{"id":159,"date":"2018-12-23T15:57:08","date_gmt":"2018-12-23T15:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=159"},"modified":"2018-12-23T15:57:08","modified_gmt":"2018-12-23T15:57:08","slug":"why-are-some-functions-felt-rather-than-just-functed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/23\/why-are-some-functions-felt-rather-than-just-functed\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Are Some Functions Felt Rather Than Just ‘Functed’?"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<hr>\n<p><b>SUMMARY: <\/b><i> My own approach to both the problem of Consciousness and the problem of Free Will stands apart, I believe, in equating consciousness <\/i>completely<i> with feeling, in subsuming the free-will problem under the more general problem of the causal role of feeling, and in arguing, unequivocally, that the mind\/body problem (which is in reality the feeling\/function or feeling\/doing problem) — namely, ‘why and how are some functions felt rather than merely “functed”?’ — is insoluble except on pain of telekinetic dualism (hence that Turing-Testing is the only proper (indeed, the only possible) methodology for the cognitive sciences that aspire to explain our cognitive — i.e., doing — capacity).<\/p>\n<p>It makes it rather simple to weigh one’s own position relative to that of others if one “travels lightly” like this. (It prevents having to keep reading — and referring others — to chapter and verse in order to get to the heart of the matter!) I feel rather like a snail, carrying his small earthly wares on his back, for all to see! <\/i><\/p>\n<hr>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> I don’t think free will is so much a belief as a sensation: The sensation of doing something voluntarily, rather than by accident or compulsion. That is no more a matter of belief than the fact that an apple tastes sweet is a matter of belief. Hence I doubt it was invented or evolved (e.g., at the hunter-gatherer to farmer transition in our species’ history)! I think the sensation of volition has been there as long as there has been consciousness (and that’s a long time — at least as long as there has been a nervous system). Explicit beliefs about freedom vs. determinism are more recent, but there too I doubt it came with the transition to farming, or any other behavioural or conceptual transition; it had more to do with our notions of religion and philosophy, whenever those started to take form — probably in ancestral childhood “magical” thinking and the tales told us by our not-much-less magic-minded elders!. I also think questions about the history, phenomenology and concepts of free well need to be separated from questions about the metaphysics of causality.<\/p>\n<p>I think consciousness is a lot older than thinking about consciousness. But there is a fundamental point latent in this: Being conscious means nothing more nor less — I choose my words advisedly — than <i>feeling<\/i> (sentience). Hence of course they were born at the same time!<\/p>\n<p> http:\/\/cogprints.org\/2460\/<\/p>\n<p>Hence the mind\/body problem is actually the “feeling\/function problem” (i.e. “What is the nature and causal role, if any, of feelings in the physical, functional world?”)<\/p>\n<p>This should also make it obvious why the problem of feeling and the problem of free will are one and the same (with the free-will version especially limning the crux of the problem, which is one of causality: “What is the causal role of feeling?”).<\/p>\n<p>Most thinkers on this topic, in contrast, are in fact reflecting upon the origins of certain ideas (“beliefs”) we have <i>about<\/i> consciousness. (This is what philosophers have sometimes called “second order consciousness” or “awareness of being aware,” and they usually end up conflating the two.)<\/p>\n<p>That’s the history of ideas, not the history of consciousness itself (i.e., of feelings, including the feeling of volition or conation.) Ideation — i.e., implicit and explicit cognition — is indeed a bundle of functional capacities that is more recent than sentience, and some of it is indeed unique to the genotype of our verbalising species, and even to the “memotype” of our more recent history and culture.<\/p>\n<p>Whether or not a snail feels certainly doesn’t depend on my definition (any more than whether <i>I<\/i> feel does!): it depends only on whether or not the snail feels.<\/p>\n<p>What one calls “consciousness” (or what one calls anything) is indeed a matter of definition, and it is a substantive (indeed radical) point I seem to have made (judging from the degree to which it is misunderstood and\/or rejected by just about everyone!) in insisting that the only way to make sense of “consciousness” is to equate it with sentience (the capacity to feel).<\/p>\n<p>But I think my point will be found to be quite correct, if one thinks rigorously about it. Loose talk about consciousness and all its fuzzy synonyms (“awareness,” “intentionality,” etc.) is all too easy, as one dances around the phenomenology and its hermeneutics instead of facing up to the phenomenon itself, and the true logical, functional and conceptual challenge it poses — and has always posed. <\/p>\n<p>The ability to reason is not an attribute of consciousness. It is an attribute of cognition. That’s a functional capacity (i.e., it’s something we can <i>do<\/i>). Computers can do it too: they too can reason. The difference is that they don’t feel. The feeling\/function problem — you could also call it the “feeling\/doing” problem — again: How\/why are some (not all) of our functions felt — rather than just “functed”? (Why do we do some things feelingly, rather than just doingly?)<\/p>\n<p>Exercise: Test your evolutionary hypotheses about the functional role of consciousness on <i>that<i> question: How\/why would the things we are able to do consciously not have been identically adaptive if they had been merely functed, rather than felt? (You won’t be able to solve that problem, and that is the real feeling\/function or feeling\/doing problem; and it <i>includes<i> the free-will problem!)<\/p>\n<p><b>Stevan Harnad<\/b><br \/>\nhref=”http:\/\/www.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/~harnad\/genpub.html”><br \/>\nhttp:\/\/www.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/~harnad\/genpub.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SUMMARY: My own approach to both the problem of Consciousness and the problem of Free Will stands apart, I believe, in equating consciousness completely with feeling, in subsuming the free-will problem under the more general problem of the causal role of feeling, and in arguing, unequivocally, that the mind\/body problem (which is in reality the … <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/23\/why-are-some-functions-felt-rather-than-just-functed\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> “Why Are Some Functions Felt Rather Than Just ‘Functed’?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}