PUTATIVE FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF FEELING: A CHALLENGE

AT:  "Why, exactly, do you believe that the brain states that constitute our feelings can't ever be explained?"

Because in every attempt to explain the functional role of feeling, feeling turns out to be functionally superfluous (except if telekinetic dualism is true, and feelings have causal power -- but it isn't, and they don't).

I long ago made a challenge (the universal "translatability thesis") -- to any linguist who claimed that there was something that could be said in language X that could not be translated into language Y -- that they should tell me (in English) what it was, and why it could not be translated into language Y, and I would show that it could be translated into language Y, even if I did not know language Y.

I hereby make the same challenge for "explanations" of the functional or causal role of feeling: Tell me what it is, and I will show it is functionally superfluous on its own terms. 

(I gave some samples in earlier postings. This is not unlike Dan Dennett's "demoting" mentalistic explanations into mechanistic [usually behavioristic] ones, except that I am not denying the reality of feeling -- just its causal role.)


-- SH