Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 63 of 138
Black-box functionalism
The functionalists naturally wanted to know what was the nature of the inner mental brain states that enabled them to cause behavior. How did the mental states differ from other sorts of brain states? One answer was to say that this is not really a suitable question for philosophy at all; it should be left to psychologists and neurobiologists. We can treat the brain as just a “black box,” which produces behavior in response to stimuli, and we need not, as philosophers, worry about the mechanism inside the black box. This view was sometimes called “black-box functionalism.” But black-box functionalism is intellectually unsatisfying in that it does not answer our natural intellectual curiosity. We want to know, really, how does the system work?