I introduce a challenge to the view that thinking about minds in a first-personal, how-it-feels way is cleanly separable from thinking about minds in a third-personal, how-it-works way. I focus on a set of thought experiments involving phenomenology without function, the ‘converse’ of widely-discussed zombie cases.

I show how a conceptual gap between first-person data and third-person data leads to insurmountable methodological difficulties for a science of mind.

Stepping back from first-order arguments about the conceptual connection between the phenomenal and the functional, I map out the logical space of views and demonstrate how the familiar difficulties of ‘immodest’ conceptual functionalism don’t carry over to a ‘modest’ version of the view.

Dissonant qualia cases ask: are structure-distorting phenomenal quality transformations conceptually compatible with the same underlying functional architecture? At least some of them aren’t, and that shows that some phenomenal kinds (e.g. color experience, emotion, audition) conceptually necesitate matching functional kinds. (c.f. the structure-preserving transformations of inverted qualia cases.)

How does our concept of conscious experience constrain attempts to understand the mind’s place in nature? Many think there’s an in-principle difficulty in moving between the first-personal concept of experience and the sorts of third-personal concepts that feature in scientific theorizing: we can’t read off any facts about objective functional structure from facts about subjective experience, and vice versa. But this has some under-appreciated costs: it undermines our justification for everyday judgments about experience, and it renders the metaphysics of mind unintelligible.

By reflecting on cases of functionally isolated experiences (which I take to be incoherent), we can see that our notion of experience must be a functional notion of some kind or other. Conceiving of a phenomenal mind already involves the conception of a certain kind of underlying functional structure in which various experiences are embedded and through which they bear relations to one another. And seeing this allows us to better understand why brains are the sorts of things that can be the seats of experience while jars of mayonnaise–which don’t have the right functional organization–can’t be.