1. ATS2840 Philosophy of Mind Semester 1, 2017
Dr Ron Gallagher
Tutorial 5 Functionalism
Office Hours: Caulfield: Wed (RoomS908) Please for an appointment.
Lecturer and Unit Coordinator: Dr Jennifer Windt Phone:

2.
Self-awareness in primates
Smart Octopus
Dog knows 1,000 words
Dennett
Dumbing Pill

4. Assessment Tasks Expository 1 (600 words) Fri 24th March (Week4) 15%
There are four assessment tasks in this unit.
Assessment Task
Due Date
Value
Expository 1 (600 words)
Fri 24th March (Week4)
15%
Expository 2 (600 words)
Fri 14th April (Week 7)
Essay (2,300 words)
Fri. 12th May (Week 10)
40%
Exam
TBA
30%
Hurdle Requirements to Pass this Unit
Your overall grade for the unit must be at least 50%
You must achieve a grade of 40% or more on the final exam
You must submit all assessment tasks
You cannot miss more than 3 tutorials

5. 1. Introduction: What is the mind
1. Introduction: What is the mind? Is it nothing more than a physical thing? Are you nothing but a pack of neurons?
2. Descartes and Dualism: Are there two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world: mental and physical? Is your mind something over and above the physical world?
3. Ryle and Philosophical Behaviourism: Is having a mind nothing but having dispositions to behave in certain ways?
4. Smart and Identity Theory: Are mental states literally identical with states of your brain?
5. Functionalism: Are mental states functional states that could in principle be realised in many different kinds of physical system?
6. Causal Theory: Can we capture the best parts of both identity theory and functionalism in a single theory?
8. Consciousness 1: Qualia & the Knowledge Argument: Does complete physical knowledge yield knowledge of everything? Or is knowing what conscious states are like knowledge of a fundamentally different kind of fact? And what are those mysterious things called qualia, anyway?

7.   … [?] ? Causation Link to behaviour Non-chauvinism Physicalism
Non-reduction
Hurt?
Identity theory   …
Dualism
Behaviourism
[?]
Functionalism ?

8. Dualism: What are minds and bodies made of?
Behaviourism: What are we doing when we use mental terms?
Identity Theory: The brain is the mind (neural processes atre mental processes).
Functionalism: What do minds do?
Causal Theory: How do minds cause actions/behaviour?
Knowledge Argument: Are scientific descriptions of mental experiences equivalent to experiences?
Zombie Argument: If dualism is conceivable is it possible?
Panpsychism: Are theories of mind all equally improbable? Is it just as likely that minds are intrinsic to matter as minds are separate substances?
Mental Content: Is thinking a social construct?
Other Minds: Is analogy from our own experience of or own mind enough to establish that others have minds?

9. Required Readings for this Week Ch. 5: Functionalism
5.1 Putnam, H. 1975, ‘The nature of mental states’ in Mind, Language, and Reality, Cambridge University Press: 429–440. (Originally published in 1967 as ’Psychological Predicates’ in Art, Mind, and Religion, W.H. Capitan and D.D. Merrill (eds.), pp. 37–48.)
5.2 Block, N ‘Troubles with Functionalism’ (excerpt), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9:261‐325. (Reprinted in A.I. Goldman, 1995, Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge & London: MIT: )
5.3 Watch Dan Dennett on big think:

10. Recommended Reading:
Block, N ‘Troubles with Functionalism’ Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9:
Fodor, J ‘Special sciences: Or the disunity of science as a working hypothesis’ Synthese 28:
Introductory Reading:
Cole, D .2004, ‘The Chinese room argument’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Funkhauser, E. 2007, ‘Multiple realizability’, Philosophy Compass, vol. 2, iss.2:
Hauser, L. 2005, ‘The Chinese Room Argument’, in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Kim, J. 2011, ‘Mind as a Computing Machine,’ Philosophy of Mind, 3rd edn, Boulder, Westview Press: ch 5.
Levin, J. 2004, ‘Functionalism’ in E N Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Oppy, G. & Dowe, D. 2005, ‘The Turing Test, in E N Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

12. In ‘The Nature of Mental States’ Putnam discusses the question “Are pains brain states?”
He argues: “pain is not a brain state, in the sense of a physical-chemical state of the brain (or even the whole nervous system) but another kind of state entirely. I propose the hypothesis that pain, or the state of being in pain, is a functional state of the whole organism.”
Is the mind nothing but a program running on a sophisticated computer (such as the brain)?

13. Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures.

14. Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures.

15. Functionalism
Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part.

16. The early functionalist theories of Putnam (1960, 1967) can be seen as a response to the difficulties facing behaviorism as a scientific psychological theory, and as an endorsement of the (new) computational theories of mind which were becoming increasingly significant rivals to it. According to Putnam's machine state functionalism, any creature with a mind can be regarded as a Turing machine (an idealized finite state digital computer), whose operation can be fully specified by a set of instructions (a “machine table” or program) each having the form:
If the machine is in state Si, and receives input Ij, it will go into state Sk and produce output Ol (for a finite number of states, inputs and outputs).
A machine table of this sort describes the operation of a deterministic automaton, but most machine state functionalists (e.g. Putnam 1967) take the proper model for the mind to be that of a probabilistic automaton: one in which the program specifies, for each state and set of inputs, the probability with which the machine will enter some subsequent state and produce some particular output.