PHYSICALISM &

FUNCTIONALISM
 • overview of various general metaphysical
positions and their relations, including
dualism, monism, materialism, and idealism

Last week • the mind-body problem

• Cartesian mind-body dualism,
• its strengths and weaknesses,
• and evaluate Descartes’s arguments for it
Metaphysical Metaphysical
Can there be
more than
Is matter a
fundamental
Is mind a
fundamental
Positions and Their positions
one type of type of reality? type of
reality? reality?
Responses to Central
Metaphysical Materialism No Yes No

Questions Idealism No No Yes

Dualism Yes Yes Yes

Lawhead, William F. The Philosophical Journey: An Interactive Approach. 7th ed. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2019.
 Distinguish between the identity theory
and eliminativist versions of physicalism

Explain
This week • the nature of functionalism,
• the Turing Test,
• and Searle’s Chinese room objection
to strong A I
Physicalism: An
Alternative to
Dualism

Physicalism : human beings can be

explained completely in terms of their
physical or material components.

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 Why most people have trouble concentrating in class
after they have had a big meal?

Why do animals such as frog or rabbits have relatively

small brains, whereas high level mammals such as dogs.
Apes and humans have larger and more complex brain?

How do your thoughts produce a motion in a physical

world?
Questions . . . Is our mental life under our conscious control?

Are your mental states of believing, loving, and choosing

identical your brain states?

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 Physicalists claim that all elements of reality (not just
human beings) are a hundred percent physical and
capable of being explained by science

Physicalism The physicalist’s case rests on two pillars

• The first pillar is the problems with dualism, which
the physicalist believes are unsolvable
• The second pillar is based on all the progress that
has been made in brain science
Four Problems of
Dualism
1) Where does the mind-body interaction
take place?
• Pineal gland?

2) How does the interaction occur?

• Physicists understand force as the product
of mass and acceleration.

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Four • 3) Conservation of energy?
Problems of • The amount of energy in a closed
physical system remains constant.
Dualism • If your body is set in motion by a
mental event: new energy has
entered the world.
• If motion in your body is
translated into a nonmaterial
mental event: energy has been lost
from the physical world.
• Violation of the principle of the
conservation of energy
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 Conservation of
energy?

When playing pool, the cue ball is shot at a

stationary 8 ball. The cue ball has energy.
When the cue ball hits the 8 ball, the energy
transfers from the cue ball to the 8 ball,
sending the 8 ball into motion. The cue ball
loses energy because the energy it had has
been transferred to the 8 ball, so the cue
ball slows down.
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Four problems of
Dualism
4) Success of brain science?
• The brain events tell the whole
story about us.
• Missing sock analogy

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https://tr.pinterest.com/pin/324118504404465569/
The Positive Case for
Physicalism
Correlation between mental events and
changes in brain states
• The case of Phineas P. Gage

Consciousness may be a by-product of low-

level physical processes

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 Forms of Physicalism
• Identity theory, or reductionism
• Mental events are identical to brain events

• "X is feeling pain in her hand"

• "A particular C-fibber is signalling neurons in the S1 region of the cortex, approximately 30 millimetres up
from the lateral fissure."

• Mind-body Superman and Clark Kent

Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain
• We can continue to use our mentalistic language as long as we keep in mind the real object of our talk.

• Brain research will answer all questions about the mind 13

 Eliminativism
The eliminativist believes that people’s
mentalistic talk is so deeply flawed that
it must be abandoned
Forms of
Physicalism
—Labels traditional psychological theories as
folk psychology

—No beliefs or desired, only brain states and

processes

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Do you think, it is
meaningful to literally
attribute a belief to
subject in question?

• Lawhead, p.86
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Dualism &
Physicalism
Functionalism
• How many of our cognitive activities are carried out in full
consciousness?
• How do we know that a person is intelligent?
• What about computers?

• Is it necessary to have emotions to have a mind?

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Functionalism
• Minds are constituted by a certain pattern or relation between the
parts of a system

• Minds have multiple realizability

• Mental states are defined in terms of their causal role (how they
function)

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Functionalism

Stimulus Response

Organism
Stimulus Other
mental
Response
states

Organism
Organism
Other
Other
mental
Stimulus mental
states
Response
states

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Functionalists on
Artificial
Intelligence
• Computers would be intelligent and would have
minds if:

• Computers could be programmed to have

cognitive states functionally equivalent to those
states in human psychology that are identified as
thinking, believing, wanting, remembering,
willing, and so on
• The ability of computers to process information is
comparable to humans
Mary M. Linch , Philosophy Through Film, p.92-93
 ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE 1997 : The computer chess-playing program,
Deep Blue, beat Garry Kasparov.

Is this a sign that computers had achieved a

level of intelligence with that of humans?
Is it something we should fear?
In the 1950s a new research area aimed to
program computers so that they did things
that, when done by humans, were thought
to require intelligence. That research area is
called artificial Intelligence (AI).

Mary M. Linch , Philosophy Through Film, p.92-93

 ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE

Deep Blue, the chess programme that beat

Garry Kasparov could calculate 200,000,000
board positions per second.
Garry Kasparov, when deciding which move
to make, had much more limited research
(approximately three board positions per
second.
But he relies on “hunches” and “intuition” –
the implicit knowledge gained from playing
and studying chess games throughout his life.
Mary M. Linch , Philosophy Through Film, p.92-93
Minds versus
Computers

• Lawhead, pp. 100-101

Artificial Intelligence
• Can a computer think?

• Turing test

• Strong AI thesis: an appropriately programmed computer can think

• Weak AI thesis: a computer can only simulate mental activities.

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Turing Test
“The Imitation Game”

• Alan Turing (1912-1954)

• Turing test, A test produced by

Alan Turing to determine whether a
computer can think or not

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Turing Test
“The Imitation Game”

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 • Turing realized that the machines of his day could
not pass the Turing Test, but he believed that
someday machines would be technologically
capable of doing so

Turing Test • Led some philosophers to expand Turing’s thesis

into two claims
“The • Strong A I thesis: Claim that an appropriately
Imitation programmed computer really is a mind and can be
said to literally understand, believe, and have
Game” other cognitive states
• Weak A I thesis: Claim that artificial intelligence
research may help people explore various
theoretical models of human mental processes
while acknowledging that computers only
simulate mental activities
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Ex Machina

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 Turing Test
“The Imitation Game”
Descartes
• Machines have the sort of intelligent we have if and only if they can understand
language
• Machines cannot understand language
• Therefore, machines cannot have the sort of intelligence we have
Turing
• Machines have the sort of intelligent we have if and only if they can understand
language
• Machines can understand language
• Therefore, machines can have the sort of intelligence we have

Lawhead, p.103 30
Chinese Room
Experiment (1980)
John Searle

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ARTIFICIAL John Searle’s Chinese Room Thought
INTELLIGENCE Experiment.
You are put in a room alone. There is one “in”
and one “out” mail slots, writing instruments,
blank sheets of paper, a very tick book. The
book explains about the experiment and gives
the necessary instructions in detail. These
instructions tell that you will receive a paper
from the in slot and when you receive the
paper you look at it and find out that there
are some writings on it which are meaningless
to you. The instructions tell you to draw
certain things on the blank paper with specific
instructions. Then the instructions tell you to
put your paper in “out” slot. This process
repeated several times. After doing it so often
you start to apply the rules without much
consult the book.
ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE- Later it is been explained to you that
Chinese Room what seems meaningless drawings to
Thought Experiment you, are actually a short story in
Chinese and what you insert to the out
slot was answers to the question about
the story in Chinese.
Thus you be able to answer questions
without knowing and understanding
Chinese. For Searle, when you are in
Chinese room you are the equivalent of
computer running program.
Chinese Room Thought Experiment

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 Chinese Room
Thought
Experiment

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Law head, p.106
 • Attempts to show that:

Chinese • The person in the experiment has passed

the test by fooling the people on the
Room outside that he or she is fluent in Chinese
Experiment • Searle claims that this formal manipulation of
symbols is comparable to what goes on in a
(1980) computer’s A I program

John Searle • No matter how effective a computer

program may be in simulating
conversation, it will never produce real
understanding

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