> 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.
Yes, they are.
> 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.
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.
This doesn't really address the hard problem, it just asserts that the hard problem doesn't exist. The meat of the problem is that subjective experience exists at all, even though in principle there's no clear reason why it should need to.
Simply declaring it as functional is begging the question.
For example, we can imagine a hypothetical robot that could remove its hand from a stove if it's sensors determine that the surface is too hot. We don't need subjective experience to explain how a system like that could be designed, so why do we need it for an organism?