Liquid courage has been around for a while. How about liquid respect or liquid ? What happens when we can find the physiological correlates of various phenomological states?

The real answer, is that our vocabulary increases rather than decreases and we get a more refined way of discussing our states. For example, we still feel fear, but now we can also feel an adrenaline rush. Being able to describe both conditions is useful since they're not coextensive, a person can have an adrenline rush without being afraid, and vice versa.

There is also a conceptual shift similar to the one that took place when the chemical structure of water was determined. Being composed of H2O became a more fundamental way of understanding what water is then any of the phenomenal properties that have allowed people to identify water throughout history. When the physiological correlates of fear, or depression, or some other state is discovered, it becomes a more fundamental description of the higher level state then the properties usually associated with the higher state, so even if you're not feeling fear, executing enough of the physiological response is enough to be afraid. I take this to be related to John Searle's position that the brain is what thinks and that an inorganic can't think. After all, whatever behavioural criteria the computer might meet, its not doing it with a brain and we understand thinking as what a brain does.

Imagine a robot with an avoidance routine. It's relatively easy to design a robot that avoids lights. It's easy to imagine a robot that's programmed to avoid cats, say. Observers of such a robot are prone to say that its "afraid of the light" or "afraid of cats". Getting upset over such usage is a poor sort of hair splitting. The robot meets behavioural criteria for being afraid, even if it doesn't satisfy every possible sort of criteria. Unless the robot is really a close model of a human body, it can't have a adrenaline rush.
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