Ep. 221: Functionalist Theories of Mind (Putnam, Armstrong) (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 221 is what is the mind? And we're considering the theory of functionalism as elaborated in Hilary Putnam's the Nature of Mental States, 1973. David M. Armstrong's The Causal Theory of Mind, 1981, and where relevant, will also bring up one of the readings that we're going to hitting next episode. Ned Block's Troubles with Functionalism, 1978. For more information and links to the readings, visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer actually seeing color as the reflection of certain wavelengths of light in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Seth: This is Seth Paskin feeling this pain. My pain, not your pain. In Austin, Texas.

0:44 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in a really positive machine state in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:49 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey wondering about the difference between what is temperature and the concept of temperature.

0:56 Mark: All right, so we're on our third Philosophy of Mind episode in a row, and it's the first one Seth's been on. How you doing, Seth?

1:04 Seth: Fantastic. How are you?

1:06 Mark: Great. This was the one you wanted to come back on, right?

1:09 Seth: No, I wanted to skip the entire series, but you guys said you would excommunicate me if I. I am fascinated by the question, but there just seems to be almost nothing at stake.

1:22 Dylan: Bored to tears.

1:24 Seth: Just philosophically. If you end up on one side of the debate or the other, what's at stake? What changes in the way that you live your life? That's the piece. But it's a fascinating, fascinating question. I just don't like the way these guys talk about it that much. But that's okay. I'm in.

1:40 Mark: So functionalism sort of cross cuts the issue that was discussed in our last couple of episodes. Because being a functionalist is not, I think, like being a materialist, necessarily. Whereas according to Chalmers interpretation, if you're a materialist, then you have this big problem with how to fit qualia into your materialism. Well, a functionalist might have that problem, but actually Chalmers himself is a sort of functionalist. Functionalism is just a way of thinking about the mind, not necessarily even referring to the problem of consciousness.

2:14 Wes: So it's neutral to the question of whether one is a dualist or an identity theorist or anything else. And it actually is something that traditionally has been highly appealing to materialists. I wouldn't place this in opposition to materialism, but you could place it in opposition to physicalism to the identity theory, where a mental state just is a brain state. Functionalism is onto a different way of looking at things, which we'll get into. But it overcomes some of the problems that I think we've seen with identity theory.

2:45 Mark: We got a few different introductions to functionalism. We looked at maybe the Internet Encyclopedia philosophy.

2:51 Wes: We sort of already talked about functionalism. As Mark has kind of pointed out. It might have been better to have done functionalism first. But the distinction is between identifying mental states with what they're made of. So a particular neurochemical substance, for instance, and identifying mental states with what they do. And the Internet Encyclopedia Philosophy article on functionalism gives a very common and clear example of artifacts like mousetraps and keys, which you could have a key. It could be made of wood, it could be made of steel.

But what tells you is a key is not what it's made of, but what it can do. It can unlock a door, for instance. And the same thing with the mousetrap. There are lots of different ways to make a mousetrap of many different materials. You can think of circumstances in which what something is made of, you might want to say, well, what it is is actually closely tied to what it's made of.

3:51 Dylan: A diamond.

3:52 Wes: So being a diamond is a matter of being a certain kind of physical stuff, to quote this IEP article. But being a mousetrap is not. It's having a certain design. It's being able to perform the particular task of capturing a mouse. The intuition for functionalism started coming about as computers got more and more advanced. And this is something Hobbes predicted. Thought of human mind as a calculating machine. The idea that the human mind might be something like a computer was an idea that people were becoming taken with. And if that's true, then a computer is something that's obviously like a mousetrap or a key, multiply, realizable.

Which is to say, it could be made of many different types of materials as long as it does functionally what a computer does. The other precursors to this are in behaviorism, this idea that you might treat mental states as things that link up inputs and outputs, link up stimuli and behavior, for instance. And functionalism, it's not behaviorism, but it expands on behaviorism and makes it more robust in the sense that it takes into account not just inputs and outputs, but the entire state of the system as well. A way for us to get into more detail on that.

5:04 Mark: So the analogy people give that's easy for people to understand is maybe the brain Is the hardware and the mind is the software.

5:11 Dylan: The way that would be multi realizable there, following the analogy, is that there are lots of different computer languages and lots of different ways of arranging the bits to come up with the same solution.

5:23 Mark: Well, I guess that's a good question because it runs on different hardware. But. But if it's a different computer language, is it actually expressing the same thing? I think that's a place where the analogy is vague.

5:34 Wes: So there's software, there's computer languages, and then there's hardware. Multiple realizability says right. You could have silicon or you could have brain matter. If you think that the mind is computational.

5:44 Dylan: Part of what we'll want to talk about is where you decide to draw the black box. Part of what I took functionalism to mean is that there's a association with inputs and outputs, and at some point there's a black box that you're either agnostic regarding the actual realizability or you, as a sign of that, have a multi realizability and you're at least agnostic about whether multi realizability is part of the ontological condition or it's part of the fact that you have a black box. But you're being kind of pragmatic about inputs and outputs. Right.

6:15 Wes: We might want to say a little bit more about functionalism per se before we do all that. We gave the example of a mousetrap, but we might want to say more specifically what we're talking about with the mind. So the broad brushstroke is to say that the identity of a mental state is determined by. Now I'm just quoting Stanford, but it's determined by its causal relations to sensory stimulations, other mental states, and to behavior. Pain is something that tends to cause bodily injury and to make you believe that something is wrong with your body and you want to get out of that state, it produces other emotional reactions.

So you get this system of causal relationships not just between inputs and outputs, as the behaviorist might have it. So the behaviorist might say, well, pain is just the disposition to say ow and do a bunch of other things given certain stimuli. In this case, you can get a much richer picture because you can take into account certain internal states, including other emotional states, other beliefs, desires, all sorts of things. But still you would define pain in terms of the system of causal relations between inputs, which are sensory stimulations, behaviors, but also other mental states.

You're sort of drawing that into the picture.

7:30 Dylan: That's a good qualification because the behaviorists are going to say that the resulting behaviors are a causal, direct consequence of physiology.

7:43 Wes: Yeah. So someone might think that in fact, it's not the case. And we discussed this at length in discussing Block with the whole data example. Can data be conscious? Someone might say, no, the mind is not like a computer or something simply functional. It's not a matter of hooking up the right inputs and outputs and machine states or mental states. There's something really, really specific about neural constitution. Could be chemical, something about brain matter, brain material, which is just important to having mental states, as the physical constitution of a diamond is to being a diamond. And so that's the position of the physicalist or the identity theorist who wants to say pain just is the firing of C fibers. To take that old examp. If you say pain just is that physical state, you're doing something which is not functionalism.

8:35 Dylan: I thought the key distinction that you were pointing to with regard to the behaviorist, and I guess it's also the same one with regard to the materialists, is allowing for internal states as being a key feature in the functionalism argument and that you have the possibility of internal states that are internal mind space.

8:57 Mark: So this is what I was wondering, what you're talking about, Dylan, with the black box. Because what I understand, and this answers Seth's question too. Why does this matter? This was introduced to me in the context of cognitive science, as this is the philosophy that underlies cognitive science. And cognitive science is about trying to figure out kind of how the brain works by programming computers to mimic behaviors that the mind performs. So can we program a computer to understand a story where we ask it common sense questions that any child who heard the story would be able to answer accurately?

And can we build up some sort of reservoir of understanding so that it could answer those, even though it hasn't been told that specific fact? How do we give it background knowledge? So the way that we try to do that is by figuring out abstractly what are the steps involved in this mental process. And so you make a little box and say, okay, this is the input. And if it receives this sort of input, let's put a little arrow and shove it to the next box. And like, oh, this is the memory part. And, you know, you could get a very elaborate flowchart like that.

So then you test it by programming it. You see if it comes out with the right thing. This is how I'm actually sympathizing here with Dylan's saying. Even the programming language is kind of a matter of implementation, is kind of a matter of the Hardware. Because really, when we're talking about the functions, we're not talking about the software as in a bunch of lines of code. We're talking about the schematic of what steps are being followed by the software in order to achieve the result. And so the various boxes end up being like the mental states.

Or you could say the whole Turing machine is in the state right now of believing, desiring, blah, blah, blah, when it's received certain inputs. There are different ways of clarifying exactly how the mental states are in there. Are they like one part of the box? Are they the total state of the system as it progresses through the boxes?

10:45 Dylan: Yes. I didn't see anything in these articles, but I would be very interested in a discussion about the substrate versus implementation in language or in fact, in a whole computing system, because it seems to me that just saying it's silicon versus brain matter is not the right place to draw the line. Because the software, the way in which the inputs and outputs are processed is at least, if not more important than the hardware implementation. And that distinction between hardware and software becomes fuzzy because in most cases you can implement, I'll call it software solutions in specific versions of hardware so that you make it more efficient that way. And so there's a kind of symbiosis between those two things. It's not just a sort of simple, I made it with this, and then I ran the program with that.

11:44 Wes: I'm a little averse to this hardware software thing. Just because hardware isn't computers isn't just a matter of the physical material they're made of. Right. A lot of structure is built into a processor. And to say hardware with computers isn't really just to say what something is made of. We're already talking about the things which in this analogy, we would want to think of as software.

12:04 Dylan: I think I completely agree.

12:07 Seth: Let me take another stab at it. If we want to get away from that analogy, then what's intuitively pleasing about functionalism is the fact that it allows us to have a description of consciousness or of mind that permits something internal, but that's not just physical. So on the one side of the spectrum, you have the identity theorists which identify mind and brain. So to be in pain is just to have the firing of X neurons, the C fibers, or whatever it's called. And then on the other hand, you have behavioralism, which is trying to describe to be in a mental state is just to exhibit certain behaviors, again, a physical thing.

Both of those are attempting to provide what's metaphorically called an eliminative description. It's really what we would normally use the term reductionism for. But it's trying to explain the mental in terms of something else. The physical in one case the brain states, in the other case the behaviors. And what functionalism does that I think is really satisfying, even if ultimately it doesn't satisfy your intuition, is to say neither one of those is sufficient. And without introducing something like qualia, like what it is to be, it's simply saying that there is a functional state which is internal, which is not just the behavior, which is not just the firing of the neurons, which is needed to explain what it is to be in a certain state.

13:40 Wes: I mean, where I think the software analogy is useful, is it really? I think it is kind of the algorithm of the program. The idea is that the mental state is the entire program that connects input and output and includes connections between internal subcomponents. So it could include other mental states within the system. So it's not just this very rough connection between certain stimuli and certain behaviors. But you can get this finer grain by talking about other mental states. Once we get into the Putnam, maybe this. It'll help because we'll be getting more specific because he's going to outline what functionalism is essentially as an alternative to the identity theory. But I think it is something like saying the mental state is this program or this algorithm.

14:27 Dylan: I think you're right about that, Wes. I liked Seth's. The juxtaposition he put at the end. It seems like it'd be worth going through the argument about what's missing in materialism and in behaviorism that leads you to functionalism. In both cases, there are straight up arguments about why those two solutions don't work that lead you to say, okay, well, functionalism is the answer to both of them. Glossing over the fact that there are varieties of functionalism.

14:57 Mark: So that's actually the strategy that the block paper takes. He actually uses that to. I mean, the article is called Troubles with Functionalism. So we're really not going to get into the critique of functionalism today. We're going to save most of the block article for next time. But I can tell you the overall strategy as he says. What makes functionalism better than behaviorism? Well, the very thing that makes functionalism better than behaviorism. You can use the same argument that used against behaviorism, still against functionalism. It doesn't get far enough.

And the same with the other direction. What makes functionalism better than materialism? Well, here's what it claims to do. That materialism can't. But actually it's still subject to the same sorts of objections that you had against materialism. So it sort of is an attempt to be a compromise between those two positions to kind of have the best of both, and it actually, according to Block, does neither. So we can see whether we do a good enough job today outlining it to see whether that's going to make sense next time.

15:52 Wes: Do we want to work through Putnam as a way of getting more specific about functionalism?

15:57 Mark: Yeah. So the two kinds of functionalism that when Block gives his typology, actually match pretty well with what we saw in the Chalmers article last time about materialism.

16:08 Seth: Right.

16:09 Mark: Chalmers said that there's a type A materialism where materialism is defined a priori, that in other words, the meanings of the words involved show that pain has to be a brain state, for instance. And a posteriori materialism, type B materialism, is saying, no, it has nothing to do with the meanings of the words. It's an accomplishment of science to discover that pain is in fact a brain state. We're going to have the same thing here. The second one we're going to consider Armstrong. Block calls straight up functionalism, where Armstrong actually thinks that it's something in our everyday mental theory, something really in the meanings of the words, that if you analyze it correctly, you'll see that we're not referring to brain states, we're referring to functions.

That's the kind of thing that's most closely connected with behaviorism. Whereas this second kind that we're going to talk about right now, Putnam is more like the a posteriori scientific. So it's a scientific discovery that mental states are in fact functional states. It's not just a matter of the meanings of the word pain, for instance.

17:14 Wes: And in the beginning, he's going to go through some of the problems with identity theory.

17:19 Mark: He's saying it's a bad habit in philosophy. This is coming out of carnap. And people like that, these reductionists, to think that if an identity is true, that it somehow has to be a matter of the meanings of the words involved.

17:33 Wes: So conceptual analysis, basically, yes.

17:37 Mark: That's what philosophy does, is conceptual analysis. Both of the papers, the Putnam and the Armstrong, are very methodologically oriented. They're trying to figure out why we would support functionalism according to what philosophy is supposed to be doing. Is philosophy just analyze concepts? Philosophy is not the thing that goes in and does the science, but it needs to sort of work with science. I think both these Guys think to interpret science's results.

17:59 Wes: So water is H2O is a common example of an identity, a scientific identity statement, which helps us get beyond merely conceptual identities. Right? So it's informative in the sense that we could discover that after the fact, empirically, and not simply by some sort of a priori derivation from one concept to something it implies. And it seems like a promising candidate for saying, yeah, if we're going to say pain is a brain state, it's probably going to be something on analogy to the discovery that water is H2O.

18:33 Dylan: You can end up writing a whole bunch of pages about whether or not water is H2O. That exercise ends up articulating either sides of that relation where both empirical information say, what does H2O mean on its own terms? Comes into the discussion. Maybe that ends up being what you guys are talking about in terms of conceptual analysis. When I say, what do I mean by water and what do I mean by H2O? And to establish them as being equivalent, at what point does the empirical account come in? It seems like the empirical account you're going to end up being on sort of the sciency side of that equation on the H2O side of it, whereas what you mean by water, you're going to be just lining that up.

19:17 Mark: Right. And I can refer, folks, to our last Putnam discussion where on his paper, the meaning of meaning, where he goes following Kripke into this same argument where he's considering what is the status of the Identity Water equals H2O. And he imagines a twin Earth where the thing that floats in rivers and streams is xyz. And so in twin Earth is that person thinking the same sentence when we're thinking water is H2O here and they're thinking this stuff is XYZ where XYZ

19:48 Wes: is a chemical formula like H2.

19:50 Mark: Okay, yes, exactly. I'm kind of confusing my Kripke and Putnam here because of the two. I think we did those two episodes in a row and they seemed like a very similar argument. It discovered that despite the meaning of water, let's analyze water functionally. Water is just the thing that floats in rivers and streams and we drink it. And so we have our functional water and they have their functional water. And Kripke at least was saying that no, water is a term that drills in to its chemical property. Whatever you think water means. You might not know anything about chemistry, but you're actually referring to, you know, the extension of water, which is H2O.

They might use a thing you Know, if we're talking to them on the phone from our Earth to their Earth, and they talk about their water, and we talk about our water and we think we're talking about the same thing, we both have a delicious glass of it next to us and just went swimming earlier. But actually we're talking about different stuff.

20:41 Wes: Yeah. So it's a rigid designator in the sense that even if we know water only under its trappings, under its empirical properties that have nothing to do with chemical formula H2O, it still fixes us on H2O. Even though that's our criteria for identifying water, it's still the underlying thing that we've been identifying is a natural kind water. And so that becomes fixed. And then from there on, across all possible worlds, you have to have this constancy H2O, and not just something that appears to be H2O.

21:14 Dylan: Importantly, in that twin Earth conversation where we're describing my compatriot on the other Earth, and I imagine in that whole discussion that he's talking about water. And it turns out that I go for a visit and I get a glass of water from him and it turns out to be not water at all. And before I choke to death from drinking something that's not water is actually poisonous to me, I realized that it's water. Like, to me, at least that's part of the distinction, right? It's not just that water is a rigid designator to H2O, but it's also that I can understand my mistake as well as understand the meaning of that rigid designator by saying that once I go and look at it and get it as precise as I have been here on my own Earth, then I realize that it's actually not H2O.

It's not what I meant by water, it's water. Like in the same way that other fluids are water, like, right. If I see a glass of vodka, I don't know, I could easily say that it's a glass of water, but it's not a glass of water. And as soon as I drink it, yeah.

22:24 Wes: The intuition here is that a natural kind like water is something like an individual, because naming individuals for Kripke is something that requires rigid designators. And that's because definite descriptions fail to do the work of truly singling out anything in the world. And really, it's almost like just ostension. It's like pointing, even if it's pointing under some description in some context. But once I've pointed to the thing, and if it's just to a person with a particular name, then I've fixed the identity, regardless of whether names and descriptions change across certain possible worlds. So natural kinds end up being like individuals.

23:06 Dylan: And where this is going to run into a problem I don't remember if Kripke talks about. This is the whole area where functionalism is providing its juice, which is in these cases, like mouse traps and keys, things that don't admit of natural kinds.

23:23 Mark: Putnam is actually arguing here that it is a natural kind. It's just a natural kind that aligns with a function. So the point is a little different than Kripke's, which is saying that natural kinds, what's essential about them is in fact their chemical structure. I think Putnam is actually saying the opposite here. He's working up. He's starting with talking about identities in general and talking about, you know, he actually starts the article is pain a brain state? But that's not going to be his point. He's not arguing about materialism. He's saying functionalism is better than materialism.

23:53 Wes: I wouldn't say materialism. I would say physicalism.

23:56 Mark: Physicalism. Okay, there's going to be a natural kind pain that aligns with a. What you're actually picking out is the functional characteristic, and you're picking it out as, let's say, the extension. In other words, it's what the term refers to, whether you know it or not. So that the ultimate distinction he's making here is between. The whole reason we're talking about this is because he distinguishes on this first page of the article between a property which is actually something in the world, the extension of what you're talking about, and a concept.

So this is basically just like Frege's sense and reference distinction, that you've got various senses, various ways of picking out the one in the same referent one and the same property in the world. And so water and H2O, those are going to be two different concepts. You might not know they're the same thing, but they in fact do refer to the same thing. And so Putnam's point here is going to be that pain and this functional state, which is kind of complicated to outline because he has a whole Turing machine description of it having to do with inputs and outputs in a machine table, that those things actually are the same property referred to by two different concepts.

25:02 Wes: Yeah, as you pointed out, it seems like he's actually defending identity theory and he defends it against a few objections. But then he moves on to say we actually have a better explanation than identity theory. One of the problems with identity theory that we saw in discussing Block already is that if we really say that pain is a particular sort of neural state, then we rule out pain in other creatures that don't have that particular physical composition. And it seems like we don't actually want to do that. We can imagine that some Martian or extraterrestrial life form might arrive and could feel pain without having a brain exactly like ours.

25:47 Seth: Part of me wants to, like, try to lay a ground rule around this. And by the way, I don't agree at all with identity theory. It strikes me as ridiculous, but it also strikes me as ridiculous to critique it in saying that there can only be one universal brain state that's the equivalent of basically pain felt in any species, anywhere in any possible species. We don't need fucking Martians. Enough with these thought experiments by these ridiculous philosophers. Just talk about a dog or an ape. One of the criticisms that's levied against it is that if you identify being in pain with just the firing of the fibers in the brain, whatever, you know, that equivalent, then you have to find a way to explain, like how, for example, an octopus could be in pain.

You could actually say an octopus is in pain and we are in pain. And, you know, basically find an equivalency between the two things, saying that only the brain states that manifest themselves in human beings count as pain states and these other things don't. And how are you going to figure out that? It may or may not be a legitimate criticism, but I don't want to waste a lot of cycles trying to pursue that path. Like, let's just acknowledge that that's a criticism, but I don't think it's particularly compelling.

27:04 Wes: Well, it's one of the major reasons for moving to functionalism. Here's another simpler example, which I hope works because I'm making it up on the spot. But suppose someone said, well, what does it mean to do arithmetic? And I said, it means this particular thing that's happening in these transistors here, in this silicon based machine. That's arithmetic. That's something like identity theory. And someone else comes along and says, look, arithmetic is an abstraction, okay? And we're getting the computer to it physically realizes something that does arithmetic.

But arithmetic isn't that physical thing that's going on right there. It's something that's more abstract. And I think that's the analogy we're trying to intuition that we're trying to get at. And also that arithmetic, right, could be realized and you could do it Many different ways. You could do it with an abacus, you could do it with a brain, you could do it with a computer, various types of materials, many, many, many different sorts of ways. And the intuition is that a mental state is something like that. Not like the physical thing that's doing the function, but like the function itself.

28:08 Dylan: When I was reading these essays and then thinking about them and now this conversation, it feels like this whole conversation about functionalism and materialism is really a kind of proxy war in ontology about the way we can talk about what things are. I mean, I want to start talking about what they're made of and what their potentials are and what it means to have a potential for something and a whole other different language about it. And it seems like that the whole conversation is going over that ground, but in terms of zombies and Martians and fighting over what is and whether what something is, is instantiated in the material that it's made of or whether it's instantiated in the activity of that thing.

28:54 Mark: Yeah, and I like the fact that the various Stanford Encyclopedia, Internet encyclopedia hooked functionalism up to Aristotle as being maybe the first functionalist that he's talking about the faculties. It's the form of the soul is what the mind is. It's what the mind is doing.

29:11 Wes: The soul is the form of the body.

29:13 Mark: The form of the body. There you go.

29:14 Wes: Yeah. In the same way that an axe to say. When Aristotle says, well, what is an axe? He is going to say an axe is its function. You know, it could be made of many different materials. And what makes it an axe is not its material composition. Can it do the cutting thing?

29:29 Dylan: I guess maybe it's just because I've read more of that. I don't know, I just find that philosophical conversation in a way much more plain spoken and categorized in terms of different levels. Whereas here I have the same kind of distinction being made about what trumps what in terms of existence. But in this sort of proxy war regarding what it means to have a mind or not have a mind.

29:56 Wes: So, Dylan, you don't find it plain spoken to say that the notion of a probabilistic automaton is defined similarly to a Turing machine, except that the transitions between states are allowed to be with various probabilities rather than being deterministic.

30:09 Dylan: You caught me, Wes. That's just completely clear. I'm sorry, I stand corrected.

30:16 Seth: Dylan, I think your sense in which you're like, I prefer to hear Aristotle talk about this than Putnam. I completely agree. Aristotle didn't use. Isms we don't have functionalism and T state. What was you guys talking about on the previous episode? Type A, type E, type F, type G, materialism. All these kinds of ridiculous. And the fake formalization. The fake. The pseudo. Sorry, not fake. Pseudo formalization. When it's like, well, this is just to say it's, you know, a series of P1 to PN correspondent with S1 to SN, just that kind of nonsense. It's irritating.

31:01 Mark: I stopped reading whenever it got to Ramsey Sentences. I'm like, I'm not going to learn what Ramsey Sentences are.

31:06 Seth: I had to look it up. And then it's still like, okay, what am I going to do with that information? Oh, it's a formal way of. It's a way of formalizing sentences. And, well, okay, so what am I supposed to do with it? How does that help me understand what he's trying. The point he's trying to get across.

31:20 Mark: Let's say it's very similar to when we had our Tarski on Truth episode. And the formalization he was trying to give for what sentences count as true. It's very similar to that. It's like, let's try to get some weird formal logic notion in.

31:34 Seth: It's actually where our format breaks down. It reminds me, I was just listening to a podcast and comedians were talking about what it's like to do crowd work over a podcast. Like, to hear somebody, you know, like Don Rickles used to make fun of people in the crowd, and you're just like, well, I guess that guy's Japanese, because I don't. I can't see him. I can't figure out. But based on what Don Rickles is saying, imagine trying to have a podcast talking about formalizations. I mean, even just to say we

32:02 Wes: don't have to imagine it. Seth, we've done it.

32:07 Mark: We've tried. We've tried for all.

32:10 Seth: For some. No, no, no. Just imagine the squiggly. And then there's, you know, like, you end up having to translate the formalism back into natural language, which is the greatest irony of all, I think.

32:21 Wes: Yeah. For all the nastiness of this, we can say pretty simply what it is, Right?

32:26 Mark: Didn't I already with the machine table describing the algorithm, this flowchart.

32:31 Wes: Yeah, I think your flowchart example is good, but it's confusing enough that it might bear reiterating it in light of this paragraph. This is really the first place, this place that Seth is focused on, where Putnam is going to give us the meat of functionalism. What page 54.

32:48 Dylan: Do we want to just read the last paragraph at the top? The last sentence of the paragraph where he just says what he's going to argue, even though that actually sort of makes sense.

32:57 Seth: Yeah, it does. It's the one sentence in the first few pages that's actually in English.

33:03 Dylan: I shall, in short, argue that pain is not a brain state in the sense of a physical, chemical state of the brain or even the whole nervous system, but another kind of state entirely. I propose the hypothesis that pain, or the state of being in pain, is a functional state of a whole organism.

33:21 Wes: So he gets into this description of a system. You say the system has all these distinct different states and it has inputs and outputs. And borrowing from behaviorism, we can easily think of inputs as sensations and stimuli and things like that, and outputs as behaviors. But the innovation here is we also get what Mark was describing as all these different boxes in the flowchart. A lot of this just happens inside the system, where you don't get a flow from input to box to system to output without knowing what's in the box. You get tons and tons of stuff going on inside the box where there's flow between different states, where a state is a description of the whole system.

34:07 Dylan: It seems to be built up of these probabilistic automata. So he has these technical terms, the description of a system. These systems are made of probabilistic automata that are allowing for some input to be joined up with some output, as he says. That is, it's a machine table that for every possible combination of a state and a complete set of sensory inputs and instruction, which determines the probability of the next state and also the probabilities of the motor outputs. So it's a relation between inputs and outputs.

34:43 Wes: But the innovation here from behaviorism is that what the machine table tells you is not just what output is going to result from an input, but it tells you how the system itself is going to change.

34:52 Seth: Yeah, the state will change.

Yeah.

34:54 Wes: You get an output and you also get a state change.

34:56 Seth: Yeah.

34:57 Mark: Should we just give an example? I feel like pain is not the simplest example, but it is the one that's spelled out here. I mean, maybe a simpler one that's almost as common is, you know, a behaviorist might say, what is the belief that it is raining? Well, that means it's the tendency to go get an umbrella when you're going outside. But that just so is obviously not what the belief it is raining means. Because, like, what if you just don't care about getting Wet. All other things being typical. Well, so just make different squares in your flowchart for those other things. So the input is seeing the rain outside, and then there's a desire to go outside. You might have in your first box. Is there a desire to go outside?

35:39 Seth: No.

35:39 Mark: Well, send then over to somewhere. If yes, then it goes to the next one. Is there another desire to get wet? No, there's not that. So we go to the next one. Do you have an umbrella? Do you know where it is? It kind of goes through a bunch of knowledge and desire states. And then if it answers yes or gives the appropriate answer for each of these, then eventually you'll get the output of going outside with umbrella.

36:03 Seth: What are you describing there? I'm sorry, circle back. I was about to get angry, but now I'm realizing I better be calm. Were you describing behavioralism there?

36:11 Mark: No, no. This is supposed to be a functional account of the belief that it is raining. And you might think that you just look outside, you see that it is raining, and you know that it is raining. You know, like you don't need all this other shit.

36:23 Seth: You don't need all those steps for the belief it is raining.

36:26 Wes: But the idea is that the belief is that algorithm is defined in terms

36:31 Mark: of dispositions, with the exception that it's

36:34 Wes: not an algorithm like of the sort Mark just gave. Because we're talking about probabilities instead of just simple if X, then definite, definitely why is going to happen. And also that you're talking about a unbelievably large number of variables. So you don't just get these simple if this, then this. Then think of it holistically. You take into account every single belief and desire of the subject, the probability given their causal interrelations and the given inputs, their probability of moving to the next state, to the next state, to the next state. And there are many, many, many intermediate steps. And then finally, whether you get that range of particular outputs, and then you say that whole abstract description is the mental state.

37:20 Seth: There's something that feels just fundamentally flawed about this. Let's start over. What is the belief that we're trying to explain here? It is raining. I believe it is raining.

37:30 Mark: Sure. Which a behaviorist would say, not just that you will go out and use an umbrella, but like, if I ask you, is it raining? You'll say yes, unless you have some reason to lie to me or whatever. So it's like there's a number of behaviors that could come out of it. And to have the disposition to those typical behaviors in the right situations is to have the belief that it is raining.

37:48 Dylan: That's a behaviorist account of what it means to have a belief.

37:52 Seth: Right? And what Mark was trying to outline then was the functionalist characterization of that same belief Is not to say answer yes, if somebody asks you if it's raining, or to grab an umbrella or a mackintosh or whatever. But to go through this series of decision gates that are a function of.

38:11 Dylan: No, you don't go through those series of decision gates. It's that you can describe that system in that way. But that doesn't mean that you as an organism or entity are going through those decision gates.

38:27 Seth: It's an explanatory thing.

38:29 Dylan: What Putnam is doing in these two paragraphs on 54 that he prefaces with. To explain this, it is necessary to introduce some technical notions. So his technical notions are these probabilistic automatons. The notion of sensory input, motor input, all the things that are in single quotes. Those are all technical terms. And then in the second paragraph, he's describing how they combine together so that you get a state of a system that will result in a particular output. The example that Mark gave with the individual 2 state if thens would be too simple to account for.

I think it would be too simple to account for the complexity that Putnam wants to include. That's why he has these probabilistic range of possibilities. And then they have those possible results at any given sort of call. Turn of the crank results in a new state that can be added into the previous set of states, results in your organism.

39:33 Wes: To say what pain is, just to go back to the more common language example is to say that. To say that we're doing functionalism right, Is to say we are going to talk about pain in terms of what it does or how it fits into this certain set of causal relations. So what causes pain? Getting injured, Certain things happening in the body. And then what effects does it have? Well, behaviorist might want to look at totally in terms of crying out or wincing or things like that. But the functionalist wants to say, no, we want to look at the internal state of the system.

So we want to say that pain has the tendency to give you the belief that you're injured. It makes you want to not be in pain. It might give you anxiety. But then also you have to account for conflicting desires. What if you're a masochist? What if there's something more that you want that requires that you be in pain for a little while? So you have to take that into account. That's a way of taking into account everything that's going on internally in the system. The point is, and I think, Seth, you're right, there's going to be some really strong objections to all of this.

To say what pain is is to say what it does. And you describe what it does in terms of its tendency to do all of these things within the system and ultimately to lead to certain types of behavior.

40:48 Seth: I actually really like where you were just going, Wes, because it allows us to switch from this analytic philosophy way of talking to some kind of, like, maybe more Marquis de Sade way of talking. Let me try to be kind of serious here for a second.

41:03 Wes: So I had you with masochism.

41:05 Seth: No, that's exactly right. So let's take a masochist, right? And let's take somebody who's just a regular old person. We don't have to take a sadist because we're not concerned with the infliction of pain, but the experience of pain. So the experience of pain in a normal person, in a masochist, from a biological brain state, physical state level. And by the way, we have to at some point get to the notion of brain state versus physical state, because there is such a thing as, like phantom pain and what goes on in the brain versus what's actually instantiated in the body and the nerves and so forth.

But so the same biological activity which causes pain in two different people in one, it's pain. Pain. Well, it's pain in both of them. It's identical. That's the identity theorist. Right. Then the behavioralist view of that is one person is screams, ah, they're in agony. They exhibit all of the things that tell us that they are in pain, not enjoying things on the other side. The masochist maybe has orgasmic, very, very non pain like reactions to the pain. Right. Which we normally associate with pleasure and say, okay, that right there kind of articulates the failure of the identity theorist as well as the behavioral theorist.

Now, in that same paradigm, help me understand, Functionalism says it is the same activity in both, but we explain the fact that it's identical in the regular person and the masochist by virtue of the way in which all of the other parts of the organism come into play to generate that reaction. How do we give a functional explanation without appealing to the behavioralist piece?

42:46 Wes: No, that's right. You take into account the entire system, and you're doing this abstractly. You're giving a bunch of if then statements. So if this happens, this happens. If this happens, this happens. But there are so many ifs. And the ifs include everything that we might think of in material terms as the way the brain is constituted in a particular person, or psychologically, as their particular baggage and dispositions and desires and beliefs. So that to really describe what pain is in the abstract, generically, you'd have to take into account all those different possibilities. You'd have to incorporate that into your program, so to speak.

43:28 Seth: But ultimately, you're trying to explain one person's behavior versus another person's behavior. Yes or no?

43:33 Wes: I wouldn't say behavior because I think you're talking about the bulk of it is not behavior. It's relations to other beliefs and desires and. And emotions.

43:43 Dylan: Yeah. In fact, one of the knocks on behaviorism in order to be an accurate account of the mind is just one example after another of there being other things going on in the mind that are not discernible by external behavior, and that you can simply be radically wrong about what's going on in the mind. And so in the papers that we've read, I was just seeing example after example of how there are evidence for internal states. That means that behaviorism just doesn't give you enough to account for the mind consciousness satisfactorily. We didn't read anything that really tried to say, well, no, not quite.

44:27 Seth: I'm not trying to defend behavioralism. What I'm trying to say is to be able to say that what we are witnessing is pain in two different people. One in which they exhibit what we normally call pain, and the other what we exhibit as a masochist. We're trying to describe and explain what we consider to be the same ontological state, but as exhibited in different behaviors in two different people.

44:54 Dylan: Well, why would we say that the masochist is in pain? Are you insisting that the masochist is in pain?

44:59 Seth: Absolutely, yeah.

45:00 Wes: So if someone gets off on. If they were to get sexual pleasure from being burned, for instance, it's not that they've completely repressed the pain of being burned. They'll feel that they just have a

45:12 Dylan: different behavior with respect to the experience of pain.

45:17 Wes: The mind is complicated, so they're also going to have pleasure, and their desire and their pleasure are going to outweigh the particular feeling of pain they have. But the point is that in functionally describing pain, I'm not simply going to describe the behavior because the masochist is a good counterexample to that. I'm just going to say it marks all things being equal statement well, things never are equal. And I have to take into account all the other stuff that's going on in the system causally and say, here's what'll happen if they're a masochist. Here's what'll happen if you take into account all these other causes. But we're still describing pain.

45:55 Dylan: Importantly, in both cases, the masochist and the typical person, let's call it.

46:01 Wes: You think you guys underestimate the commonality of masochism to go ahead.

46:06 Seth: That's why we're not calling him normal, we're calling him typical.

46:10 Wes: Sorry, I'm just kidding. Just go ahead.

46:12 Dylan: Maybe we need to have a podcast on varieties of masochism, but let's have that one now.

46:18 Mark: Let's quit this shit.

46:20 Dylan: Isn't that what's happening right now? So in both cases, they would recognize it. And we're saying that they'll call that experience pain. That's the thing that's held in common. Not talking about burning oneself, but like somebody who, you know, an athlete or somebody who's pushing themselves very, very hard and in the end has some kind of pleasure out of doing that. They're not going to say that it wasn't painful.

46:47 Seth: Right.

46:47 Dylan: But they're going to say that they really enjoyed it as well.

46:51 Seth: Well, they enjoyed the result. They didn't enjoy the experience of it.

46:54 Dylan: They might have enjoyed both. At least that's been my experience. So.

46:57 Seth: Okay, well, that's possible. Yeah. And I think this is kind of like one of the things, you know, what about the way in which memory and emotion play a role in these things? There's a kind of a facile articulation of the problem statement where it's like, well, is being in pain a brain state or something else? But that's talking about one particular type of potential mental state. This idea of being in pain. Right. Like being in pain, seeing the color red, being angry, being whimsical, being indignant. There are nuances there where you're talking about the question of pain.

Let's just assume it's a physical pain, like, oh, you know, I burnt my hand on the stove. That's one particular way of being in pain. But being hurt by having your parent tell you that you're a failure, that's a different sort of thing. Can we provide the same analysis? Can we assume the same kind of descriptive or explanatory framework for something that involves history and memory as well as an emotional or component to it? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. That that holds still. But I'm not even sure it works for just even the quote unquote simple case of pain.

48:19 Wes: The thing about this is that because, and Mark can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the way to think of this is pain is the algorithm. And you can pack into the algorithm as many variables and factors as you want. You can say if there's this particular sort of memory and this emotional disposition, then this. But multiply that by a billion trillion altogether so you can get as fine grained as you want. But ultimately you're saying pain is this machine table is this set of if then statements between not just inputs and outputs, but different internal states. So being able to take into account different internal states means being able to take into account all these very, very, very particular things.