REPLY to Searle:

Searle: "Harnad says

'We do not know how brain activity could
generate feeling. Even less do we know why.'

[But] suppose we knew in exact detail all of the neurobiological mechanisms... [and] precise laws... causally necessary [for]... feelings... [and] this knowledge [could help cure] human pain, misery, and mental illness. If [this] would not satisfy [Harnad], he should tell us what would. If nothing could satisfy him, then it looks like the complaint may be unreasonable."

The reason this does not satisfy me (and should not satisfy Searle either) is that the "precise laws" we need to explain (causally) the neurobological mechanisms and to cure the illnesses, both bodily and mental, do not explain how and why we feel at all. Those precise same laws would just as fully explain how/why we can and do act (move, behave, function) the way we do (including behaving the way we do when we feel something, such as pulling our hands away from something that is burning our skin); it would explain all the neural and environmental causes of our actions and functions, exactly as we explain the cardiac (and environmental) causes of the heart's actions and functions. But unlike the case of the heart, the actions and functions of our bodies (and brains) feel like something. If our bodies and brains just acted and functioned -- according to the demands of Darwinian survival and reproduction, for example -- and there was nothing it all felt like, there would be no problem. But it does feel like something, and I defy Searle now (or on that happy day when all these neurocognitive mechanisms are known) to say how and why those actions and functions are felt -- rather than merely "functed." For the "functing" is all that survival and reproduction call for; it's also all that the causal explanation of every other phenomenon in the universe ever provides, or can provide. So the reason I ask for more, and what it is that I am asking for when I ask for more, is the how and why of what makes felt function different from all other forms of function, whether physical function or biological function: an explanation of the fact that it is felt, rather than merely functed.

Is it unreasonable to ask this, and to complain when one doesn't get it? No more unreasonable than asking for the explanation of any other otherwise unexplained (and in this case not only unexplained, but apparently utterly superfluous) phenomenon.

Would nothing satisfy me? Actually, there is a very simple, natural explanation of feeling that would fully satisfy me, and indeed it is the explanation that most people believe to be the correct explanation, but unfortunately it is false. There would be no feeling/function problem if feeling were simply another, independent causal force in the universe. If feeling were up there, along with electro-magnetism, gravitation, and the weak and strong nuclear forces as the 5th elementary force (say, "telekinesis"), then it would make no more (or less) sense to ask how and why we feel than to ask how and why gravity pulls. But feeling is not a 5th force. It has no independent causal power of its own. All evidence is that it piggy-backs (no one knows how or why) on the other 4 forces: I may feel as if I'm doing something because I feel like doing it, as if my feeling were the cause of my doing; but in reality, it is my neural mechanisms and my environment that are doing all the causing and causing all the doing, and my accompanying feelings are merely an inxplicable (but reliable and predicatable) correlate. There is no "mind over matter" -- or at least so all the evidence to date on the conservation of energy has ever shown.

So, yes, feeling as a 5th force would have been a satisfactory causal explanation -- if only it had been true. But it is not. So we are left with an unexplained -- indeed an inexplicable -- correlation (in the wake of the failure of the direct causal explanation that would have accounted for feeling so naturally and satisfyingly).

Searle: "Harnad has a deep philosophical worry... that we should all share. It seems astounding that objective neuronal processes should cause our subjective feelings."

Whenever we are at a loss, we tend to multiply terminology (and thereby also the apparent number of entities to explain, or, equally, of the number of candidates for explaining them). Explaining how/why functions could be felt was hard enough. We don't have to add that "objective functions" are being "subjectively" felt: How else does anything else get felt but subjectively? And what else can functions be in a feelingless universe than "objective"? The mystery is already there in the very existence of feelings. That's why we, in our frustration and desperation, invented the supernatural notion of the immaterial and immortal soul!

Searle: "But in coping with this sense of mystery we should remind ourselves that it is just a plain fact that neuronal processes do cause feelings, and we need to try to understand how."

We can and should and will learn how to predict feelings from function: The correlation is reliable. So once we isolate and explain the relevant functions, they will reliably predict the correlated feelings. I'll pre-concede even more: Those functions will cause those feelings -- somehow, though we won't be able to explain how; we'll just be able to predict it, as in weather-forecasting (except that the functional doings of wind and air and water are fully explained by and constituted in their causal antecedents, whereas feelings are not). And the buck will stop there, because the feelings themselves (as opposed to their neural causes/correlates) will not have any independent causal power of their own, no matter how much they may feel as if they do.

Searle: "[Harnad] is convinced that the mystery of consciousness is unique. But... this is not the first time we have confronted such mysteries.... How could magnetism ever be explained by Newton's laws?"

Searle: "[Life too] seemed a mystery. How could mechanical processes explain life?... Mechanism and vitalism were once debated.... These mysteries were overcome... By increasing our knowledge... the mystery... of consciousness [too will be] overcome."

It seems clear in hindsight that mechanical, chemical and biological structures, actions and functions had never really raised any problem of principle for causal/functional explanation, just a practical challenge. Imagining that the lack of an explanation was owing to a fundamental mystery rather than to ignorance was just a case of failure of imagination and faulty reasoning. A clever enough person could have proposed a perfectly viable explanation for life by way of a speculative but purely mechanical or electrochemical hypothesis to show that nothing supernatural was necessary in principle to account for all known function, whether inorganic or organic.

But I think there was a bit more that drove people to vitalism than merely the daunting challenge of explaining biological action and function: I think vitalists had feelings in mind -- life as sentient matter. That was the animism that was implicit in vitalism all along -- which makes vitalism into just another variant of supernatural belief in an immaterial and immortal soul. But since the only viable version of that hypothesis would be feeling as a fifth force, and since that hypothesis is false, the only remaining rational option (on all the evidence) is to admit, fairly and frankly, that not only do we have no idea how and why certain functions are felt, but that we never will. And that far from being a shortfall that can be pooh-poohed as destined to dissipate much the way other bit of our ignorance have dissipated, this one might be a shortfall endemic to causal/functional explanation itself -- or rather, of the explanatory power of causal/functional explanation, given that explaining itself (and being explained to) has a felt dimension (and one that is utterly lacking in any of the gestures toward explaining feeling to date).

Searle: "I believe [Harnad's] sense of "how/why" demands more than science and philosophy can offer.... If you want to know how/why a body falls, the standard answer is to appeal to gravity... [Suppose] we had a unified theory of everything that explained gravity, electromagnetism, and everything else.... In the end, how/why questions stop with theories that state how nature works and the mechanisms according to which it works."

One would have thought so -- and one would have entirely agreed with Searle -- had the universe either consisted only of feelingless function (like gravitation or electromagnetism) or had feeling turned out to be one of the basic forces of nature. But neither of these is true: There is no telekinesis, yet some functions are felt. So we have to own up to the fact that not only do we not have the faintest idea how or why, but there is every reason to believe we never will.