Tags / 19 quotes from 4 sources
#functionalism
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Searle against functionalism
John Searle’s examination of social ontology. A professor of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, Searle specializes in consciousness, philosophy of language, and what he calls “social facts.” For example, what kinds of things are corporations and money? They exist…
Consciousness-as-hallucination as the key to intelligence
The project of machine consciousness is to create a computational simulation with such high fidelity to the human brain and human thought (if these are even separate things) that this simulation would also construct subjective experience. In order for AI to be successful in…
Chalmers's third way on consciousness
third way proposed by David Chalmers, which is somewhat between the ideas of the functionalist and biological theorists. Chalmers proposes that consciousness is itself a fundamental property of the universe—just like
Biological versus functionalist views of consciousness
Without going into the mathematical details here, Maguire shows that if we do in fact have completely integrated experiences, this form of information integration cannot be modeled computationally. Both the global workspace theory and the integrated information theory can in…
Psychedelics and the useful-hallucination theory
In the same spirit as “disorders of consciousness research,” scientists are also beginning to study the neurobiology of psychedelic drugs by using these modern brain-imaging technologies. Which theory about consciousness best supports the conception that consciousness is a form…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Searle does not deny strong AI
It is important to note that Searle is not denying the possibility of Strong Al. Indeed, Searle believes that we are nothing more than complex machines, and therefore we can build machines that think and understand. Searle’s objection is with the notion that machine…
Searle's Chinese gym
Predictably, the resilient Searle stands firm and replies with the Chinese Gym. Instead of a room containing a lone Searle, he imagines a gym full of non-Chinese speakers, one for each neuron in the neural network.
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
The standard views in philosophy of mind are false
I write out of the conviction that the philosophy of mind is the most important subject in contemporary philosophy and that the standard views—dualism, materialism, behaviorism, functionalism, computationalism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism—are false.
What tokens of the same mental type share
But now they are faced with an interesting question. What is it that all of these tokens have in common that makes them tokens of the same mental-state type? If you and I both believe that Denver is the capital of Colorado, then what is it exactly that we share if there is…
Mental states defined by their function
At this point the materialists made a move that was crucial for subsequent philosophizing about the mind. They said: what token brain states have that makes them mental states is a certain type of function in the overall behavior of the organism. Not surprisingly, this doctrine…
Beliefs have no intrinsic features
Mental states such as beliefs are not defined by any intrinsic features, rather they are defined by their causal relations, and these causal relations constitute their function.
Causal relations are all there is to a belief
Beliefs, for example, are caused by perceptions and together with desires they cause actions. Such causal relations are all that there is to having a belief.
Minds are like carburetors, thermostats and clocks
another appeal of the functionalist account of mental states is that it seemed to assimilate the mental realm to a very familiar realm of human functional entities. Thus if we ask, What is a carburetor? What is a thermostat? What is a clock?—all of these questions are answered…
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…
Mind is to brain as program is to hardware
The idea was based on a convergence of work in philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. It seemed that we knew the answer to the question that faced us: the way the system works is that the brain is a digital computer and…
Materialism leaves something out
In this chapter I will present the most common arguments against materialism, concentrating on functionalism, because it is currently the most influential version of materialism. In general, these attacks have the same logical structure: the materialist account leaves out some…
The Chinese room threatened the citadel of functionalism
Forget about consciousness, which is scientifically irrelevant anyway. What matters about the mind is its capacity for information processing, and the modern computer at long last gives us the right model for understanding the information processing capacities of the mind. This…
How is intentionality possible at all
I. HOW IS INTENTIONALITY POSSIBLE AT ALL? This problem is supposed to be as difficult as the problem of consciousness, so the sorts of solutions that are supposed to solve it are much like the solutions proposed for the problem of consciousness. The dualistic solution is to say…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Person is a functional category
That principle is that ‘person’ is not a biological category, but a functional one. Any creature, or even machine, that has the conscious capacities of a person is a person, irrespective of its species. That is why we recognise as people characters in science-fiction films who…