Functionalism first emerged as a criticism of type-type identity theory, claiming that it was wrong to locate mental phenomena in matter because that implies:
1) Mental phenomena can only be had by beings with a central nervous system similar to ours
2) Beings with similar central state nervous systems must have similar mental states
Functionalism developed the idea that mental phenomena can be had by beings with very different physical constitutions (e.g. humans, cats, computers), and that the same mental phenomena can conceivably be had by physically different beings.
Functionalism's central thesis is that mental phenomena depend not upon the matter in which they 'reside' but in their organisation; i.e. mental states are functional states. A functional analysis of mental phenomena would therefore explain the working of the component parts, or functions, of a psychological organism, and their overall organisation. The mind could therefore be explained in terms of (admittedly complex) flow charts. The mind, and mental faculties, are defined in terms of what they do, rather than what they are, just as one would define 'crank shaft' as 'something that opens and closes valves', rather than identifying the definition with a particular physical object.
Functionalism solves one of the most damaging problems of behaviourism, which is that one could have two stimuli cases providing quite different responses, or indeed several cases of the same stimuli-response relationships with different associated mental states. With functionalism, having the same inputs and outputs needn't mean having exactly the same mental phenomena, since the functions that process the inputs and provide the selfsame outputs can differ. This implies quite a startling conclusion: if one could map out the entire functional process of one thought, one could make a computer 'think' in an identical fashion, and so it is quite conceivable that a machine could love a human, and vice versa.
On this theme, functionalism can be summed up as follows: mind is to brain as software is to hardware. Two systems can be computationally equivalent by physically different.
Is functionalism dualist, materialist or idealist?
By defining itself in terms of function rather than in terms of its substantial instantiations, functionalism remains ontologically liberal (identity theory was thought to be 'chauvinistic') and so avoids the problems of what kinds of beings can have mental phenomena, and of dualism.
Functionalism could be considered compatable with a very liberal token-token identity theory, however, as one could claim that each mental state is identical to a particular physical state (e.g. my pain Y, happening right now, is identical to brain state X) but that mental states in general needn't be thought of as identical to physical states in general (e.g. pain Y is always identical to brain state X).
An identity theory this liberal, however, without the additional ideas of functionalism, becomes more or less meaningless as nothing that it can tell us can ever be proven in any sense (in positing an identity one needs to be able to know of each honomonous entity distinctly, and show a pattern of coincidence with reasons why it is more than coincidence; here one can find no pattern).
It is this distinction between functional states and physical states that leaves functionalism open to forms of dualism, in particular property dualism. Mental phenomena can be thought of as functional properties of brains, with sufficient detachment for entirely different functional states to be associated with the same physical state, and vice versa. In fact, it is conceivable that functionalism might fit with idealist theories. There are no contradictions in functionalism in supposing that a conscious being might have a mind but no brain, and so it is logically possible. Materialism cannot therefore be considered a conceptual truth based on functionalism alone.
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