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Preface

Some mental states have " feels" or qualitative phenomenal characters

. And since the dawn of Behaviorism, some philosophers have

doubted the ability of any physicalist account of the mental to accommodate

this fact. There is something it is like, or feels like , to be in

pain or to hear middle C as played by Dennis Brain or to have one's

visual field suffused with vivid yellow ; how could the introspectible

qualitative features of such states as these possibly be explained , explicated

, afforded , or even allowed by a theory that reduces persons

and their states fo the motions of dull little atoms in the void? That is

the main question that concerns me in this book . In answer to it I

shall develop and defend the theory of mind that I call Homuncular

Functionalism , arguing that the view is entirely adequate to the subjective

phenomenal character of the mental and to all the facts of

consciousness.

Incidentally , the terms "conscious" and "consciousness" have any

number of different though related senses: A being is a conscious as

opposed to a non conscious being if (unlike a stick or a stone) it has

the capacity for thought , sensation, and feeling even if that capacity

is never exercised, as in the case of an infant that dies soon after birth .

A creature is conscious as opposed to unconscious if it is awake and

having occurent mental states such as pains, perceivings, and episodic

beliefs and desires. But (see chapter 6) there is a further , introspective

or attentive sense in which even such episodic states of

subjects can themselves be unconscious or, better, subconscious, " unfelt

" - not to mention Freud's even more special sense. There is the

dyadic consciousness of some physical or perhaps intentionally inexistent

item . There is one's consciousness or awareness that suchand-

such is the case. There is the vaunted self-consciousness or even

"consciousness of self." And more . We shall see that all these notions

are different , and that insofar as any of them poses problems for physicalism

, the respective problems are very different problems and must

be dealt with quite separately. Thus my title is a misnomer or at least

a malnomer , and I admit that in choosing it I have just pandered to

currently popular usage. What really concern me are the qualitative

features or phenomenal characters of mental items, in a sense finally

to be clarified in chapter 8.

This book is a very distant descendant of what was to have been a

joint work by George Pappas and me, and has been cited in the literature

under the title Materialism. Sometime during the 1970s, both

Pappas and I lost interest in doing our original project - essentially a

critical survey of materialist theories of the mind - and I began proselytizing

for Homunctionalism in particular , with the results ensuing .

I am grateful to Pappas for rich and rigorous discussion over the

years. I am also indebted to generations of graduate students at the

Ohio State University, the University of Sydney, and the University of

North Carolina for their many critical and constructive contributions ;

to David Arm strong and Keith Campbell for numerous trenchant conversations

about "qualia"; to Victoria University of Wellington for giving

me the opportunity to present this material in the form of a course

of lectures in 1986; and to David Rosenthal and Robert van Gulick for

their more than generous comments on an earlier draft of this book .

And as always, warm thanks to Harry and Betty Stanton for their

patient encouragement and for their joint homuncular realization of

the vigorous group organism called Bradford Books.

Acknowledgments

Chapter 3 partially reprints my articles "A New Lilliputian Argument

against Machine Functionalism "

(1979) and "The Moral of the New

Lilliputian Argument

"

(1982), both reprinted by permission of Philosophical

Studies; copyright @ 1979/1982 by D. Reidel Publishing

Company, reprinted by permission . Chapter 4 contains interfoliated

chunks of my

"Form, Function , and Feel"

(1981), reprinted from the

Journal of Philosophy by permission . Sections 1- 4 of chapter 7 are lifted

from "Phenomenal Objects: A Backhanded Defense: ' in J. Tomberlin

(ed.), PhilosophicalP erspective,s Vol. 1. The appendix borrows about

four pages from "Abortion and the Civil Rights of Machines,

" in N.

Potter and M. Timmons (eds.), Morality and Universality, copyright

@ 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, reprinted by permission .