GERUNDS FOR A GERIATRIC CONUNDRUM

JS: "'functing' does not specify anything at all.  Anything at all might be regarded as functing." 

Except, notably, feeling.

JS: "But then, how could we distinguish functing from feeling?"

Pinch yourself, with and without anesthesia.

JS: "you say that feelings themselves can be functed as well as felt."  

No, I never say anything even remotely like that (unless I have somewhere inadvertently misspoken)! I say that some (not all) functing is accompanied by feeling. (That is, if you like, "felt functing" but certainly not "functed feeling"! To be able to say that feelings are indeed functed, we would first have to say how and why.)

The mind/body (feeling/functing) problem is to explain how and why some functings are felt functings rather than just functed functings like all the rest.

JS: "There is no way to distinguish what you call "the functing of a feeling" from 'the feeling of a feeling'"

Vide supre. I never said (nor would say) "the functing of a feeling," only the feeling of a functing, i.e., the feeling that inexplicably accompanies some (not all) functings. (The "lifting of a dropping" is not the same as the "dropping of a lifting.)

JS: "there is no referent to go along with your use of the term "feeling"...  I presume that anything which exists can be felt--at least, I have no reason to think otherwise."  

For what it feels like to feel X, try pain.

For a sample of things that exist but cannot be felt, trying feeling what it feels like to be an electron, or to be under total anesthesia...

JS: "since anything at all can be regarded as functing, what could we feel, if not functing?"

All causal dynamics are indeed "functing." And there does not, indeed, seem to be room for anything more. So the only part left (and then you've convinced me!) is to explain how and why some functing is felt functing...

JS: "when we talk about what it is like to X, we are not talking about some causally mysterious aspect of X-ing; we are rather making explanatory-cum-predictive statements about behaviors and experiences related to X-ing." 

That's a bit too fancy for me. Run it by me using ordinary language: "When we talk about what it feels like to walk, we are not talking about some causally mysterious aspect of walking, we are rather explaining and predicting behaviors and experiences related to walking."

Fine: Please explain how and why it feels like something to walk. (I already know the rest of the functional story, about bipedal locomotion, its neurology, and how and why it gets you somewhere...) 

JS: "Claiming that 'what it is like' is some causally inert, or causally inexplicable, aspect of events really is a category error."  

Jason, you can echo poor old Gilbert Ryle till doomsday: it won't solve the explanatory problem ("how and why do we feel?"), nor make it go away.

JS: "there is no particular 'what it is like to be a bachelor' that all bachelors experience."  

If that way of putting it feels too vague, fine, forget about what being a bachelor (or blind, or sighted) feels like, and consider instead what walking feels like. You know what it feels like. I know what it feels like. Now explain how and why it feels like anything at all.

(I am quite happy to discuss the rather subtler problem of "uncomplemented categories" with you too, but we won't get anywhere if you keep trying to dismiss even the less subtle case of complemented categories too: what it feels like to be walking feels different from its (various) complements, e.g., what it feels like to be stationary. But what it feels like to be awake -- note, not wide-wake, necessarily, just awake, simpliciter -- does not have any complement, because there is nothing it feels like to be asleep (or comatose, or dead)...)

Harnad, S. (1987) Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it Like to be a Bachelor? 1987 Presidential Address: Society for Philosophy and Psychology. 

JS: "Of course, we should not confuse the verb 'to feel' with the noun, 'feelings.' 

One cannot skirt the problem via syntax or morphology, any more than one can do so by crying "category error!"...

Be it feeling, feelings, feels, feel, felt, feelingly or feelingfulness, the problem is to explain how and why there's any of it, rather than just the functing that it (sometimes) accompanies.

JS: "Dennett, for example, does not make recourse to subjective experience"

Quite. And that's one of the effective ways of begging the question: Don't talk about feeling at all!

JS: "I am not attracted to the introduction of new terms unless they help us solve our problems, at the very least by helping us better recognize a problem or its solution.  I do not think the term "functing" achieves either end."

I don't like neologisms either. I could have called it the feeling/function problem instead of the feeling/functing problem, and I could have written out, longhand, "How and why are some functional dynamics accompanied by feeling?). I just think gerunds are shorter, hence handier. 

(What gets lexicalized in a language, and then canonized with a lexical entry of its own, is partly arbitrary, but partly dictated by whether a circuitous description is said often enough, and long enough, to warrant baptizing and replacing with a new name of its own.)

I like "funct" because it punctuates the question-begging that normally perpetuates the fog around feeling: "How and why do we feel rather than just funct?"

Stevan Harnad