The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Ep. 222: Debating Functionalism (Block, Chalmers) (Part One)
Jul 29, 2019
A spirited clash over functionalism and whether functional duplicates could lack consciousness. They dissect Block's China and homunculi thought experiments and Chalmers' fading and dancing qualia replies. The conversation pits intuitive counterexamples against gradual replacement scenarios and probes where subjective experience would be located.
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Functionalism’s Core: Causal Roles Define Minds
- Functionalism defines mental states by their causal role among inputs, outputs, and other mental states.
- This lets different physical substrates realize the same mental states if they share the same functional organization.
Chalmers’ Non-Reductive Functionalism
- Chalmers distinguishes reductive functionalism from non-reductive supervenience of experience on functional organization.
- He accepts that functional organization can determine experience without reducing experience to function.
Homunculi Implementing A Turing Table
- Block's homunculi example imagines little men implementing Turing-table squares inside a human-like body.
- The system as a whole simulates you functionally even though its parts are simple rule-followers.