Abandoning functionalism: Some intuition pumps (2024)

The piece argues that functionalism - the view that consciousness is just the implementation of certain abstract functions - fails as an account of sentience because computation and causal role alone miss crucial physical ingredients. It marshals intuition pumps and concrete examples: single-celled organisms and nonstandard computing paradigms show complex, goal-directed behavior without anything like neural computation; superficially “functionally equivalent” silicon neurons would not automatically reproduce the same conscious states; and the binding problem - how unified, integrated experience arises - resists explanation purely in terms of distributed information-processing. These points are used to show that treating consciousness as an observer-relative, multiply-interpretable computation produces degenerate or trivial mappings and leaves central phenomena unexplained.

The proposed alternative is to treat consciousness as a fundamental physical phenomenon whose instantiation depends on specific physical processes (for example, electromagnetic-field dynamics and topological segmentation) rather than on abstract algorithmic form alone. That view avoids implausible strong-emergence claims required by functionalism, restores objective, substrate-sensitive criteria for when systems are conscious, and implies that many digital simulations and standard computational architectures will not, in fact, be conscious unless they reproduce the requisite physical mechanisms. The write-up emphasizes explanatory depth and physical constraints as decisive criteria for a satisfactory theory of consciousness.