Functionalism Refuted Options

[Trip like I do]

A basic tenet of functionalism is that brains and computers are interchangeable. But mathematician and theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the university of Oxford has used the following thought experiment to shake the theory at its foundation.

-All conceivable computers are, in principle, Turing machines (named after English mathematician Alan Turing, who first described them). They carry out sequential operations following definite rules. Turing machines can represent any arbitrary, formal system - one in which each element and each operation is uniquely defined. If the Turing machine is a model for the brain, then the brain function is a formal system.
-Now consider Australian-born mathematician Kurt godel's incompleteness theorem, or theory of improvability. According to the theorem, in any formal system there are mathematical axioms that are true but that cannot be proved true within the system. Yet if our thoughts constitute a formal system, then we should not be able to recognize the validity of the Godel axiom. Penrose concluded from this that human capacities of understanding cannot be enclosed within a formal system; the brain is not a turing machine, and thus the presupposition of functionalism is false.

[Dan]

yes, without the 'ghost' the machine is empty formalism

[Rick]

Functionalism can be revived if we consider that the functions of the brain go beyond the functions of the computer. For example, one brain function is consciousness, which computers don't do. Therefore, a functionalistic brain theory that includes consciousness doesn't rely on similarity to computers, although computation is a subset of the brain's functions.

Aside from that, the above "proof" of nonfunctionalism is fallacious. Godel's theorem is proven within the mathematical system. There is an infinite number of unprovable but true theorems, but Godel's incompleteness theorem is not one of them.

[Trip like I do]

There is an undoubted similarity between the way the brain's complex bundles of neurons are organized and the spaghetti of wiring that makes up the electrical circuitry of a computer, particularily now that computers using parallel processing have been invented.

[Trip like I do]

Like the 'nerve cells' of a computer, the brain's 10 billion or 100 billion neurons are also a form of electrical wiring, with various messages passing into and out of the brain by way of electrochemical pulses travelling (at the speed of light) across the nerve junctions, the synapses. At any one time the brain is literally seething with millions of highly charged neural events, a large proportion of which no doubt underlie our impressive data processing and computing abilities.

Is computation really all there is to mind.

[Trip like I do]

Why don't computers have minds?

Certainly they can do very sophisticated things. They can analyze genetic tissue, do complex mathematics, or play chess. But so far no one would argue that any electronic computing device of the sort we can imagine is even remotely conscious. They lack spontaneity and creativity;;;;;they lack imagination; they don't laugh at jokes, enjoy music, suffer pain, or do any of the other things of the sort thatwe normally associate with the conscious life of the human mind.

[Dan]

'subject' is the crux of the issue. Is there a 'subject' that experiences the perceptive data of the machine? If not, then no matter how complex or how 'lifelike', such a machine is ultimately no more than a glorified toaster.

[Rick]

[Trip like I do]

Functionalism -

1. The doctrine that the function of an object should determine its design and materials.
2. A doctrine stressing purpose, practicality, and utility.
3. Philosophy. The doctrine in the philosophy of mind according to which mental states are defined by their causes and effects.

[Trip like I do]

The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine.

[Trip like I do]

The Ghost in the Machine arose in part as a reaction to Thomas Hobbes. He argued that life and and mind could be explained in mechanical terms. Light sets our nerves and brain in motion, and that is what it means to see.

"When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork," philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900 - 1976).

The Blank Slate naturally coexists with the Ghost in the Machine, since a slate that is blank is a hospitable place for a ghost to haunt.

[Trip like I do]

It can indeed be upsetting to think of ourselves as glorified gears and springs. Machines are insensate, built to be used, and disposable. Humans are sentinent, possessing of dignity and rights, and infinitely precious. A machine has some workday purpose, such as grinding grain or sharpening pencils. A human being has higher purposes, such as love, worship, good works, and the creation of knowledge and beauty. The behaviour of machines is determined by the ineluctable laws of physics and chemistry. The behaviour of people is freely chosen. With choice comes freedom and responsibility.

[Trip like I do]

· Abstract motion took possession of Western mind. the rotation of the earth, the majestic geometric path of the planets, the swing of the pendulum, the arc described by hurtling projectiles, the exact motions of clockwork, and the rotations of watch wheels.

Technics and Civilization (1963) – Lewis Mumford

· 18th century automation, step from naturalism to mechanisms.
· The next move is to remove the organic symbol entirely.
· Mechanization and regimentation have been projected and embodied in organized forms, which now dominate every aspect of our existence.
· Surrendering to the machine.
· Three phases of the machine and civilization: 1. The first wave came in the 10th century in an effort to achieve order and power by purely external means, turned away from the momentous moral and social difficulties that it had neither confronted nor solved. 2. The second wave came in the 18th century, where external regimentation and internal resistance went hand in hand. 3. Modern day.
· The characteristic properties of emerging order – its patterns, its planes, its angles of polarization, and its colours.
· Can one, in the process of crystallization, remove the turbid (muddy, not clear) residues left behind by our earlier forms of thought?
· Machines have developed out of a complex of non-organic agents for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the mechanical or sensory capacities of the human body, or for reducing to a measurable order and regularity the regularity the processes of life.
· The tool lends itself to manipulation, the machine to automatic action.
· The Universe as ordered by God.
· No two cultures live conceptually in the same time and space.
· Kant “Time and space are categories of the mind.�

[Trip like I do]

The Myth of the Machine – The Pentagon of Power ( ? ) – Lewis Mumford

· At every point in development, the concrete, the empirical, and the historical on the one hand and the abstract, the mathematical and the analytical on the other, have both been necessary for forming an adequate picture of reality.
· Types of business personalities: finders, collectors, fabricators, manipulators, etc.
· Every man is a dabbler, if not a master in all knowledge. Every man is a divine, a physician, and a lawyer to himself, as well as a counsellor to his neighbours.
· 16th century mechanistic conversion of society – purely mechanical forms were superimposed upon every manifestation of life, thereby suppressing many of the most essential characteristics of organisms, personalities, and human communities.
· 16th century depersonalized world picture – mechanical activity and interests took precedence over more human concerns.
· Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton were the driving forces in this transformation. Also note Boyle, Maxwell and Planck.
· Marxist historians see feudalism as a universal historical stage through which all societies must pass before the emergence of capitalism.
· Whereas many of the older ideologies of life had mistakenly accepted a static, earth centred world, with only the most limited possibilities of change, mostly of a cyclical or apocalyptic order, the new ideology fostered an intense interest in space, time, motion, in their widest cosmic setting, not the settings in which organisms actually function in their earthly habitat, intermingled with other organisms, pursuing their own further life potentialities.
· Speed shortens time, time was money, and money was power.
· Farther and farther, faster and faster, became identified with human progress.
· Metaphors and analogies derived from the machine were applied shrewdly, if coarsely, to organisms in order to reduce life to its quantitative mechanical and chemical components. This seemed an infallible method of eliminating the ultimate mystery of life itself.
· Western man’s views of the new world – the geographic new world, with the Sun as the centre of the universe, the mechanical new world, and historical time, which released man from the grasp of his unconscious past, with its buried traumas and its futile repetition of attested errors.
· The human figure as a mechanized automaton – that which is self-moving, self-acting machine; a mechanical contrivance, which imitates the arbitrary or voluntary motions of living beings; a person who acts mechanically.
· Mechanization of the world picture.

[Rajesh]

http://www.dhushara.com/book/quantcos/penrose/penr.htm

[Trip like I do]

We will one day find the right key that unlocks the box to universal harmony and dimension.

Maybe the universe is the biblical tower of Babel and understanding is spread throughout all levels and all dimensions of the cosmos.

[rhymer]

There is an excellent article to be found at

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty...ctionalism.html

[Trip like I do]

From above link,

...One motivation behind functionalism can be appreciated by attention to artifact concepts like carburetor and biological concepts like kidney. What it is for something to be a carburetor is for it to mix fuel and air in an internal combustion engine--carburetor is a functional concept. In the case of the kidney, the scientific concept is functional--defined in terms of a role in filtering the blood and maintaining certain chemical balances...

...According to functionalism, the nature of a mental state is just like the nature of an automaton state: constituted by its relations to other states and to inputs and outputs...

...According to functionalism, all there is to being in pain is that it disposes you to say ‘ouch’...

...Mental states can be totally characterized in terms that involve only logico-mathematical language and terms for input signals and behavioral outputs...

...conceptual functionalism, the functional definitions are aimed at capturing our ordinary mental concepts. In the former case, which I named psychofunctionalism, the functional definitions are not supposed to capture ordinary concepts but are only supposed to fix the extensions of mental terms. The idea of psychofunctionalism is that the scientific nature of the mental consists not in anything biological, but in something "organizational", analogous to computational structure. Conceptual functionalism, by contrast, can be thought of as a development of logical behaviorism. Logical behaviorists thought that pain was a disposition to pain behavior. But as Geach and Chisholm pointed out, what counts as pain behavior depends on the agent’s beliefs and desires. Conceptual functionalists avoid this problem by defining each mental state in terms of its contribution to dispositions to behave--and have other mental states...

...dualism told us that there are both mental and physical substances, whereas behaviorism and physicalism are monistic, claiming that there are only physical substances. Here are the metaphysical claims: behaviorism tells us that what pains (for example) have in common in virtue of which they are pains is something behavioral; dualism gave a non-physical answer to this question, and physicalism gives a physical answer to this question. Turning now to functionalism, it answers the metaphysical question without answering the ontological question. Functionalism tells us that what pains have in common--what makes them pains--is their function; but functionalism does not tell us whether the beings that have pains have any non-physical parts. This point can be seen in terms of the automaton described above. In order to be an automaton of the type described, an actual concrete machine need only have states related to one another and to inputs and outputs in the way described. The machine description does not tell us how the machine works or what it is made of, and in particular it does not rule out a machine which is operated by an immaterial soul, so long as the soul is willing to operate in the deterministic manner specified in the table...

[Unknown]

We are too scared to die, due to beliefs imposed by ancestoral religious dominators and too vain to live without a soul, in case we might be too closely related to the archaea. If, when you're dead you're dead, there is no need to fear life or death. One day we might be able to transfer the chemistry or physics of mind, memory and personality to a machine that will maintain it, but until then let us leave the earth and existence behind when we die and get on with appreciating the really important science - understanding and ridding humans of pain. Look into any hospital and you will see even the most minor ailments and treaments inflicting quite severe pain. If we are truely an important species with this special mind, then why do we suffer so? The facts of pain in life are frightening. The end in death is welcome. The dualism of pain and painless has a great impact on the usefulness and capability of the mind. Let's understand the physics, chemistry, biochemistry and physiology of the nervous system and use the mind as a tool and not be a slave to it through naivety and vanity. Let's be a machine (that the mind is part of) and be proud of it!

Merry Christmas.

[Dan]

[rhymer]

You're right Dan, but surely the real objective is to REALISE ones pain has gone!

[Trip like I do]

Functionalism -

Two of its most influential proponents were William James and John Dewey. Functionalists were interested in the fact that behavior and mental processes are adaptive, they enable an individual to adjust to a changing environment. Thus they sought to study the adaptive functions of behavior and mental processes, not merely there structure.

Instead of limiting themselves to the description and analysis of sensory experience and of mental content, they emphasized the total activity of the individual, how he learns, how he is motivated, how he goes about solving problems, how he forgets.

So functionalism has two chief characteristics: the study of the total behavior and experience of an individual, and an interest in the adaptive functions served by the things an individual does.

[Enki]

[rhymer]

A probability of 0.2 means that your offer is significant - just about!

But does Trip have 5 friends willing to have a go?

I'll bet the 'key' is the phone number for the samaritans (an emergency self-help group in the UK)!

[Hey Hey]

In actuality, I reckon there will be more chance of winning the lottery! This is not due to any disagreement with statistical methods (ie the 0.2); rather, I just don't trust Enki. Is trust a metaphysical characteristic or just a complex reflex?

Dan, the swan dive could leave pain for others, so an invalid suggestion. And don't forget, whilst you're alive, you're alive. Go to the back of the class and try harder! Or try some permanent pain and then consider the solutions. And don't be flippant; it could happen to you anytime and without your control. And we should consider the rights and value of others and not be so quick to side-track the hard problems. I hope that you aren't doing this in your research.

[Trip like I do]

Shadows of the Mind - A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994) Roger Penrose

The A, B, C, D, of computation and conscious thinking.

'wired up'

Might we be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all?

How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?

Will the computers of the future actually have minds?

Does the presence of a conscious mind actually influence behavior in any way?

Does it make sense to talk about such things in scientific terms at all; or is science in no way competent to address issues that relate to the human consciousness?

[Trip like I do]

4 diverse opinions:

A. All thinking is computation; in particular, feelings of conscious awareness are evoked merely by the carrying out of appropriate computations.

B. Awareness is a feature of the brain's physical action; and whereas any physical action can be simulated computationally, computational simulation cannot by itself evoke awareness.

C. Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but this physical action cannot even be properly simulated computationally.

D. Awareness cannot be explained by physical, computational, or any other scientific terms.

[Trip like I do]

[Unknown]

[Enki]