Functionalism

This is a video lecture about Hilary Putnam's Multiple Realizability argument against the mind-brain identity theory and his argument for the functionalist theory of mind. Functionalism is the theory that being in a mental state just is being a functional state, with certain inputs and outputs, or causes and effects. This is part of an introductory level philosophy course, focusing on the philosophy of mind.

[JAYDUBYAH]

You are a fantastic teacher. This lucid common sense conversational style is so often missing from how many teach philosophy.

[a.a.h.s.]

I can't thank you enough for these videos. I've been really struggling with an essay regarding the Identity Theory and Functionalism, but these videos have practically saved my life (and grades)! Keep up the great work!

[DarisDamaris]

I'm so impressed. Mr. Kaplan, you did such a great job explaining something complex and made it so easy to follow. You are a perfect educational role model! Cheers

[steveseamans]

You just have to be the most popular professor on campus. I’m an old man and my wife was as high school teacher for many many years. She was also the kind of teacher the students loved to listen to and respected. You’re a fantastic lecturer. I just had to say.

[jamesboswell]

"The function of a cat is to be grumpy and scratch your furniture and stuff like that..." LOL Said like a true dog-lover!

[hoagie]

One of the issues with the attack on the brain-mind identity theory is that, while perhaps octopuses and other animals feel "pain", they may not do so in exactly the same way as we do. That is to say, while the mental states may be similar, they are not the same, and thus there is no issue with the brain states being different. This gives rise to questions of how we can know if mental states are similar or the same, and how rather different brain biologies can lead to (what we assume to be) similar mental states. But, importantly, these seem to be open questions, while the functionalist needs them to be closed in order for their attack on identity theory to hold.

[mattmerc]

Thank you for making this complex theory so easy to understand in one go. the quality of these vids are top notch

[captainscarlett]

I'm reminded of my training to be an NCO in the army...functional leadership...a leader is someone who carries out the functions of a leader by addressing needs...group needs, individual needs and task needs. This is teachable and doesn't require individual qualities or situational expertise.

[novas.]

This was great. Thank you for taking your time to help us out.

[mariuszpopieluch]

This channel is excellent. I teach philosophy of mind and it’s my go to intro to each topic. Really like the energy and enthusiasm—it’s a pleasure to watch and listen.

[magnesiumbutincigarette]

It is a great success that you explain some arguments in an easy way although the texts about philosophy of mind are so hard to get it. Thank you so much 🙂✋

[gusbozeman]

this man just saved me with this video 2 hours before I have to turn in my paper. Mr. Kaplan is a godsend

[gm]

I am so glad that before I came accross this video I was considering the mind I independently used fuctionalism to described cognition to require something to experience and an apparatus of any form to abstract the interactive experience, the cognition is the processing of the mind of the experience. I feel like I am starting off on the right path for philosophical thinking.

[FR-kbfc]

Another great lecture. A couple comments. First, gold is the most electrically conductive element that does not easily oxidize, so it functions well as a conductor in oxygen-containing environments. Second, there is a different sense of functionality that I've been trying to understand. Prof. Kaplan says that gold has a certain number of protons; but really, we can't know that, what we can know about gold is that it functions in a certain way. By this I mean, if we put gold ions in a machine called a mass spectrometer, the gold will behave in a certain way, and from this behavior, we infer that it has a certain number of protons. And it isn't just gold, it's everything in the material universe. We can only know how a thing functions. We can never know what a thing "is". That is the kind of functionalism that I'd like to understand better; however, based on this lecture, that seems quite different than the meaning of "functionalism" in philosophy.

[atmansoni]

Very well explained, thank you for the animated examples :)

[PoletBally]

I like how "stuff" seems to be a technical, descriptive term within philosophy.

[gustavs]

You are a great teacher, beyond a very good scholar!

[GeneralPublic]

An octopus has what is called a distributed nervous system instead of a central nervous system. All 8 tentacles contain stuff similar to brain stuff, a network of neurons throughout the body. If you chop off a tentacle, the tentacle can survive for a little while on its own, and it shows signs of being sentient, and can react to things just like an octopus, even without a brain. While an octopus does have a central brain, their 8 tentacles act like 8 additional brains, sort of, so they are sort of like 9-brained creatures, except the network of neurons is all one big network, and as long as it’s all connected, the entire octopus functions like one giant brain.

Since an octopus can be big and its entire body is part of this distributed nervous system that is sort of like a brain, that makes octopi pretty smart compared to other invertebrates. Imagine if your arms and legs had brain matter in them and could think and act immediately without having to send nerve signals all the way to your head and wait for a nerve signal from the head to tell the muscles how to move, if there were some brain-like structures in your limbs that could respond to sensory stimuli and tell your muscles how to react really fast. Technically humans have a little bit of this ability but not very much, in the spine, like your spine can react to certain nerve signals from your legs and tell your legs how to react, but this is much more limited than in an octopus, this is part of how reflexes work, like when a doctor hits a certain location on your knee and your leg goes up without you telling it to do that consciously. But most of what humans do is controlled by the brain, whereas in an octopus, all 8 tentacles can pretty much operate on their own. They are connected the same way the right brain and left brain in a human are connected. Most people just have one consciousness instead of 2. But in some people, the right brain and left brain aren’t really connected well enough, and end up operating separately, with 2 separate consciousnesses.

There are theories about this stuff, how if you cut a consciousness into parts it splits into multiple consciousnesses, and if you connect multiple consciousnesses up together well enough, they merge into a single consciousness. So if I hooked my brain up to yours with electrodes in the same part of the brain in millions of wire connections, theoretically, according to neuroscience, our consciousnesses would merge into one single shared consciousness for both of us that knows everything either of us knows, senses what either of us can sense, controls all our muscles in both bodies, but operates as a single mind, a single consciousness. This is from science, not philosophy. And if you completely disconnect the 2 hemispheres of the brain in a person or another mammal with a similar type of brain, you end up with two minds, two consciousnesses. So with an octopus, technically it has one mind, one consciousness, but it is not centralized, but distributed throughout its body, and can be split apart.

And if you cut off a tentacle, well, the octopus just lost not just part of its body but part of its mind too, so it is very upset. And the tentacle’s mind is now separate from the rest of the octopus’s mind so it is upset too, and it is still sentient and can still think and feel pain and have emotions, unlike for instance if you chop off a human arm or leg, the arm or leg has no consciousness or mind, because in humans, almost all of that happens in the brain, with a tiny bit happening in the spine instead. Although maybe the spine has a little mind of its own that is separate from the larger mind in the brain. We don’t really know for sure. I just felt like talking about how octopus tentacles are sentient and can still think even if you chop them off, and scientists have proved this in experiments. Please don’t hurt any octopi in experiments. It might not be very ethical, now that we know even their tentacles are sentient.

Personally I have witnessed something similar in lizards. There are lizards where if you catch them and are holding them by the tail, their tail detaches from the rest of the body and the lizard escapes, bleeding a bit from where its tail came off, and then it can grow a new replacement tail. And the tail that came off wriggles around for awhile on its own, not even connected to the main body. The tail seems to have a bit of its own nervous system that can, at least, tell it to wriggle around a lot if it is disconnected from the main body of the lizard. Is the tail sentient or conscious at all? Who knows? It might be. It can certainly move on its own after being detached.

Also if you chop the head off a chicken, the chicken can run around for awhile without a head or a brain, still knowing how to run on its legs, which it typically does until it bleeds to death. Is a headless chicken sentient? Maybe. Some people think so. But a chicken or lizard doesn’t have quite as distributed a nervous system as an octopus, nor is it as centralized as a human or other mammal like a cat or dog. This thing where the brain does all the thinking is mostly just a mammal trait, not as true for other animals. Birds have tiny brains but that doesn’t make them dumb, crows are fairly smart, some of the thinking isn’t done in the brain.

A distributed nervous system is sort of like massively parallel cloud computing where multiple regular computers networked together act like one huge supercomputer. It’s a similar phenomenon but not exactly the same because computers don’t seem to be sentient or conscious... not yet. Maybe in a few years they might be. If a simulation of a neural network is just as smart as a real brain, then according to functionalism, it has a mind too. AIs seem like they might get to that point in the next few years, at least a little bit. Like if you think a fruit fly is conscious and sentient, AIs will almost certainly reach that level, at least if you consider an emulated or simulated consciousness to be just as real as the real thing. Which you should.

In software, you can play the same game directly on hardware, or in an emulator emulating that hardware, for instance playing Super Mario Brothers either on an actual original NES game console, or on a program that emulates an NES. In either case, whether on original Nintendo hardware or a Nintendo emulator, you are still playing the same game, Super Mario Brothers, and functionally it is exactly the same. So if you could emulate or simulate a brain, this would also be just as much a mind as the real thing, according to functionalism, because a mind, like Super Mario Brothers, isn’t defined by what it’s physically made of but instead by its function. Super Mario Brothers is a functional kind, just like a brain, you could play it on the latest smartphone and it would still be Super Mario Brothers. Maybe you could even train an octopus to play it, with the right interface and control system designed for an octopus to use. Different tentacles could control different buttons, up down left right A B select and start, 8 buttons for 8 tentacles, a perfect match. Each tentacle would either be pushing a button or not pushing it depending on the position the tentacle points in. Then we would just need an interface to communicate the state of the game to the octopus because maybe vision might not be its main sense. With enough funding, we could create a Nintendo for octopi, and use the Nintendo-playing octopus to solve all of philosophy. Or at least the octopus would have that experience, like in Robert Nozick’s experience machine. Or we could put it in a Chinese room. I guess the Nintendo would be like a Chinese room because it would raise the question, does this octopus actually know how to play Super Mario Brothers, just like asking, does the person in the Chinese room actually know Chinese? The answer is yes, obviously, because this octopus is really smart. All of its tentacles can think, after all... its entire body is like one giant brain.

[williamgarner]

Only in modern times could someone discuss in this way mousetraps and cat and not at least in passing ask if a cat is a mousetrap. That was their main purpose (as far as humans were concerned) for a thousand years.

[bthomson]

Your expression when you are trying to think up what makes a cat is priceless! A cross between disgust and long forgotten memories! I do not think that cats are your thing!