The Mind as Neural Software? Understanding Functionalism, Computationalism, and Computational Functionalism

Functionalism, computationalism, and mental states

Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the m...

Extended cognition and functionalism

Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue that the mind sometimes extends outside the body to encompass features of the environment (HEC). HEC has been criticised by Fred Adams, Kenneth Aizawa, and Robert Rupert. In this paper, I argue for two claims: (1) HEC is a harder target than those critics have supposed; HEC is entailed by functionalism, a commonly held view in philosophy of mind, and one to w...

Synaesthesia, Functionalism and Phenomenology

Parallelism and Functionalism

as funct/onal/sm. It is my contention that his argument is seriously mistaken and rests on a misunderstanding of the functionalist position. While my primary aim is to defend functionalism from Thagard’s attack, in the process I hope to provide some much needed clarification of matters both philosophical and computational. Since I intend to untangle issues that are often troublesome in cognitiv...

Computation and Functionalism: Syntactic Theory of Mind Revisited