UC Berkeley

Many philosophers hold that there’s a fundamental difference in conceiving of the mind first-personally, in a how-it-feels way vs. conceiving of the mind third-personally, in a how-it-works way. This is a mistake. And the quickest way to see this mistake is with an example.

In that widely held view, we have two separate ways of thinking about consciousness. We can think of mental states as phenomenally conscious—as feeling a certain way or as having certain qualitative aspects—or we can think of mental states as conscious in functional sense—as being available for arbitrary use in a cognitive system. We’re supposed to find a sharp contrast in concepts here: simply reflecting these different senses of “consciousness” won’t reveal anything about how they actually overlap. But I think we have good reason to reject this view: we cannot conceive of an experience that is functionally isolated from the subject for whom it is an experience. If this is right, it looks like the phenomenal and functional senses of “consciousness” aren’t totally distinct after all, since there are a priori functional constraints on phenomenal experience.

Because conceptual dualists draw a sharp distinction between thinking about the mind in a first-personal, how-it-feels way and a third-personal, how-it-works way, they run into a scary epistemological problem: the specter of phenomenal overflow. Each and every attempt to mark off the boundary between a subject's cognitive access and phenomenal experience, a skeptical challenge will arise in the form of phenomenal overflow. Conceptual dualists are themselves responsible for this, because of their conceptual commitments, which bar them from the sorts of a priori resources that might have helped them to avoid such a situation. And so they end up saddled with a feeble, grossly- underpowered epistemology, which can't possible match the picture most of us have of our own epistemological situation. If you're sufficiently spooked-out by that epistemological fate, then you're be better off abandoning conceptual dualism.

Are phenomenal concepts functional concepts? For evidence that they aren't, many have looked towards absent qualia and inverted qualia cases (which, respectively, involve 'subtracting' and 'inverting' the phenomenal consciousness of 'normal' subjects). Such

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cases have been thought to demonstrate the conceptual independence of the phenomenal from the physical. This is a mistake. While the phenomenal cannot be conceptually reduced to the functional, neither can it be conceptually isolated from the functional. A modest version of conceptual functionalism is laid out, its advantages and disadvantages considered.