Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[The Grand Nudger]

Pain, in the functionalist view, is whatever causes attentive behaviors towards bodily damage.

That's the behaviorist's model. The behaviorist doesn't need to posit any kind of conscious experience in that formula, though. And when people hear that, they want to ask the behaviorist "How come we have conscious experiences then?" There are two ways out of this. 1) straight epiphenomenalism, and 2) functionalism. Functionalism says something like a pain state plays an intermediary role... that IT is just one causal artifact in the line of succession between the firing of neurons and a motor response. It's there because it plays a role in the causal chain. And its qualities are explicable by what role it plays in that causal chain. No other explanation, according to the functionalist, is necessary.

This is a succinct view. That's what I like about it. But then ontological irreducibility comes along as a challenge to that view.

I don;t think that it does - but I do want to point out that my very short description was not the behaviorists model.  There is nothing between attentive behavior and damage, no other thing causing the one n reference to the other.  The functionalists view doesn't just differ in some intermediary whatsit..but in the breadth of allowable whatsists-as-intermediary.  It allows for there to be pain in an organism or machine that absolutely does not and even cannot feel pain..the way we feel pain.  Our pain ceases to be a unique set, and becomes a member of a set.

Sure. But bringing machines into the realm of potentially conscious beings raises further questions. Some postulate that any information feedback mechanism produces conscious states. If they are correct, then the back of our toilets are "slightly conscious." And if that's true, there is some law of the universe concerning production of conscious states that we have yet to discover.

Well, we say sure, but we're just casually agreeing with the functionalists main point of distinction between their idea of mind and everyone else's.  You say it raises further questions, and maybe it does, but functionalism also premises our only scientific theory of mind, and it's not even a theory of human mind - but machine mind.  Before we knew about control and control models and physical control of systems we may have lacked the phenomenal concept required to understand the phenomena itself.  Mind, or at least human mind... wasn't just stranger than descartes supposed, but stranger than he could suppose....and still purely physical, purely monist.

It's intuition, yes. At least half of it. But I think I've done due diligence concerning exactly where my intuitions may err. Maybe that makes it less "folky"? (shrug)

You and Angrboda seem to think that asking questions about the mind is a rejection of physicalism. It isn't. I have no problems accepting the view that mind is a physical phenomenon. I thought I made this clear when I stated that I think all mental states are causally reducible to brain states. If that is the case (and that's what I believe) there is no room (or need) for the Cartesian soul in there.

My issue is the ontological reduction. It doesn't gel. There is no physical thing called "pain" on the tip of a pin that transfers into your finger during a pin prick.

That's a proposition, not a demonstration or assertion of fact.  FWIW, and accepting that we could be wrong, it's a proposition that flies in the face of observation.  Pain..in humans..... appears to be very much a thing.  C fibers, one of many classes of nerves...firing - for example. As much a thing as the trigger of a gun.

When you examine a neuron, or the brain, you won't find the quality of pain there. The universe is colorless. The brain is colorless. We know that. The question is: how do you produce color from non-color? How do you produce pain from non-pain? The brain does both of these things, and we have no idea how. It *IS* a mystery. Consciousness is a mystery. Plain and simple.

You're using those phrases again..... In mere reality, neither the universe nor our brains are colorless (if color only existed in our brains..our brains still exist in the universe..and so too their contents), we mouth those words to explain how things aren't -exactly- as they appear...but we do think that plants really do absorb a particular spectrum of light, leaving the remainder to be detected by a specific receptor in our eyes, to be interpreted for effect by a specific region of our brain. We do think that our eyes and our experience of red map and reduce to a thing actually happening to light and actually happening to plants and actually signalling a change in the plant or the environment - and we can measure or detect all of that.

That we're not space cadets..just visually disabled, to some extent...relative to other animals or instrumentation - and that this inability to see necessarrily colors our perception of seeing.