michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael maxwell) (09/17/86)
I recently read Paul Churchland's book "Matter and Consciousness" (MIT Press, 1984). For those unfamiliar with it, it is an introduction to the philosophy of consciousness, including approaches like dualism, reductionism, behaviorism, functionalism, etc. The fact that it is an introduction should suffice to indicate my level of expertise in the subject... The author describes dualism, as advocated by Descartes and other philosophers, and concludes after noting the arguments against it that "most (but not all) of the professional community" have abandoned dualism. He then describes functionalism. According to Churchland, the functionalist claims that "the adequate characterization of almost any mental state involves an ineliminable reference to a variety of other mental states with which it is causually connected... In characterizing mental states as essentially functional states, functionalism places the concerns of psychology at a level that abstracts from the teeming detail of a brain's neurophysiological... structure." (pg. 36-37) He adds that if an alien being had a set of internal states that were interconnected in the same way as ours, then we could speak of the alien's pains, desires, fears etc. just as we do our own. My paraphrase of what he is saying at this point is (using a computer analogy, as he does later in the book), if the software is the same, the hardware doesn't matter. *If* this latter statement is an accurate paraphrase of functionalism, then I don't see how functionalism differs from dualism. And this is my question: can't the "software" of minds (assuming for the sake of discussion that there is such a software!) be identified with the dualist's "ghost"? It might not have some of the properties that Descartes would have liked (eternality?), but I don't see in what other way it differs from the dualist's separate mind. Or what am I missing? -- Mike Maxwell Boeing Advanced Technology Center ...uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm