functionalism

functionalism, in the philosophy of mind, a materialist theory of mind that defines types of mental states in terms of their causal roles relative to sensory stimulation, other mental states, and physical states or behaviour. Pain, for example, might be defined as a type of neurophysiological state that is caused by things like cuts and burns and that causes mental states, such as fear, and “pain behaviour,” such as saying “ouch.” Functionalism, introduced in the 1960s by the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), was considered an advance over type-identity theory (the view that each mental state is identical to a specific neurophysiological state) because the former is not vulnerable to the objection that types of mental states are multiply realizable, or realizable in different physical systems (as a given type of pain is realizable in different human systems, or in both human and animal systems, or in both human and, hypothetically, Martian systems).

Functionalism was inspired in part by the development of the computer, which was understood in terms of the distinction between hardware, or the physical machine, and software, or the instructions that tell a computer what to do. The theory was also influenced by the earlier idea of a Turing machine, named after the English mathematician Alan Turing (1912–54). A Turing machine is an abstract device that receives information as input and produces other information as output, the particular output depending on the input, the internal state of the machine, and a finite set of rules that associate input and machine state with output. Turing defined intelligence functionally; for him, anything that possessed the ability to transform information from one form into another, as the Turing machine does, counted as intelligent to some degree. This understanding of intelligence was the basis of what came to be known as the Turing test, which proposed that if a computer could answer questions posed by a remote human interrogator in such a way that the interrogator could not distinguish the computer’s answers from those of a human subject, then the computer could be said to be intelligent and to think.

Following Turing, Putnam argued that the human brain is basically a sophisticated Turing machine, and Putnam’s functionalism was accordingly called “Turing machine functionalism.” Turing machine functionalism became the basis of the later theory known as strong artificial intelligence (or strong AI), which asserts that the brain is a kind of computer and the mind a kind of computer program.

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analytic philosophy: Functionalism

In the 1980s the American philosopher John Searle (born 1932) mounted a challenge to strong AI. Searle’s objections were based on the observation that the operation of a computer program consists of the manipulation of certain symbols according to rules that refer only to the symbols’ formal or syntactic properties and not to their semantic ones. In his so-called Chinese room argument, Searle attempted to show that there is more to thinking than this kind of rule-governed manipulation of symbols. The argument involves a situation in which a person who does not understand Chinese is locked in a room. He is handed written questions in Chinese, to which he must provide written answers in Chinese. With the aid of a computer program or a rule book that matches questions in Chinese with appropriate answers in Chinese, the person could simulate the behaviour of a person who understands Chinese. Thus, a Turing test would count such a person as understanding Chinese. But by hypothesis, he does not have that understanding. Hence, understanding Chinese does not consist merely of the ability to manipulate Chinese symbols. According to Searle, the functionalist theory leaves out and cannot account for the semantic properties of Chinese symbols, which are what a Chinese speaker understands. In a similar way, the Turing-functionalist definition of intelligence as the ability to manipulate symbols according to syntactic rules is deficient because it leaves out the symbols’ semantic properties.

A more general objection to functionalism involves what is called the “inverted spectrum.” It is entirely conceivable, according to this objection, that two humans could possess inverted colour spectra without knowing it. The two individuals may use the word red, for example, in exactly the same way, and yet the colour sensations they experience when they see red things may be different. Because the sensations of the two people play the same causal role for each of them, however, functionalism is committed to the claim that the sensations are the same. Counterexamples such as these demonstrated that similarity of function does not guarantee identity of subjective experience, and, accordingly, that functionalism fails as an analysis of mental content. Putnam eventually agreed with these and other criticisms, and in the 1990s he abandoned the view he had created.