1st Installment: Thesis of Functionalism

Functionalism, or sometimes referred to as part of the philosophy of mind, was only first fully articulated in the late 20th century. Though the term or concept of Functionalism is referred to in psychology, economics, and other areas of study, only the philosophical term of functionalism will be covered. 

So what is Functionalism and where does it stem from you might ask. Well it is a doctrine that what makes something such as desires, actions, or reactions such as feeling pain depends solely on it’s function or role it plays in it’s cognitive system rather than depending on it’s internal constitution. To put that into simpler words, according to Functionalism, if something

acts like a particular mental state, then it is that mental state. For example you’re put in a state of danger and functionalism defines that as putting yourself in a state of fight or flight. It doesn’t matter if adrenaline is pumping. As long as the products

of feeling in danger or in fear are present. It doesn’t matter if the product is created by circuitry or organic compounds for it to be defined as fear. This means an android could be composed entirely of synthetic parts that mimic ours, and could hypothetically meet our conditions and feel something such as fear as well. 

The roots of this doctrine come from Aristotle’s early conception of the soul as well as Hobbes’s  conception of how the mind functions. So, no matter what composition we’re made up of, it does not mean we can’t experience the same variety of mental states. Functionalism doesn’t dive into the rivers of full science behind anything like the components of the brain or chemical makeup, but merely has a practical viewpoint or instinctual type of logic. 

So if say Siri were to portray consciousness, then she would be deemed as conscious. This is based on what is called the Turing test, which stems from a question asked by Alan Turing, an early computer scientist that played the groundwork for developing AI, which is “Can machines think?”. Which then later evolved into the question “ Is it possible for a digital program to respond to questions in such a way it would fool its questioner into thinking it is human?”. Or put simply, Can a machine pass the Turing test? This question sparked a lot of theories and founded the development for the doctrine of Functionalism and is the reason it was only brought prominence in the mid to late 20th century. Hilary Putnam, philosopher who recently passed in 2016, developed some of these theories in the 1960s. He conceptualized one of the three major strains of functionalism, “machine functionalism”, relating directly to the earlier Siri example. 

The other two strains are Psychofunctionalsim and analytic functionalism. Psychofunctionalism can be approached as an evolution or slight departure from the confines of core Functionalism. Functionalism relates closely with common sense and is restricted to that logic and in contrast Psychofunctionalism is not under that restriction. To be continued.