- Anti-functionalist(as a philosophical position)
- A rejection of functionalism; the view that mental states cannot be fully explained just by their functional roles, and that something else matters too.
- Metaphysically impossible(as used in metaphysics)
- Something that cannot exist or happen in the deepest reality, no matter what—not just practically impossible but impossible by the very nature of how reality works.
- Principled reason(as a philosophical standard)
- A consistent logical ground or justification based on an underlying rule or theory, rather than an arbitrary decision.
- functional duplicates(Central to debates about functionalism and phenomenal consciousness)
- Two individuals who are identical in all functionally relevant respects — i.e., same input-output relations and internal computational organization — but who may or may not share the same physical substrate.
- functionalism(Philosophy of mind; distinguished here from representationalism)
- The view that mental states are defined by the causal roles they play in a cognitive system — their actual, potential, or typical causal relationships.
- inverted qualia(Used to challenge both functionalism and physicalism)
- A scenario in which two individuals are identical in some relevant respect (functionally or physically) yet differ in their phenomenal experience — e.g., one experiences red where the other experiences green.
- molecule-by-molecule duplicates(Contrasted with functional duplicates to probe physicalist commitments)
- Two individuals who are identical at the level of every molecule and share the same external physical settings, constituting the strongest physical notion of duplication.
- physicalism(The target position that the knowledge argument is designed to refute)
- The thesis that physical theory can in principle account for everything there is to know about the world