One worry was whether the apparent detachment of functional mental properties from physical properties would render mental properties explanatorily inert.
Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties.
Perhaps mental properties elude scientific investigation but are real nonetheless.
Therefore, mental properties cannot be identified with physical ones.
The same is not true of mental properties.
But mental properties fail this more refined test.
How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior?
If the following three are true: mental properties are functional in nature, occupant-functionalism is correct, and the role of mental properties is played by physiological properties, then mental properties reduce in a straightforward sense to physiological properties.
It should be noted, however, that it is not the case that only mental properties can explain and be explained by the occurrence of mental properties.
Nonetheless, so long as there are occurrences of mental properties in need of the distinctive kind of explanation provided by rationalization, mental properties occupy an ineliminable explanatory role.
It thus leaves open the possibility that, in W*, everything has mental properties, or nothing has or the only things that have mental properties are Saturn's rings!
