Brent: Your post deserves a more detailed reply, but it's late so...
At 04:44 PM 3/2/00 -0700, you wrote:
>Do
>any functionallist care about being able to eff qualia, emotions, and
>so on and so forth? Rather than do this, Dennett and others seems to
>just argue that they don't exist, and therefore it doesn't matter?
>Just give the paint machine a few more "wiggles" or whatever and it
>will be the same? This doesn't seem right to me.
Yes, many (I think most) functionalist *do* care about "effing" qualia.
Dennett may be an exception. If so, I would place the blame on his
instrumentalism. Take a look at the work of people like Paul Churchland who
are very interested in effing qualia.
> > I'm curious since I'm currently discussing this very topic in two of
> > my classes right now.
>
> Cool, what classes are these?
Philosophy of Religion--having covered the Cosmological Argument and the
Design Argument, I'm now covering the Argument from Consciousness where we
compare dualist with physicalist accounts of mind in terms of their
explanatory power (i.e. can mind be explained naturalistically or do we
need to resort to a supernatural explanation?).
Onward!
Max
Max More, Ph.D.
President, Extropy Institute. www.extropy.org
CEO, MoreLogic Solutions. www.maxmore.com
max@maxmore.com or more@extropy.org
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