I am not saying that you could have physical situation exactly like the real world except with subjective experience reversed. I agree that in order to reverse subjective experience, you would need to make physical changes.
To be clear, I didn’t think you were proposing any sort of p-zombie-like hypothesis, where mental states are epiphenomenal or otherwise.
But with those physical changes, why couldn’t you have a situation where adaptive experiences feel bad and non-adaptive ones feel good?
I think this is the same sort of error that a lot of people make when they ask “Why am I who I am instead of someone else?” They think that their identity exists primitively in the territory or even that it existed before their body; but it’s a wrong question because they have the causality reversed. The question would make sense if you were some ghost-in-the-machine and you or someone else picked some physical body, but that’s not how it works. Your body caused your mind, so you always are who you are and the question is confused. (I also don’t mean to exclude the possibility of anthropic reasoning in this example.) The good and the bad don’t exist primitively in the territory, they are caused by evolutionary processes that develop organisms with reward mechanisms, and we identify reward and punishment, among other things, with these high-level concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that didn’t exist before us, so good is always good and bad is always bad and the question is confused.
Although with what I’ve seen in neuroscience, some creature like what you describe doesn’t necessarily seem outside of the realm of physical possibility to me. If people can simultaneously observe that they are paralyzed and come up with endless excuses for why they aren’t, and the cognitive processes we’re talking about in this case aren’t too intertwined, then I can perhaps conceive of a creature that continues to perform adaptive behaviors but experiences suffering and happiness in the reverse. But I would expect someone to have to construct it, not for it to evolve. Or maybe an evolved creature with the most horrible sort of oddly complex neurological lesion.
To be clear, I didn’t think you were proposing any sort of p-zombie-like hypothesis, where mental states are epiphenomenal or otherwise.
I think this is the same sort of error that a lot of people make when they ask “Why am I who I am instead of someone else?” They think that their identity exists primitively in the territory or even that it existed before their body; but it’s a wrong question because they have the causality reversed. The question would make sense if you were some ghost-in-the-machine and you or someone else picked some physical body, but that’s not how it works. Your body caused your mind, so you always are who you are and the question is confused. (I also don’t mean to exclude the possibility of anthropic reasoning in this example.) The good and the bad don’t exist primitively in the territory, they are caused by evolutionary processes that develop organisms with reward mechanisms, and we identify reward and punishment, among other things, with these high-level concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that didn’t exist before us, so good is always good and bad is always bad and the question is confused.
Although with what I’ve seen in neuroscience, some creature like what you describe doesn’t necessarily seem outside of the realm of physical possibility to me. If people can simultaneously observe that they are paralyzed and come up with endless excuses for why they aren’t, and the cognitive processes we’re talking about in this case aren’t too intertwined, then I can perhaps conceive of a creature that continues to perform adaptive behaviors but experiences suffering and happiness in the reverse. But I would expect someone to have to construct it, not for it to evolve. Or maybe an evolved creature with the most horrible sort of oddly complex neurological lesion.