would also see blue is red. You could never, through any mechanical means, seemingly get past this discontinuity. So the question is, is that discontinuity between people even possible?

8:47 Wes: The way Block puts it on page 304, it makes sense, or seems to make sense to suppose that objects we both call green look to me the way objects we both call red look to you. It seems that we could be functionally equivalent, even though the sensations are fire hydrants evoke in you, is qualitatively the same as the sensation grass evokes in me. Imagine an inverting lens, which when placed in the eye of a subject, results in explanations like red things. Now look the way green things used to look and vice versa.

9:19 Mark: You brought this up why, Seth? To complain about how that example didn't make sense to you.

9:23 Seth: I don't want to sound like I'm bitching, but that's what I'm doing. This is supposed to be sensible to me in a way that's going to get at an intuition about the problem that's in front of us. And it just doesn't for me. So essay after essay after essay, example after example after example. Trying to get at it's not helping me. I understand the problem that's at stake, but none of these exercises is helping me get any closer. I just feel like I'm wandering in the thicket.

9:54 Mark: So it's interesting with Block how this is ultimately supposed to result in qualia, which of course, you know, our whole consciousness discussion was around qualia and what to do with them actually aren't part of psychology at all. It's a really weird ultimate result. When we actually talk to Block and the stuff that we're going to read for that discussion, I think we'll be able to get at like what is Bloch's actual view? Because he kind of just seems like a skeptic about everything, right? If we combine what this paper where he's just being more skeptical about functionalism, presumably in favor of physicalism.

But then in the harder problem one, it was like you don't even know if physicalism is true, right? Because it could be that Commander Data, that this silicon based thing is conscious, but we just don't know and we can't know and we don't even know what would mean to know. So where Block actually lies, you know, all the rest of these guys that we've read, it's pretty clear, like, okay, Chalmers is a panpsychist of some sort or you know, property dualist. There might be some open questions within his view, but you can kind of put him on the spectrum and Dennett is way in the other end, like, well, where is Block?

Block is kind of has a weird patched together view that I think is because he breaks down the problem into several different problems. And one of the ways is I think he might actually be okay with functionalism for accounting for some mental activity, just not Qualia.

11:20 Wes: Yeah, absolutely. I don't think these philosophers think that functionalism, for instance, for beliefs are a problem in particular because you want to

11:28 Mark: be able to say what is it for me to believe that two plus two equals four and for Wes to believe that two plus two equals four. Why is that the same belief? They're in two different heads. And when does it change to a different belief? If I believe that thing in German and you believe it in English, is it still the same belief?

11:47 Seth: No, I think that's a legitimate. And that was one of the things that I kind of came down to at the end of all this was we can't even account for differences between two people that we agree have qualia and we agree they're not functionally equivalent. But we could say for the purposes of a simple case of perception, they are functionally equivalent and yet the qualia is not the same. So there's a sense in which even trying to create a reduction in that case of the mental to the physical or to even talk about functionalism, I don't know that functionalism explains that example

12:26 Mark: either, the qualia being the same.

12:29 Seth: No, no. Take the relevant parts of perception in between you and me, and we say functionally, you and I are equivalent, but we have different qualia.

12:38 Mark: So just basic philosophical clarity here, numerically different, yes, of course, we have different brains, so we're going to have different qualia. But are they typologically, are they different in character? In other words, if we're both looking at the same shade of red from approximately the same angle, our heads are really close together, neither of us is drunk, we're both in a normal lighting, neither of us is wearing funny glasses, then you would imagine that the qualia that we have of the patch of red, you and I, are roughly equivalent, that we are functionally equivalent.

13:11 Seth: We can't even account for or explain that. So why are we going through all these gyrations with trying to hypothesize if each individual's qualia is different? Because functionally we are all different. Is that fair? Human beings are, at least for the most part.

13:27 Wes: I mean, it depends on where you draw the line. I mean, functionally we're the same.

13:32 Mark: Each of us as a system instantiates infinitely many different functional organizations. So there's some with respect to a particular psychological theory. This is the annoying thing at the beginning of Block that I didn't want to go into, but this is maybe a problem with functionalism, and this is ultimately why Putnam that we read last time later in his career, rejected the whole thing, is because he thought it was problematic to narrow it down, to be clear enough of, like how you and I would be considered functional analogs of each other, because it seems like you really can't be a functional analog of like, strictly speaking, it has to be.

You have to just, I'm the functional analog of me in another possible world. In other words, like, we're in the same state exactly right now, and we have the same dispositions. And then you can then tweak things and say, well, in this other possible world, water does not equal H2O. Or there are other things about what's going on in my brain, and part of my brain is swapped out for a circuit. It seems like it always requires some weird abstraction to talk about functional analogs for exactly the reason you're saying that we're different enough in detail that it's always kind of a gross oversimplification to say, yes, we're having the same perception or we're having pretty much the same algorithm as at work.

When you and I decide whether pain is bad in this particular circumstance or not, it's all very abstract, so I see no way to get around that. Does that taint this for you, Wes?

15:03 Wes: I don't want to spend more time talking about methodology and whether thought experiments are legitimate. The point of these is not actually hypothesizing whether or not we have the same qualia. This is an investigation into whether each of us have similar qualia and similar circumstances. There's nothing to do with them. It's simply thought experiments for the sake of investigating whether or not we think functionalism works or what the possible objections to it are or defenses of it are.

15:32 Mark: It is relevant, though, how this conceptual work, how this reflection of our intuitions interacts with science, because he does think that, like, even if you believe in functionalism, actually determining that something is a functional isomorph or determining what it is that makes a pain a pain, is empirical work. According to Chalmers, I think according to both these guys, there's philosophical work, there's conceptual work, intuitive work that has to be done to kind of clear the ground to figure out, like, how to study stuff. But you're not actually going to get the answers just by doing what we're doing right now.

16:08 Wes: Yes, but the point of these papers is to discuss whether functionalism is a good explanation of mental states.

16:17 Mark: I find that ambiguous is a good explanation of mental states. Well, even if conceptually it seems to work, but you actually looked into it. You know, you tried to write down the algorithms based on observing behaviors and things, and you just couldn't do it. Like, then that would be a bad theory for a posteriori empirical reasons.

16:36 Wes: Are you saying that there's a theory that would not involve a systematic Cause, effect, explanation, because that's what you just said seems to imply. And I think, yes, they are assuming that if it can be explained, it must be systematically explained in terms of causes and effects, which is to say there's an algorithm of some sort, even if that algorithm rests not on deterministic causality, but on probabilities in transition. So you could account for randomness. Otherwise, I think the implication is that maybe it can't be explained.

17:09 Mark: Yeah, I think this is one of the interesting things that Block raises near the end of his paper. It seems like the whole point of functionalism, as you've just described, is to kind of apply regular scientific method to the analysis of psychology. For various reasons that I don't remember, Locke finds the attempt to do that through functionalism problematic, that functionalism actually doesn't work. And part of it could be just the reason that I was saying that each of us functionally instantiates infinitely many functional models.

17:38 Wes: There's no satisfying. It just all comes back to the mind body problem. I mean, it doesn't satisfy us to talk about machine tables and functional states in the sense there's no causal implication from that to what it's like to be in pain, for instance. So I think in the end that's what's inherently. I mean, we've talked about this, I think, at least once over each of these episodes on functionalism, but there's a real misalignment between qualia and functional explanations because you would never derive from a functional explanation what it's like to be in that state. And so it's a weird theory that says to be in pain is just to be in this certain functional state, when on paper you would never be able to infer what it's like to be in pain from understanding the functional state. It goes back to the Jackson black and white room argument. Mary's hovel.

18:42 Mark: See, but it sounds like you're just objecting to the reductionist version. And again, Chalmers, who is arguing for

18:49 Wes: functionalism here, yes, that's what Block is describing. That's why I think these essays aren't quite in conflict with each other, because Block makes it clear he's thinking of functionalism in all its varieties as resting on this constitutive identity statement. And Chalmers says, no, I'm not defending that version of functionalism. I'm basically defending a kind of supervenience. He doesn't say that explicitly, but that's the way I take it. I'm defending something that's consistent with property Dualism. All I'm saying is, I'm not saying that the functional organization is the mental state.

Chalmers is jettisoning the basic intuitive problem that I'm talking about where hey man, you can't get from the functional state to qualia intuitively. It doesn't really make sense. He's just saying, yeah, I understand that, but what I'm saying is that in order to have those qualia, you have to be in that functional state. There's a causal relationship. It's no longer an identity statement, it's a causality statement which we know to

19:49 Mark: be true, which is more vague than

19:51 Wes: causal because we know if the functional state is not there, then we can't feel pain. And we also know that if we are feeling pain, yeah, then definitely the functional state must be there. That's a weaker or it's a more generalized abstract way of saying something that we already definitely empirically know is true. Right? Which is that without the brain states there are no conscious experiences. And if we are having a conscious experience, there is a brain state underlying it that we're not spiritualists, we're not embracing some anti naturalistic metaphysics.

So once you accept that it's a natural move with all the problems that physicalism has with it, it's a natural move to rephrase that in non reductive functional terms, which is to say, yeah, to have the mental state I need the functional state. If the functional state is there, then I have the mental without saying it's constitutive. Because again, the problem with the constitutive stuff is just that once we have the functional state, there's still more left over. There's still the qualia. And the qualia isn't quite explained just by giving the functional state.

20:58 Mark: I just don't believe that bloch in this 66 page paper is merely stating that at great length that you can't capture qualia. Because he's just restating it as the hard problem, like there's so much more going on in here than that. And that's why I want to say that.

21:15 Wes: I mean, that's my claim. I'm not saying he's saying that, that's my claim.

21:18 Mark: He does have that problem that you're outlining. But he also thinks that even taking Chalmers position of a non reductive functionalism, that there's still something just fundamentally incoherent about that.

21:29 Wes: Because he says I shall consider those functionalist theories of mine that can be understood as identity theses. So he rules out non Reductive functionalism from the very beginning of the paper. I mean, he rules that out as his topic.

21:41 Mark: He says that at the beginning. But many of the arguments against functionalism as it's going on do not rely on that ruling out or not addressing the specific thing that is kept in when you rule out the non reductive cases. So in order to say, as Chalmers does, that a mental state is supervenient upon a functional state, you have to be able to actually isolate what that functional state is and you have to be able to state it non problematically. And so about half of the objections, most of the most difficult ones in this paper, have to do with the difficulty in stating that in narrowing down among the apparently infinitely many functional organizations that any given system can be said to instantiate which one you're actually talking about.

We've already pointed to a lot of the elements of this pointing out, as you said, we where unproblematically saying what the inputs and outputs are. I mean, you can just say like okay, the person who's defining the functionalism can just stipulate all this stuff. But there's something problematic about that stipulation.

22:45 Wes: What I'm saying is in particular these two arguments that we focus closely on, absent qualia and inverted qualia. Chalmers defenses of functionalism against those arguments that Block brings up works for establishing non reductive functionalism, but Chalmers arguments don't work towards establishing reductive functionalism. That's where these papers, again they are a little bit oblique to each other because the objections Block is outlining still hold against reductive functionalism even if we accept Chalmers. I think with very strong. I'm not so sure about this, but this is the general impression I gave away with.

23:27 Mark: We can ask him about it next time. So let's finish up what the second objection is. So we said what inverted qualia are, right? Have we said all Y Block thinks that's a problem for functionalism? I mean, it seems obvious in the way you've just described it. We cannot explain even if they're correlated with qualia, we can't explain why the correlation would be there. And the fact that we can't see into each other's heads means for exactly the same problem that we went on and on about in the harder part problem episode.

23:54 Wes: It's just a brute empirical correlation without an explanation.

23:58 Mark: It's an empirical correlation, but we can't even establish is it a correlation Because I don't see in your head there is a functional isomorphism in that when we both see the blue object, we say blue. If we speak the same language and we're not screwing with each other, lying to each other or whatever, we can talk about behavior being constant with regard to perception of the color blue. But that that still underdetermines what our actual qualia might be. And there are even real life circumstances of this. You could have a colorblind person that maybe could still tell.

I'm kind of making this up. I know he gives some actual examples in the article. Could maybe still tell just by the gradations of gray, which one is supposed to be blue and which one is supposed to be red. You know, even though they know they're not functional isomorphs across the board, like there's some things they just can't tell. But if you put one next to each other, maybe they could tell the blue next to the red. Certain types of colorblind people could tell with a high degree of accuracy which one is, in quotes, blue, even though they don't see blue.

There's plenty of evidence even in the empirical realm that something like not actually inverted qualia, but like different qualia with basically the same functional behavior is possible. Do you remember the dancing qualia response enough or want to read some of that? That's page seven, is the beginning of that section.

25:17 Wes: We do a bunch of intermediate cases between me and an isomorph made of a different material where we're supposing, so the one the robot made of silicon could have qualia that are inverted for my particular qualia, red instead of green. And then we do the gradual replacement and at some point my qualia have to flip in such a way that I wouldn't even notice.

25:41 Mark: According to the functionalist hypothesis, you would not notice because again, you're functionally equivalent at both end. You point to the same sky and you always say blue, even though it seems different between you. And it says Bill at the end, just to sidestep the whole robot issue.

26:00 Wes: The dancing part is we imagine, okay, if we're flipping a switch at some point, if it's a discrete thing, and it's, you know, it's down to a certain, you know, a single replacement neuron where once we replace it, the qualia invert, then you can imagine flipping the switch and the qualia dancing back and forth between our eyes between red and blue. But, you know, as Mark, as you just noted, I would not actually notice the change because I'm functionally equivalent otherwise. And my beliefs are essentially going to Be the same. There's no special difference in my behavioral dispositions and blah, blah, blah.

So if we are functionally construing belief and judgment, Then I get the same sort of misalignment that he talked about in the fading qualia example. Where at the level of belief and judgment, I'm not noticing the flip. The actual inversion, which seems really weird and counterintuitive.

26:56 Mark: Yeah, just the dancing part. Here's a quote. The crucial step in the thought experiment is to take a silicon circuit just like Bill's is the guy at the end, and install it in my head as a backup circuit. This circuit will be functionally isomorphic to a circuit already present in my head. We equip the circuit with transducers and effectors so it can interact with the rest of my brain. But we do not hook it up directly. Instead, we install a switch that can switch directly between the neural and silicon circuits. Upon flipping the switch, the neural circuit becomes irrelevant.

And the silicon circuit takes over immediately after flipping the switch. Processing that was once performed by the neural circuit is now performed by the silicon circuit. However, my functional organization is exactly the same as it would be if we had not flipped the switch. The only relevant difference between the two cases is the physical makeup of one circuit within the system.

27:40 Wes: This is good because I misstated this by saying it was gradual, just like in the previous example. But it's not.

27:45 Mark: What happens to my experience when we flip the switch? Before installing the circuit, I was experiencing red. After we install it, before we flip the switch, I will presumably still be experiencing red. As the only difference is the addition of a circuit that's not involved in processing in any way. After flipping the switch, however, I'm more or less the same system as Bill. The only difference between Bill and me now is I have a causally irrelevant neural circuit dangling from my system. Maybe we could even destroy it. Bill, by hypothesis, was enjoying a blue experience after the switch.

Then I will have a blue experience too. What will happen then is that my experience will change before my eyes. Whereas once experiencing red, I will now experience blue. All of a sudden I will have a blue experience of the apple on my desk. We can even imagine flipping the switch back and forth a number of times. So that the red and blue experiences dance before my eyes. So this might seem reasonable, but I do not notice any change. That's the whole point of it being functional analog.

28:39 Wes: The reason for that assertion is just that we still assume that belief and judgment are organized functionally. If we were non functionalist about Belief we wouldn't have to draw that conclusion.

28:51 Mark: So in other words, you have a qualia and part of having the qualia is the belief. Like I'm having a red experience.

28:58 Wes: No, once my qualia invert at the level of judgment, I'm still saying the same thing. I'm saying, oh, the apple is red. I'm saying that before and after the flip. And the reason why I have to be saying that before and after the flip is because I'm functionally organized in the same way. And we assume that our expressions of our beliefs and our actual beliefs and judgments will be the same. Unless we also want to say that the silicon can't instantiate beliefs and blah blah blah. And so then we have another problem. So this is why he says on any functional construal of judgment it is clear that I do not make any novel judgments due to the flip.

29:37 Mark: Yes, you can't suddenly be disposed to say hmm, something strange is going on. There's no room for sudden start from exclamation or even a distraction of attention. My cognitive organization is just as it usually is, precisely as it would have been had such switch not have been flipped.

29:51 Wes: So I'm going to be saying the same things, believing the same things, behaving in all the same ways, but the qualia themselves would be different and I wouldn't be able to notice that. So it's a very messed up situation, man. You know, again, we're supposed to conclude that inverted qualia are not possible. And if inverted qualia are not possible, then qualia are determined by functional organization. That's what this thought experiment is supposed to show us both of these experiments. And I think they're very convincing. I don't see how one can avoid this conclusion, that this non reductive functionalist conclusion, which is that, you know, if the functional organization is right, then I must be having the right qualia.

30:30 Mark: But it's just a reductio again, so it doesn't actually make a positive assertion other than that Bloch's absent qualia argument is wrong.

30:40 Wes: So I conclude that by far the most plausible hypothesis is that replacement of neurons while preserving functional organization will preserve qualia and that experience is wholly determined by functional organization. So I think he thinks, and I think he's right, that this thought experiment actually does show that qualia are determined by a functional organization.

30:59 Mark: I think he thinks that there are other independent reasons for preferring a functional explanation to a physical explanation and that Block had presented an obstacle which now I have removed that obstacle. So the original reasons for finding functionalism plausible are back into play. If you didn't have those arguments in the first place, then you wouldn't have this. They both say we're not dealing with logical possibility here. We're dealing with just kind of. We're dealing with likelihood.

31:28 Wes: Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think the assertion is the reductio actually goes as follows. Qualia are not consistently related to functional organization. Then I do a thought experiment where I violate that rule, violate the rule that qualia are predicated on functional organization, and I get to absurd consequences. I think that does show that experience, as he puts it, experience is wholly determined by functional organization. Maybe if I thought about that more, Mark, I'd be on your side about this. But that's my general reading of this.

32:04 Mark: I think that Chalmers is making that claim, but because the reductio he's setting up is this. If, then. In other words, if you have two functionally identical things and yet you have a difference in qualia, then absurdity results. Rejecting that argument means that either you're taking that, you change the latter thing. In other words, we can't have qualia. We have to have organizational invariance is what Charles calls it. He says, this is what I'm going to be arguing throughout this paper, that functional organization supervenes on the mental and vice versa. There's no hierarchy necessarily here. Whenever you have one, you have the other. They always go together.

32:42 Wes: Or the mental supervenes on functional organization. It's not that functional organization supervenes on the mental, but the other way around.

32:49 Mark: I don't think supervenience is a thick enough relation for you to say that one supervenes on the other, but not the other way around. I think this is perhaps, maybe just we should ask Block about this because he could clear this up.

33:01 Wes: I don't know what you would mean by something supervening on the mental.

33:05 Mark: It's just an if. Then I'm saying taking supervenience is it's an if and only if. In other words, it's a biconditional if one thing is there, the other one's going to be there, and vice versa. So like saying that means that one supervenes on the other, but the other does not supervene on the first. At least that would be going beyond merely saying that there's a biconditional there. I don't know what supervenes means. If it. If it doesn't mean it's biconditional. I'm sure, we could have a general Philosophy of Science episode or we could talk about that in other contexts. Let me read this one thing from the end of Ned Block's.

33:35 Wes: Yeah, One thing it means is that the mental states don't dip back down and do causal stuff in the actual substrate system. But anyway, go ahead.

33:43 Mark: Supervenience is not a causal relation. So, right. The mental states do not dip down and do causal stuff in the physical realm. Neither do the physical states reach up and cause stuff in the mental realm.

33:54 Wes: I think of supervenience as a causal relation, as a one way causal relation. It doesn't mean that there's not a biconditional, but at a causal level, that's

34:03 Mark: just not what the word means. I'm just telling you from the little bit of research I did on supervenience, it's something related to what you're saying, but it's not the same thing. But unless we want to stop and Google it right now, which you're welcome to do, show that I'm wrong, I might well be wrong. I introduced this saying that I don't really understand. I'm just saying, you know, going on what Chalmers has said about it, okay,

34:25 Wes: they can't differ with respect to one set of properties without differing with respect to the other. We can hash out what that means with regard to causality some other time.

34:33 Mark: Let's look at the conclusion of Ned Block's and see if we think, yes, they're actually just talking past each other. This is just the very bottom of page 317, right near the end. If the functionalist argument against physicalism is right, any functional description that specifies inputs and outputs physically will be chauvinist. Moreover, mental or action terminology, for instance, punching the offending person, may not be used either, since to use such specification of inputs or outputs would be to give up the functionalist program of characterizing mentality in non mental terms.

On the other hand, you recall, characterizing inputs and outputs simply as inputs and outputs is inevitably liberal. This is the conclusion of some stuff that we didn't talk about at length. But the point is, when you're trying to give a functional explanation, you need to make sure that you are neither chauvinist. Like the whole point of functionalism we said was to make it so like, you know, Commander Data could be conscious, it could be in silicon. But Block in this paper has found it problematic to really say what the common psychology is among different creatures like this.

And we can just think about what he said in the previous paper that we went on about. Length about, about the harder problem to see why he might want to say that you're either too chauvinist, in other words, your psychological theory, your functionalist theory is ruling out non humans, or it's too liberal, in other words, in functionalism, he has to specify what the inputs and outputs are. And we were saying earlier it's the sense organs. Well, presumably the robot doesn't have sense organs. Like it might have analogs to sense organs, right?

36:05 Wes: Yeah, you could say the sense organs. But although he does again, he says specifically that by inputs and outputs, he's thinking at the level of the input into the brain, at the point where the electrical impulse gets into the brain or comes out of the brain. But I think it's the same thing either way. And yes. So if we are doing physical specifications and we just get into the same problem that we've seen with physicalism, which is we don't want to be wedded to one particular material or one particular instantiation of a sense organ and say, oh, it's only this particular eye that you know, or some disjunctive set of all the eyes of all of the animals who are alive on earth today.

That's what counts physically as an input, but nothing else. That sort of problem. That's what functionalism gets around because physicalism is too chauvinist. But then it turns out that the functionalist, it gets around the chauvinism problem, but it is confronted.

36:58 Mark: It doesn't. Block is claiming that it actually still doesn't. It's very hard for it to get around this chauvinism problem because like you were just saying right then, okay, well, let's specify the inputs, outputs in terms of the brain. But we are just saying we want to capture things that like have silicon instead of brains. Okay, well, it's the edge of the system, you know, in other words, the silicon brain. So you basically say the system. Let's just call it a brain. Maybe it's a billion Chinese people acting out in the brain like way. But, you know, on the edge of that, he just thinks that there's something really difficult about specifying these inputs and outputs in a systematic way that is not either chauvinist or liberal because like, if you say, okay, forget about referring to specific biological stuff, referring to the sense organs, referring to brains, if you want to enlarge that and say, well, it's things that are like sense organs, things that are like the entrance of the brain, you're getting too abstract.

You're just saying inputs and Outputs. Like you're not actually clearing that up.

37:56 Wes: I'm either being too abstract or too specific, and there is no in between realm where I can get what I want.

38:02 Mark: Yes. So the economy again has inputs and outputs.

38:05 Wes: Let me just read that sentence because I tweeted it earlier and I used it in my opening. So it does not seem impossible that a wealthy sheikh could gain control of the economy of a small country, for example Bolivia, and manipulate its financial system to make it functionally equivalent to a person, for example himself. But then this version of functionalism is far too liberal and must therefore be rejected. This is the sentence I love. If there are any fixed points when discussing the mind body problem, one of them is that the economy of Bolivia could not have mental states, no matter how it is distorted by powerful hobbyists. Yes, I think we can all agree on that. That's where I draw the line.

38:50 Mark: If properly edited into a collection of papers, Ned Block is delightful. I will say that you might not want to read 66 pages of it, but these individual little bits here. Let me finish the end of the paper. So I for one do not see how functionalism can describe inputs and outputs without falling afoul of either liberalism or chauvinism, or abandoning the original project of characterizing mentality in non mental terms. I do not claim this is a conclusive argument against functionalism. Rather like the functionalist argument against physicalism, it is perhaps best construed as a burden of proof argument.

The functionalist says to the physicalists, it is hard to see how there could be a single physical characterization of the internal state of every possible organism functionally equivalent to a human. I say to the functionalist, it is very hard to see how there could be a single characterization of inputs and outputs that applies to all and only mental systems. In both cases, it seems enough has been said to make it the responsibility of those who think there could be such characterizations to sketch how they could be possible.

39:48 Wes: We're fucked.

39:50 Mark: Yeah, exactly. Just like in the harder problem paper, where it did seem like skepticism was the order of the day. If you just read that as written, he's tried in other papers maybe to say how there could be a single physical characterization of the internal state of every possible organism functionally equivalent to a human. But like, certainly in the harder problem paper, he did not do that.

40:12 Wes: Again, I see this as just someone raising their hand and saying, hey, by the way, the mind body problem actually hasn't gone away. I know we've been talking, you know. I know functionalism is the preferred explanation. And we philosophers for a while have been operating as if that's the right explanation, even though we can't quite flesh it out and there's work to be done. But actually there are these fundamental problems, and I, speaking as me west, take them to be just a way of repeating the original problem, although there are more specific things about this liberalism and chauvinism. But I think they're related ultimately to the hard problem. I think they're intimately related to that.

40:54 Seth: I think that's a good encapsulation. Wes and I share your opinion. If I came across as like being kind of grouchy about this, it's just that one of the problems I have with analytic philosophy and this type of thing is that it gets wrapped around the axle, arguing about minutian details that are essentially language games defined by isms. And the bigger question of what's at stake and what are we actually trying to solve seems to get lost. And I think Wes surfaced that in a very clear way just now.

41:26 Wes: What I think, I believe is that we would be able to specify the inputs and outputs at the appropriate level of specificity if we understood why it is in the first place that a particular structure or organization gives rise to a particular qualia. Not knowing that creates these secondary problems. But I have to think more about that. I do find analytic philosophy to be a drag, frankly, and I would rather always be reading social theory and political stuff and moral psychology and all that stuff. Although I am also really, really interested in the problem of consciousness.

It's just that there is this feeling of futility about it. I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about it myself and it feels futile. And so the work that analytic philosophers do around it, I mean, I'm of two minds about it because they're nibbling around the edges of this massive, seemingly impossible project. But I do think that everything Block is doing, I don't think it's just word games or anything like that. Someone like Ryle, I think that brand of analytic philosophy with the Oxford language people, I do kind of have your view on that.

Seth, maybe you have this view, which is that it is language games that I think really they make me angry. Real avoidance of philosophical problems. But I don't see Block as in that category. I think all of his thought experiments in this paper are really useful for understanding the problem and deepening one's sense of what's at stake in the mind body problem.

43:06 Mark: I think if you walk around with your hard problem hammer Then, yes, everything that you see in all these articles is going to seem like a nail.

43:15 Wes: Well, I think I've given a pretty good defense of how all these things are related. I mean, maybe, or maybe I didn't give a good enough explanation. If I can explain the relationship, then it's more than just me applying a hammer.

43:27 Mark: It's to reduce the entire philosophy of mind endeavor to the question of consciousness, which I think we're going to see with our interview with Ned Block. Ned Block does not do.

43:37 Wes: We are talking about Qualia.

43:39 Seth: No.

43:40 Mark: So even Papineau acknowledges wholeheartedly, yes, there are Qualia. Yes, they cannot be reduced to anything else. Like, he's not Ryle, he's not Dennett, but yet has a very different take on how to analyze this and sort of what the task of the philosopher is realizing the scope of the hard problem. Well, let's let folks stew on that and we'll have one more stab with this. Yeah. So the readings that we are assigning for next time. This Blockheads book that he's on to promote came out in 2019. Very recent, is a collection of essays primarily by other people responding to Ned Bloch's work.

But then to each of these essays, Block wrote a new reply. So we're going to be following up on first, Brian McLaughlin's could an Android Be Sentient? So following up really, on our first two episodes here about the hard and the harder problem. And Bloch's reply, Functional Role Superficialism and Commander Data. And then Michael Tye, he wrote an essay in Blockheads called Homunculi Heads and Silicon the Importance of History to Phenomenology, which sounds like it's going to add an interesting extra thing. And Bloch's reply, fading Qualia. So Block himself told me, like, yeah, you guys should read the Chalmers paper, because my reply is like, half to Michael Tye and half to this paper by Chalmers.

So the Chalmers paper itself could have been wedged into this as well, but I GUESS it's from 1995, and I don't know that any of these papers go back that far. So that's what's assigned those two topics. If you guys feel like browsing through any of the rest of it, I would definitely recommend the introduction, which kind of goes through the complexities of his view. Folks should go on Facebook, go on partiallyexaminedlife.com email us@pblartiallyexaminedlife.com let us know what we're missing here. What else in this area or any other areas you would like us to cover.

Our closing song is called Machine. It's by a cellist who bills herself as Helen Money. And I interviewed her on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 101. Check it out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com See if you can detect in this song exactly where the qualia fade. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks for your support. Thanks for everything.

45:57 Seth: So long.

45:58 Mark: Good night.

45:58 Seth: Good night.

45:59 Wes: Good night, Sam.

47:33 Seth: Sa.

47:59 Mark: Sam.