> No degree of functional equivalence can tell us whether a system is experiencing something. What makes you sure of that? I have read all the usual arguments,

> No degree of functional equivalence can tell us whether a system is experiencing something. What makes you sure of that? I have read all the usual arguments, and I don't find them sufficient to justify the certainty that it is beyond the realm of possibility of doing so, at least up to the standard of evidence by which we assume other people are experiencing something. Framing the physical-mental problem in terms of equivalence is essentially begging the question anyway, tacitly presupposing that the mental is not a physical phenomenon. No-one asks what, physically, is equivalent to a hurricane (to use just one example of a complex and what was once a mysterious phenomenon.)