[Serious Phil] Presupposing Experiential Subsystems

[Peter D]

--- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <Philscimind at ...> wrote:

> Therefore it is absurd to allege, as you do, that functionalism claims that "all this is accomplished by syntactic transformations alone with no contribution from the physical/biological properties of the brain (in humans) and no contribution from the chip (other than as a place of software execution)" because there MUST ALWAYS BE A PLACE OF "SOFTWARE EXECUTION".

And the specific details of the Place of Execution make no difference
as long as it supports the running of the software, which is just 
what JP was saying. You are making a fuss about nothing.

> There is no daylight between a functionalist or computational functionalist claim such as Dennett's and a physicalist claim on this score, EVEN IF THE TWO POSITIONS ARE NOT SIMPLY THE SAME IN EVERY PARTICULAR. 

The different between computationalism/functionalism and physicalism is that non-computational physalism holds that specific physical
details of brains do matter, and that consciousness cannot be 
implemented on generic hardware. That's the daylight.