This paper identifies a structural explanatory gap in cognitive-scientific and functionalist accounts of mind: the problem of first-personal individuation. Even a complete functional description of a conscious system leaves open the question of what makes a given perspective belong to one subject rather than another — a difficulty I term the individuation gap, which is distinct from, and not...
Abstract AbstractThis paper asks whether first-person subjectivity can be adequately explained in purely physical-functional terms. I approach the question through what I call the AI duplication paradox—the ontological difficulty that arises when one and the same computational architecture is instantiated in parallel across multiple substrates—and argue that functionalism cannot account for the...