A claim is not an assertion. I don’t see any assertion the hard problem doesn’t exist here, just expression of a belief it may be solvable and an outline of maybe how.
> Simply declaring it as functional is begging the question.
Nobody is ‘declaring’ any such thing. I loathe this kind of lazy pejorative attack accusing someone of asserting, declaring something, just for having the temerity to offer a proposed explanation you happen to disagree with.
What your last paragraph is saying is that stage 1 isn’t conscious therefore stage 5 isn’t. To argue against stage 5 you need to actually address stage 5, against which there are plenty of legitimate lines of criticism.
> The claim is that phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible.
They're explicitly defining the hard problem out of existence.
> I loathe this kind of lazy pejorative attack accusing someone of asserting
Take it easy. Nothing I wrote here is a "pejorative attack", I'm directly addressing what was written by the OP.
>They're explicitly defining the hard problem out of existence.
A claim is just an opinion, it's not a 'definition' or 'declaration'. That's absurd hyperbole. If I say personally I don't think the hard problem is an obstacle for physicalism, I'm not defining anything.
Let's see what the author says in his introduction to the paper. "Take this with a grain of salt". Hardly the definitive declaration you're railing against.
> Simply declaring it as functional is begging the question.
Nobody is ‘declaring’ any such thing. I loathe this kind of lazy pejorative attack accusing someone of asserting, declaring something, just for having the temerity to offer a proposed explanation you happen to disagree with.
What your last paragraph is saying is that stage 1 isn’t conscious therefore stage 5 isn’t. To argue against stage 5 you need to actually address stage 5, against which there are plenty of legitimate lines of criticism.