Do you believe that it is in principle possible to differentiate between an entity that has that something and an entity that does not?
Perhaps not. ‘That something’ may be simply a model which translates the aforementioned physical properties into perceptual terms which are more familiar to us. But this begs the question of why we would be familiar with perception in the first place; “we have subjective experience, and by extension so does anything which is implemented in the same substrate as us” is a good way to escape that dilemma.
the latter differs in that it possesses a ‘something’ that is not a function of the laws of physics and is inaccessible to any form of investigation other than introspection by the inhabitant of that brain
The whole point of physicalism is that subjective experience is a function of the laws of physics, and in fact a fairly low-level function. If you want to avoid any hint of dualism, just remove the “inhabitant” (a misnomer) and the “psycho-physical bridging laws” from the model and enjoy your purely physicalistic theory. Just don’t expect it to do a good job of talking about phenomenology or qualia: physicalist theories are just weird like that.
As the saying goes, those who do not know dualism are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. Beware this tendency.
Perhaps not. ‘That something’ may be simply a model which translates the aforementioned physical properties into perceptual terms which are more familiar to us. But this begs the question of why we would be familiar with perception in the first place; “we have subjective experience, and by extension so does anything which is implemented in the same substrate as us” is a good way to escape that dilemma.
The whole point of physicalism is that subjective experience is a function of the laws of physics, and in fact a fairly low-level function. If you want to avoid any hint of dualism, just remove the “inhabitant” (a misnomer) and the “psycho-physical bridging laws” from the model and enjoy your purely physicalistic theory. Just don’t expect it to do a good job of talking about phenomenology or qualia: physicalist theories are just weird like that.
As the saying goes, those who do not know dualism are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. Beware this tendency.
Do you ever answer a direct question?