ASK A SIMPLE QUESTION...

AT: "I've proposed that brain activity that represents the world from a privileged egocentric perspective IS our... (felt content)"

Well, that would be a quick solution to the feeling/function problem: just propose that a bit of function IS feeling. Then there's no more hows and whys about it! 

But, apart from your proposing that it is so, how and why is it so? As far as I know, brain activity is just brain activity, i.e., function is just function. And the question on the table was, and continues to be: How is (some of) it felt? Why is it felt? 

"Because I have proposed it" is alas not an answer! 

(Nor, by the way, is the fact that the brain activity "represents the world from a privileged egocentric perspective" an explanation. Adaptively (i.e., functionally) speaking, there is a lot to be said for "representing the world from a privileged egocentric perspective" -- but how and why is that "representation from a privileged egocentric perspective" a felt "representation from a privileged egocentric perspective" rather than just a functed "representation from a privileged egocentric perspective"?)

AT: "if my theoretical premise is that this particular brain activity is the same thing as feeling, your question is a non sequitur."

But how/why questions are not answered by proposing theoretical premises: they are answered by explaining how and why. You are just begging the question with a solution by fiat.

AT: "Your repetition of the how/why question with regard to feeling suggests that there has to be something more than a biophysical explanation of feelings"

A biophysical explanation can answer a biophysical question. I asked how and why the biophysics is felt biophysics. It is not an answer to say that feeling just IS biophysics (because I propose that it is so). Even if your proposal is somehow true, the question is how and why is it true. How, and why is that biophysics felt biophysics, rather than just (the usual) functed biophysics? (As far as I know, all you offer by way of an answer is correlations. Well if your proposal is true, there will certainly have to be those correlations; but the correlations certainly don't explain how and why your proposal is true. They are part of what needs to be explained.

AT: "If you refuse to evaluate a biophysical explanation of [feeling] on its own terms, then you will continue to repeat your question."

But I did not hear a biophysical explanation of feelings, and that is why I continue to repeat my question. All I heard was a proposal that that biophysics just IS feeling, somehow. An explanation is supposed to tell me how and why X just IS feelings. Neither your proposal -- nor the (familiar) correlation itself -- is an explanation at all.

AT: "Perhaps you're a closet dualist..."

Not at all. I'm sure the brain causes feelings, somehow. I'm just asking how (and especially why), since felt functing -- precisely because telekinetic dualism is false -- seems utterly superfluous, functionally (i.e., causally): Just functed functing looks like it would do the very same job, exactly as well. (If not, then please explain how and why not: It's the same question either way!)

It's not a trick. And I am not just a compulsive or perverse repeater of the question "how/why". There is really an explanatory gap here, and it is not filled by merely proposing that functing that is correlated with feeling just IS feeling. It is filled by explaining how and why it is feeling.

And note that my insistence on putting and keeping the focus on feeling itself (rather than on equivocations such as seeing, knowing, representing, perspective, or ego, all of which -- if unfelt -- have exactly the same functionality) is intentional: to keep us honest, and to make and keep it crystal clear exactly what the real problem is (and always has been). 
And to make it harder to keep begging the question...


-- SH