Philosophy for Everyone by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781138672932
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Functionalism

Hilary Putnam, in his 1967 paper ‘The Nature of Mental States’, raised an important objection to the identity theory. Imagine that we find the cocktail of chemicals that we are certain is identical to the mental state of feeling pain. Putnam says that all we’ve done is find out the identity relation between pain and its physical realization in humans. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that octopus brains are made up of totally different chemicals to those of human brains but that we have good reason to believe that these critters feel pain (e.g. they withdraw from hot stimuli, they engage in avoidance behaviour around those stimuli, we see a spike in their brain activity when they touch hot things). Do we want to deny them pain because their brains are made up of different stuff to ours? Of course not, says Putnam.

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