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Functionalism And Qualia On The Mind Body Problem

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Functionalism and Qualia Introduction: It can be very difficult to find a universal proposal that offers a solution to the mind body problem. While solutions to this problem differ greatly, all attempt to answer questions such as: What makes a mental state mental? What is the fundamental nature of the mental? Or more specifically speaking, what makes a thought a thought? Or what makes a pain a pain? In an attempt to answer these questions, many philosophers over the centuries have rejected, proposed, or altered preexisting theories in order to keep up with the thinking and science of their times. Entering the 21st century their still exit a plethora of theories, some stronger than others, which include Cartesian dualism, physicalism, …show more content…

No. While the Turing machine is one model of computation, it is not the only one. The Turing machine is equivalent to other models of computation in the way that the same functions are quantifiable by Turing machines as by other models. However, it is not equivalent to other representations in the stronger sense that the computations operate the same way. Machine functionalism says that thinking is computation. However, I believe that machine functionalism could be strengthened by not committing to the idea that it is Turing machine computation. At this point one might ask, “Why should we call this machine functionalism?” And the answer to that question is that human’s beings, like Mac and PCs, are a type of computing machine. The second version of functionalism is causal-theoretical functionalism. Causal-theoretical functionalism classifies mental states in terms of their psychological theory. There are two versions of psychological theory: (a) Common-sense psychological theory (b) Scientific psychological theory It is also important to make the distinction between role functionalism and realizer functionalism. Even though this is a fairly subtle and technical distinction, it is still important to be recognized. While role functionalism says that mental states are the functional role, realizer functionalism says that mental states are the realizer of the functional

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