ABSTRACT
ABSENT QUALIA ARE IM PO SSIBLE-A REPLY TO BLOCK
Sydney Shoemaker
In his recent paper “Are Absent Qualia Impossible?” (hereafter, AAQI),1 Ned Block attempts to rebut an argument I gave for an affirm ative answer to his title question in my paper, “Functionalism and Qualia” (hereafter, F& Q ).2 The issues raised by this controversy go far beyond the question of whether a particular argument of mine is successful. The question of what account we are to give of “qualia” (of the “qualitative”/“phenomenal”/“subjective”/“raw feel” aspects of the mental), or of what can and cannot sensibly be said about them, is one of the most central issues in the philosophy of mind. Block’s formulation of this question focuses it on the issue of “functionalism.” To hold that absent qualia are possible —that a state lacking qualitative character can be functionally equivalent to a “qualitative state” like pain (one that necessarily has qualitative character)—is to hold that functionalism fails as a general philosophy of mind. Block is certainly not alone in regarding qualia as the Achilles heel of functionalism; a well-known expression of the same view is Thomas Nagel’s claim that the “subjective character” of experience, “what it is like” to have it, is “not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised, reductive anal yses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its ab sence.”3
