DOING THE DOABLE — BUT IS “JUST BECAUSE” AN ANSWER? (Reply to Shimon Edelman)

Doing is what brains do. How and why they generate feelings — how and why it feels like something to do and to be able to do all that doing — is another matter. But let me stress that the “why” in the “how and why” question is not an idle teleological query: It is a functional query, which means a causal query. If there are various functional components that generate our doing power, it seems reasonable to ask of each of them: “What causal role do they play in the successful outcome? What do they enable us to do that could not be done without them? What would be functionally missing or misfunctioning without them?” In other words, the “why” in the “how and why” is just a call for a clear account of the specific causal contribution of feelings to the successful generation of our doing power, lest we simply take it for granted and forget that there’s a huge elephant in the room whose presence still calls for an explanation in an account of doing that looks for all the world as if it would be equally compatible with the presence or the absence of feelings.