Functionalism and mental states

Functionalism recognizes the fact that it is impossible to identify types of mental states with types of behavioral tendencies, but still wishes to describe mental states by reference to behavior, albeit indirectly, and attempts to achieve this by distinguishing mental states in terms of the roles or causal functions they are believed to play in determining how the subject behaves in different circumstances. First, there are special ways in which the surroundings of a subject can cause the subject to have certain types of mental states, such as when his leg is hurt, causing him to feel pain, or when a light falls on his eyes, causing him to feel a visual sensory experience. Second, there are special ways in which a particular type of mental condition can causally interact with other mental states in the same subject, such as when pain is felt in a leg that causes a belief that its foot has been injured, or when visual experience causes a feeling that a person has seen something. Third, there are special ways in which a certain type of mental condition is able to contribute causally to the behavior of the subject's body, such as when a person believes that his leg has been injured with the desire to relieve the resulting pain, causing it to scratch the injured part or pull the leg from harm. Thus, functionalism may say, in general, that the causal role of feeling pain in the leg is a sign of a physical injury in the leg, causing the injury to occur, and thus helping to make it work. Functionalism is based on a basic analogy between the mind and the computer, which was inspired by the rise of interest in computing in the 1950s and 1960s, in fact for many functionalists this is not just a comparison, because they believe that the human brain is actually a biological computer made over the course of centuries of evolution by natural selection. Hilary Putnam, who was one of the pioneers of career doctrine and then retracted it, says: "A computer has many physical properties, for example, it has weight, it has a certain number of conductors, etc., it also has economic properties, for example, and it also has functional properties, such as having a certain program. However, this last type of characteristics is not physical, because it accepts the implementation by different systems independently of their metaphysical or ontological composition, each mind separated from the body can have a certain program, and the program can be the same." According to this view, just as the biological function of the heart is the distribution of blood throughout the body, and therefore remains oxidized and nourished, so the biological function of the brain is the collection of information from the body environment, and the "processing" of this information according to certain biological "software". This doctrine of the male mind fills in the nature of the mind and mental states and replaces this with the function of the mind, and all physical components of the computer can be replaced with other components and remain the product of the same computing. More: https://braheen.com/publications/الأخلاق-العصبية-نقد-اختزال-علم-الأعصاب-المعرفي-للأخلاق — Source: Published on Facebook's "Braheen Center" page