Do ... Be ... Do ... Be ...

When philosophers talk about functionalism, it's usually in the context of the philosophy of mind. In general, that view is that the sort of intelligence exhibited by humans could, in principle, be produced by mechanisms other than the human brain -- mechanisms that generate beliefs, judgments, attitudes, feelings, and other typical products of minds.

Another (older, but less successful now) approach to the study of the mind was structuralism, which tried to understand it by examining its contents -- the many kinds of mental states we experience. The general idea was to see which mental states were brought about by various stimuli, in hopes that we could understand how the structure of the mind relates to the structure of the environment. This approach has fallen out of favor, but I think that structuralism is still a "stealth" influence in thinking about the mind (and other physical processes). Here's how:

Functionalists typically seek to explain the causal origin of mental states.

Now, why would I object to this? Primarily, I think the approach is backwards. Instead of treating mental states as the items of interest to be studied, we'll be much better off simply looking at the way the brain works. If we must talk about mental states, it will be most profitable to treat them not as things to be identified, isolated, and studied, but rather as conceptual conveniences we can use to talk about complex (but apparently modular or individualized) functional processes in the brain. In other words, instead of treating mental states subjectively -- as things we experience in various ways -- we should treat them objectively -- as things which play functional roles for us (roles that, according to evolutionary theory, at least had their origins in promoting survival and reproduction for our ancestors, and may still do so for us).

The typical functionalist today, considering the mental state feeling certain that it's raining, will take her job to be figuring out how such a mental state might be realized by a number of different physical mechanisms -- how it might be instantiated in ET, or in Star Trek's Data, or in a Turing machine. One of the most common concerns is whether "what it's like" for ET or Data to feel certain it's raining really matches, qualitatively, the human experience. This concern is quintessentially structuralist.

The functionalists of the future, I hope, will concentrate on figuring out how feeling certain (called for convenience 'a mental state') plays a functional role in our psychology -- emphasizing the evolutionary origins of such a mechanism in our ancestors. They won't care what it's like to feel certain that it's raining, or whether that feeling will be the same for aliens or androids who swear it's precipitating. Instead, they'll be studying the brain structures that generate feelings of certainty or perceptions of precipitation -- paying attention to structures only as an aid to understanding the functional relations among them, their functional (evolutionary) origins, and perhaps their future functional applications.

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Maybe you think that "what it's like" is the big question about the human mind, and I'm nuts to think otherwise. You'd have plenty of company. But I think there are very good, functionalist reasons to believe that "what it's like" is almost irrelevant to understanding the important stuff about human nature. If you need convincing, just take a detour now to read this article. Otherwise, just keep on reading....

You've probably been wondering about the Frank Sinatra quotation above. "Do, be, do, be, do?" Well, doing is a functional term -- all about action. Being is a structuralist term -- all about existence.

Does that sound familiar? You've heard the saying, "form follows function," I'm sure -- and it's a very functionalist saying. Most people, however (I'm sorry to say) think of form as the fundamental concept. For them, function is just some relation among forms.

Back on the Overview Page, I mentioned my suspicion that the universe may turn out to have infinite detail -- no smallest units, objects, or features -- like the famous Mandelbrot Set and other fractal expressions that can be viewed as images. I was arguing against "randomness," but this is a key issue for the matter at hand, too. Just as a simple equation using complex variables describes the entire Mandelbrot Set, in all its infinite detail, so I think the laws of physics describe the entire Universe in all its infinite detail, and for all time (recalling for a moment the determinism discussed on the Overview Page). And, just as the Mandelbrot Set is best understood as a a dynamic relationship among variables (in the form of a mathematical expression) rather than some derivative image or collection of images, so the Universe is best understood as a dynamic relationship among variables (in the form of mathematically expressed laws of physics).

Yet it's clear that, psychologically, humans tend to parse their environment almost exclusively in structural terms -- in terms of objects, their properties, and their interrelationships. Objects are seen as fundamental, and the rest is just information about the objects! But physicists, at least, should know better. There has been an interesting progression of knowledge about the nature of what we (at the time) have believed to be the smallest particles in the Universe. They have ALWAYS turned out to have functional parts. First, we discovered that even the smallest grain of sand was composed of molecules. Then molecules turned out to be composed of atoms. And atoms, lo and behold, were made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Now we have quarks making up the components of atomic nuclei, and ... you guessed it: Recent research points to quarks, too, having an internal structure.

Now, here's a pop quiz in logic. Inductive arguments offer support for a conclusion, but not proof of a conclusion. Still, they often help us tremendously in discovering regularities in the world around us. For example, if all crows you have ever seen have been black, you can reasonably expect the next one to be black, too. Maybe you'll be surprised by a rare albino crow, but chances are that your inductive conclusion based on experience will be pretty reliable. Now, here's the test: Rate the strength of this inductive argument.

1. All "smallest" particles so far have turned out to have parts.
2. Therefore, the current "smallest" particle won't turn out to have parts.

You're right. It stinks.

So why do people persist in the faith that, sooner or later, we'll finally discover what the "smallest particle" really is? Because we are designed by nature to respond to what we call "objects" without truly understanding their nature. I'll explain this further in a moment, but right now I want to show just how bad things are.

Human psychology introduces another error -- naturally and automatically -- into our thinking about function. When we see something functional happening -- some sort of systematic activity -- the first thing we tend to do is look for a responsible agent. "Who did that?" And, when there's no person or other creature handy to take the blame -- say, for a dust devil or a flood or a change of seasons -- we tend to attribute the activity to some intentional agent anyway: a god or a ghost or a poltergeist or some such alleged spiritual entity.

But you don't believe that, do you? People who learn much science at all can outgrow that natural bias -- which is not to say that, even for the most highly educated scientist, it doesn't resurface from time to time!

Consider the term 'object', and pick an example: a rock. Unless you're really careful, you'll think of it as a solid, bounded object whose extent you know -- you can see and feel where the rock ends and its surroundings (air, and perhaps a table upon which it sits or the hand holding it) begin. That perspective is so deeply ingrained in us (perhaps at the very level of perception) that we can hardly help but begin with it in each instance of observation, and then carefully remind ourselves that it is technically mistaken.

After all, the rock is mostly empty space containing a passel of molecules. Furthermore, we can't really tell where the rock ends. Not only is it difficult to say which of the molecules (or atoms) around its "surface" really belong to it, but the electrons associated with those particles may be changing their "allegiance" to surrounding particles countless times in a nanosecond. Worse, if we can fix their position, we can't know their momentum (which could tell us something about which nucleii might attract them most strongly).

I think Bertrand Russell once speculated that future philosophers would stop talking about objects and deal only with mathematical functions (and I'd love to receive the citation for that). Brilliant guy.

All right, if I'm correct about the functional nature of the Universe, why didn't our ancestors evolve in such a way as to see it that way? Isn't the fact that dealing with "objects" as objects obviously aided their survival and reproduction a good reason to believe that the world is fundamentally structural?

No. What we might call "the structural stance" -- the psychological way we have of regarding things in structural terms (which is intimately related to what Daniel Dennett calls "the intentional stance" which, roughly speaking, is the psychological way we have of regarding words and actions as being "about" stuff in our environment) -- is probably a "forced move" in evolutionary design (another Dennett term). It is adaptive because certain features of our world function as units with respect to one another. That cloud of molecules we considered a moment ago -- the rock -- is functionally bound together in such a way that it really makes sense to pay attention to its gross behavior (being a hard solid with important inertial properties) rather than to the behavior of any of its smaller constituents.

But here's the kicker: Just imagine how unlikely it would be for Mother Nature to quickly whip up an evolved mechanism that reacts, not to the rock itself, but to its individual molecules (or even just to smaller chunks of the rock), working out the complex physical relationships among them and calculating how their collective behavior will make a difference to the organism. Fat chance! No, dealing with functional units is probably the only available perceptual strategy for real organisms developed through the evolutionary process.

To borrow another stock philosophers' example, there's a good reason why we don't think much about the north side of a rabbit, or have a household word to represent the concept. It simply isn't as useful as dealing with the whole rabbit -- a potential meal, or maybe just a pest to keep out of your garden!

In my title, I promised to talk about a "general application" for functionalism. How general? Well, as general as it gets: universal. I don't think there's anything that isn't best understood in functional terms -- and I'm convinced the deepest nature of the Universe itself is functional.

Let's take a quick inventory of the territory I've covered so far. We've talked about how functionalism is important in the philosophy of mind, and now also in metaphysics (the branch of philosophy consisting of ontology -- thinking about what exists -- and cosmology -- thinking about how it all fits together). Now, my view is that all the rest of philosophy stems from metaphysics (stay with me for now, but you can read about this in "Metaphysical Functionalism", listed on the Articles page), so structuralism has noplace to go if I have my way.

Let's return now to the Overview Page, and I'll explain more about why functionalism makes sense of the other branches of philosophy, too.

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