Functionalism doesn’t require giving up on qualia, but only acknowledging physics. If neuron firing behavior is preserved, the exact same outcome is preserved, whether you replace neurons with silicon or software or anything else.
If I say “It’s difficult to describe what it feels like to taste wine, or even what it feels like to read the label, but it’s definitely like something”—There are two options—either -
it’s perpetual coincidence that my experience of attempting to translate the feeling of qualia into words always aligns with words that actually come out of my mouth
or it is not
Since perpetual coincidence is statistically impossible, then we know that experience had some type of causal effect. The binary conclusion of whether a neuron fires or not encapsulates any lower level details, from the quantum scale to the micro-biological scale—this means that the causal effect experience has is somehow contained in the actual firing patterns.
We have already eliminated the possibility of happenstance or some parallel non-causal experience, but no matter how you replicated the firing patterns, I would still claim the difficulty in describing the taste of wine.
So—this doesn’t solve the hard problem. I have no idea how emergent pattern dynamics causes qualia to manifest, but it’s not as if qualia has given us any reason to believe that it would be explicable through current frameworks of science. There is an entire uncharted country we have yet to reach the shoreline of.
Functionalism doesn’t require giving up on qualia, but only acknowledging physics. If neuron firing behavior is preserved, the exact same outcome is preserved, whether you replace neurons with silicon or software or anything else.
If I say “It’s difficult to describe what it feels like to taste wine, or even what it feels like to read the label, but it’s definitely like something”—There are two options—either -
it’s perpetual coincidence that my experience of attempting to translate the feeling of qualia into words always aligns with words that actually come out of my mouth
or it is not
Since perpetual coincidence is statistically impossible, then we know that experience had some type of causal effect. The binary conclusion of whether a neuron fires or not encapsulates any lower level details, from the quantum scale to the micro-biological scale—this means that the causal effect experience has is somehow contained in the actual firing patterns.
We have already eliminated the possibility of happenstance or some parallel non-causal experience, but no matter how you replicated the firing patterns, I would still claim the difficulty in describing the taste of wine.
So—this doesn’t solve the hard problem. I have no idea how emergent pattern dynamics causes qualia to manifest, but it’s not as if qualia has given us any reason to believe that it would be explicable through current frameworks of science. There is an entire uncharted country we have yet to reach the shoreline of.