Research On Putnam's Machine Functionalism

Functionalism, pioneered in1960s by Putnam, is one of the most influential and popular theories in contemporary philosophy of mind with a brightest prospect, among which machine functionalism not only has the longest history but also presents a kind of functionalism in its purer sense.The origin of functionalism can trace back to Aristotle, whose proposition that soul was the form of body implied the conception of functionalism. Later, Hobbes's conclusion that the mental procedure was computation can also be counted as one of the sources of functionalism. In modern times, A. Turing, the British mathematician and logician, is the father of functionalism. His question that "Can the machine think?" stimulated the use of computer to imitate human thinking and thus produced the functionalism.Putnam, first putting up the idea of using the computer to imitate the human brain, thus established the school of "machine functionalism". According to Putnam, the theory of Turing machine acts as a proper analogy for us to understand the mind of human beings. As a matter of fact, human mind is a Turing machine. So, each human mental state is equal to a computational state, and each mental procedure is equal to a computational procedure with the mental representation as its object of computation. Generally speaking, despite some big changes of his opinions, Putnam didn't give up on his tough stance on the functionalism until his internal realism came to an end.The use of function to define mind makes functionalism compatible with physicalism, which further helps it comply with the principle of physical causal closure and avoid the theoretical dilemma of dualism. In the meanwhile, as the functionalism accepts the substantiality of internal mental state, the mental state, along with the sensory input and other mental states comprises a complicated causal network, enabling it to avoid the problem of logic behaviorism's failure to explain why the mental state affects other mental states. Advocating multiple realization, functionalism also refrains from the trouble caused by the chauvinism of the mind-brain type identity thesis.Although functionalism avoids the problems of dualism, logic behaviorism and the mind-brain identity thesis, it still has some inherently insurmountable issues, which are, namely, its contradiction with the semantic externalism, problems involving the inverted qualia and the absent qualia, the problems of Chinese room argument and how to define liberalism and chauvinism in the sense of mind.Although confronted with various problems and accusations, functionalism still holds its place as the mainstream theory, due to the lack of more proper and more convincing theories at present. Nevertheless, in the future, it is believed that, with the development of human exploration into the mysterious areas of the mind world, we can get a better understanding of ourselves and mystery of mind.