MichaelVassar comments on Dennett's "Consciousness Explained": Prelude - Less Wrong
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The problem is how matter can have self-awareness. It's hard to describe in words, because all of the words to describe this (consciousness, feeling, awareness) have also been (ab)used to describe the non-mysterious processes that enable an organism to act in the same way as one that we believe has consciousness, feeling, awareness.
You can say you're a functionalist, and you believe that a system that accurately reproduces all the same observable behavior of consciousness necessarily will also reproduce consciousness. Supposing that were so; it wouldn't explain consciousness.
I think functionalism is the claim that consciousness is not epiphenomenal. Suppose functionalism is false, and something that behaves like a conscious system is not necessarily conscious. This would mean that a conscious system possessed some extra quality, "consciousness" which was not a behavior and is not observable. Hence, epiphenomenal.
Alternately, people could mean by functionalism that anything that reproduces all the behavior of a conscious system that we are currently capable of observing (or at least theorizing about, having the necessary concepts in our physics), is necessarily conscious. But that would be silly; it would be equivalent to the assertion that today's physics is complete.
It's very reasonable to claim that epiphenomenalism is not just false but incoherent.
Is that assuming that you don't believe in free will?