Functionalism

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses where functionalism falls in the genesis of theory that attempts to answer the question of the truth of the relationship between mind and body in the human experience. The fundamental idea of functionalism is that mental states are definable in a similarly exterior way to behaviorism. It examines how the the theory of functionalism can be considered the intellectual child of logical behaviorism with adapted elements of modern identity theory concerning the identical nature of the human brain's structures and processes.

From the Paper:

"Functionalism takes its inspiration from the mechanistic aspects of science. In so-called simple Decompositional Functionalism, a whole system is explained in terms of functional parts, such as the functional components of an the infamous Turning machine, the purely functional machine that forms the functionalist philosophy's core image. In such an ideal machine, all that matters is what the machine does, not the mechanics of how it does what it does, or what the machine is made of. Computation-Representation Functionalism takes the technical aspects of Decompositional Functionalism and applies them to the biological components of the human mind, rendering mental states into functional states."

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