Representationalism is widely thought to grease the skids of ontological reduction. If phenomenal character is just a certain sort of intentional content, representationalists argue, the hard problem of accommodating consciousness within a broadly naturalistic view of the world reduces to the much easier problem of accommodating intentionality. I argue, however, that there’s a fatal flaw in this reasoning, for if phenomenal character really is just a certain sort of intentional content, it’s not anything like the sort of intentional content described (...) by our best naturalistic theories. These theories make intentional content a mere Cambridge property of intentional states, a property that can be gained or lost through changes to distinct and causally disconnected objects. But consciousness is manifestly not like this; consciousness cannot suffer a mere Cambridge change. Thus, whatever ground is gained by explaining the phenomenal in terms of the intentional is lost again by undermining our best attempts to explain the intentional in terms of the natural. A Pyrrhic victory at best. (shrink)

I argue for the epiphenomenality of functional properties by means of thought experiments and general principles. General principles suggest that an object’s causal powers nomologically supervene on its intrinsic properties and that its functional role does not. This implies that it is possible for an object to lose its functional role without undergoing any change to its intrinsic properties or causal powers. Nor is it difficult to conceive of such scenarios. Various thought experiments are introduced for just this purpose. But (...) properties that can vary independently of an object’s causal powers in this way are epiphenomenal, for their instantiation by an object at a time makes no difference to the causal processes the object is involved in at that time. The same processes would have occurred even if such properties hadn’t been instantiated. The intrinsicness thesis is controversial, but it is not controversial that it is true of productive causation, and many believe that productive causation is the only form of mental causation worth having. Nevertheless, in the paper’s final section I consider dependence-based accounts of causation, which do not presuppose the intrinsicness of causal powers, and show that they too have difficulties accounting for the efficacy of functional properties. (shrink)