3.4 Functionalism & The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts

Nocebo effect

When patients get worse if they believe they are taking a harmful substance:

Turing Test

Operational test produced by Alan Turing to determine whether a computer can think or not

Biofeedback

Phenomena where subjects are made aware of the firing rates of neurons and asked to control them:

Cognitive

Some of the most tantalizing evidence for the causal efficacy of the mental comes from various clinical experiments such as biofeedback, the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, and _____ behavioral therapy:

Neutral

Strictly speaking, functionalism is _____ on the issue of dualism versus physicalism

Big Blue

The IBM computer that first defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov

Irrelevant

Functionalism claims that a mind is anything that has the functional capabilities to behave in ways characteristic of human minds. The materials composing the system (wet gray matter or electrical circuits) are _____ to its status as a mind. Hence, if a computer running an artificial intelligence program has the same psychological constitution as human beings, then it has a mind.

Intentionality

A feature of certain mental states (such as beliefs) by which they are directed at or are about objects or states of affairs in the world; what a mental state is about:

Conscious

1. If something has a mind, it has subjective, _____ experiences. 2. Even computers that pass the Turing Test do not have subjective, conscious experiences. 3. Therefore, even computers that pass the Turing Test do not have minds.

Primitive

A property that cannot be reduced to or analyzed in terms of any more basic property:

Emergent (property)

A property that comes into being when things that lack that property become related in the appropriate ways:

Software

According to the functionalist, the hardware of the computer (the wires, chips, and so on) are like the brain or whatever substance underlies the mental states. The software is a set of logical relationships that direct the processing of inputs, the changing states of the system, and the outputs. _____ is analogous to the mind.

Zombie (argument)

Argument devised by David Chalmers: 1. It is conceivable that there be zombies. 2. If it is conceivable that there be zombies, it is metaphysically possible that there be zombies. 3. If it is metaphysically possible that there be zombies, then consciousness is nonphysical. 4. Therefore, consciousness is nonphysical

Downward causation

Because emergentists tend to endorse the causal efficacy of the mental, they usually believe in what's known as top-down or _____ _____.

Minds

Even if it turns out that our brains are what produce our psychological properties, there could be other ways that psychological states could occur. Hence, _____ have the property of multiple realizability. (Think of the analogy with chess.)

Psychophysical

For Chalmers, a true theory of everything would entail both physical laws and _____ laws

Easy problems (of consciousness)

For Chalmers, questions (such as how can a human subject discriminate sensory stimuli and react to them appropriately?) that are associated with consciousness in that they all concern the objective mechanisms of the cognitive system, which further research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience will answer

Hard problem (of consciousness)

For Chalmers, the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience

Constitute

For Searle, passing the Turing Test may be evidence that the producer of the apparently intelligible responses has a mind, but this feat alone does not _____ having a mind

Internal

Functionalists claim that mentalistic terms (belief, desire, love) do not alone refer to behavior or dispositions to behavior. Unlike the behaviorist, the functionalist says that mental states can function as the inner causes of behavior. Furthermore, the functionalist claims that behavior cannot be explained without understanding the internal processes that produce it. Hence, contrary to behaviorism, functionalism believes that _____ states such as beliefs, desires, and wishes play a causal role within the organism. These states may be realized in brain states, but they also could be realized in other ways.

Placebos

Inert substances like sugar pills that seem to make people better simply because the people taking them believe they will work:

Bottom-up

Nature can be viewed as having a hierarchical structure where the lower levels give rise to the higher ones. For example, subatomic particles give rise to atoms; atoms give rise to molecules; molecules give rise to cells; cells give rise to organisms; and organisms give rise to societies. These are examples of what's known as ______ causation. The lower levels affect the higher ones.

Strong AI (thesis)

The claim that an appropriately programmed computer really is a mind and can be said to literally understand, believe, and have other cognitive states

Weak AI (thesis)

The claim that artificial intelligence research may help us explore various theoretical models of human mental processes while acknowledging that computers only simulate mental activities

Independent

The identity theory says that mental events or states (believing, doubting, willing, feeling pain, and so on) are identical to a particular brain state. However, the functionalist argues that what is essential to a mind is not a certain sort of material (the wet, gray, fleshy-stuff of the brain). Instead, the functionalist claims, minds are constituted by a certain pattern or relation between the parts of a system, _____ of the material that embodies the system.

Biological naturalism

The name of Searle's resolution to the mind-body problem, which is a physicalist account (1.Consciousness is real and irreducible [against the eliminativists]; 2. Conscious states are caused by neuronal processes [against the dualists]; 3. All conscious states are realized in the brain [it does have a spatial location!])

Causal

The positive side of functionalism is the theory that mental states are defined in terms of their _____ role (how they function)

Multiple realizability

The property by which something can be realized (embodied, instantiated) in multiple ways and in different media

Qualia

The raw sensation of experience; individual instances of subjective, conscious experience such as what it feels like to experience a sunset; the particular feel of a mental state:

Consciousness

The subjective, inner life of the mind

Emergentism

The view that consciousness is an emergent property. The individual neurons that make up our brains are not conscious. But once they become related to one another in the right sorts of ways, consciousness emerges.

Panpsychism

The view that everything has mental properties. That's not to say that everything has a mind, but it is to say that everything has features of the sort we associate with minds, like perceiving, desiring, remembering, and so on. This applies to inanimate as well as animate objects. Although most panpsychists are not willing to go so far as to say that rocks are conscious, they are willing to say that rocks have the earliest glimmers of consciousness.

Property dualism

The view that the mind is an arrangement of nonphysical properties arising from yet dependent on physical properties; also called "emergent materialism," "nonreductive materialism," and "soft materialism"

Physicalists

There is no official position on what a system must be made out of to have mental states. However, the fact is that most functionalists are _____. They would say that it happens to be the case that our functional mental states are identified with brain states.

Chinese Room (thought experiment)

Thought experiment created by John Searle, which was an attempt to refute the strong AI thesis

Mary (knowledge argument)

Thought experiment in which there is a 23rd-century brain scientist who is completely color-blind. She experiences only black, white, and gray. Theoretically, she could have complete scientific knowledge of your brain states while you were experiencing a sunset. However, she still would not know what it was like to experience color. In this case, would it be legitimate to say that a scientific knowledge of the brain gives us only a partial account of the sorts of things that the mind experiences? Are there aspects of our mental life that can be known only by a conscious subject through his or her subjective experiences and that cannot be known through third-person, scientific, objective descriptions of the brain? Does this example show that your mental experiences cannot be completely reduced or understood in terms of brain states?

Materialist

To accept the existence of downward causation is to deny that all human behavior can be explained in purely _____ terms. If mental states can affect brain states, they must be taken into account in any comprehensive explanation of the workings of the brain.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Type of therapy in which patients are told to use self-instructions like "That's not me, that's a part of my brain that's not working" whenever they started to feel the urge to engage in the unwanted behavior:

Poe (Edgar Allan)

Well-known author of "Maelzel's Chess-Player" who argued that in principle no machine could play the game of chess