Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[emjay]

Now, if Searle is right, there wouldn't need to be a 1:1 reduction, because "redness" may be some artifact of neural structure or something. So biological naturalism can explain qualia. Functionalism can't. That's the question. That's the bear. Which theory is more accurate? I don't know. Why do you think functionalism is true compared to biological naturalism, Angrboda?

You might have missed this, but it was a few pages back.  A sim doesn't have to look like anything, but it will look like -something-.  We might see red for another color, or another thing.  We might hear red instead of seeing it.  In whatever case, your question could be applied, but in every application the complaint could not credibly be that functionalist theories can't explain it, but that you think the explanation is or may be wrong.

To functionalists, who posit multiple realizability, it's doing the experience of red, however done and however experienced, that counts as the thing.  Not the specific bits and parts in the individual experiencer.  Many functionalist theories of mind aren't even theories of human mind.  If articial intelligence is possible, multiple realizability is true.  If machine consciousness is possible, multiple realizability is true.  If there's any other conscious creature anywhere on earth or in the universe..multiple realizability is true.  The only state of affairs where multiple realizability could even be false..is if we are the sole conscious agents in the cosmos and it's completely irreproducible any other way.

It's interesting seeing you and vulcan discussing this in this thread... seems similar to the dance we've been having... but this post is helping me see your perspective a bit clearer now... how we seem to conflate our ideas of what we (individually) mean by qualia etc when we talk about it. You seem to be talking about Red, say, as being a placeholder in the system; that is, 'Red is real' in the sense of what it represents in the outside world (eg the ripeness of fruit), regardless of how it is individually represented in different organisms/systems? Eg Bananas, say, would be placeholder:Yellow... could call that it's signature... regardless of whether you and I experience that signature in different ways, such as swapped around colours - relative to each other's perceptions of those same colours - or even sounds.

Seems to me this could be the root of our misunderstandings and why we often end up talking past each other, when qualia is being talked about in different ways here? I don't disagree that red is real in that sense of a placeholder/signature (ie representing something in the outside world, that could be represented in different ways in different organisms, even within the same species... just down to individual differences or brain damage etc)... but when I'm talking about it in p-zombie terms, and I suspect vulcan is too from reading this thread, I'm talking about it in the other sense... that's the 'hard problem' I'm talking about, just the actual experience of qualia, different as it may be across different individuals.