David, your treatment has become a bit too complicated for something that should be kept simple if there's to be any hope of gaining any new insight at all. 

The answer to (what I think is) your question -- "How can feelings be there, reliably correlated with the functing, and yet not be in the 'causal chain'?" -- is this: Both the feeling and the correlated functing have a common cause (the functing unproblematically, the feeling inexplicably), and that common cause is functing too. The felt effects of the functing are correlated with the functed effects of the functing, but only the functed effects are, in their turn, causal. The feelings just dangle -- correlated, but lacking any causal power of their own. And that's the explanatory gap.