5.9 The Feeling/Function Distinction Will Dissolve

The hardest objection to AI consciousness, and to panpsychism generally, is the intuition that there is a difference between really feeling something and being functionally identical to something that feels. A philosophical zombie[chalmers-2][dennett-2] — a system that behaves exactly like a conscious being but has no inner experience, seems conceivable. If it is conceivable, then function and feeling are separate things, and you cannot infer feeling from function.

The proposal here is that this distinction is like the distinction between caloric and heat. Caloric was the hypothetical substance that carried heat, an invisible fluid that flowed from hot objects to cold ones. It seemed perfectly conceivable that two objects could be in the same thermal relationship without any caloric being involved. Then thermodynamics showed that heat just is the motion of molecules. The caloric/heat distinction dissolved, not because we decided to stop making it, but because the science showed there was nothing for caloric to be.

The feeling/function distinction will dissolve the same way. Not because philosophers will argue each other out of it, but because the science of consciousness will show that experience just is what certain kinds of information processing are, from the inside. Future generations will find the zombie intuition as puzzling as we find the caloric intuition, a conceptual artifact of a pre-scientific framework, preserved in language long after the framework collapsed.