(Reply to Joel Marks)
JM: “why did you omit a category of attitudes, or whatever rubric belief and desire would fall under, as something cognitive science needs to explain…?… you do mention believing and understanding and doubting…”
Yes, cognitive science needs to explain attitudes, dispositions and tendencies. They are all part of the “easy” problem: doing.
Believing, desiring, understanding and doubting, besides having an “easy” aspect (dispositions and capacities to do) are also felt. That is the “hard” problem: Why are they felt, rather than just done (i.e., acted upon)?
JM: “I am assuming that you count beliefs and desires as non-feelings, although you also say there is something it feels like to be in those states.”
No, believing and desiring are felt — though some people (not me) speak (loosely) of unfelt tendencies as “beliefs”: I think that just creates confusion between doing and feeling, things that are, respectively, easy and hard to explain.
JM: “Suppose you strongly desired to live but believed you were about to die…rather awfully… So there could be zombies with [that] belief/desire… who nonetheless felt nothing. I wonder what it is they would be missing?”
What Turing robots would be missing if they did not feel would be feeling. And in that case they wouldn’t have beliefs of desires either: they would just be behaving as if they had beliefs or desires (doing). All they would really have would be capacities and dispositions to do. (But I actually believe that a Turing-scale robot would feel — though of course we have no way of knowing…)
JM: “would we feel it was any less important to try to prevent the zombie from [desiring to live/believing it would die] than the person who…was feeling… it?”
(1) There is no way to know whether a Turing robot feels.
(2) For me it’s likely enough that it would feel (so I wouldn’t kick one).
(3) If there could be a guarantee from a deity that the Turing robot was a “Zombie” — as feelingless as a toaster — I suppose it would not matter if you kicked it (except for the wantonness of kicking even a statue). But there are no reliable deities from whom you can know that, so no way to know whether there can be Zombies.
(4) So the question is moot, since the answer depends entirely on unknowables.
JM: “I must say that I have become skeptical altogether about feelings, at least as belonging to a distinct realm of sensations”
Skeptical that you feel? (That doesn’t make sense to me.)
Skeptical about whether feelings are distinct from sensations? Anything felt is felt. If stimuli (of any kind — optical, acoustic, mechanical, chemical) are felt, they are sensations; if they are merely detected by your brain, but unfelt, then they are not sensations but merely receptor activity, peripheral or central.
In addition, there are other kinds of feelings, besides sensations: emotional, conational and cognitive feelings. Any state that it feels like something to be in.