Functionalism: A second problem
I said, in 1.1, that from an epistemological point of view, it seemed plausible to say that M had a mind. We have been looking, in the last three sections, at functionalism about minds from an essentially epistemological point of view.
We have seen that functionalism offers a plausible answer to the other-minds question: we can know, at least in principle, what is going on in other peoples' minds. But from the phenomenological point of view, which denied that machines could have minds, functionalism doesn't look so attractive. For if functionalism is right and to have a mind is to have certain internal states that function in a certain way, then anything that has states that function in the right way has a mind. That seems to have the consequence that if a computer had internal states that functioned in the right way, it would have a mind. And, the phenome- nologist says, that is quite wrong. It isn't enough to have internal states that lead you to respond in the right way; you must also have an inner life. That inner life has to have the sort of character that Descartes thought it had. It has to be conscious mental life. And a machine could quite well behave in the right way without having any mental life at all.If the phenomenologists are right, it follows that functionalism has failed to capture the essence of what it is to have a mind. For if they are right, a functionalist might say that a creature (or a machine) had a mind because it had internal states with the right functions, even though it did not, in fact, have a mind because it had no inner life. To understand this objection to functionalism, we must first try to make more precise what “having an inner life” means. The phenomenologist will usually explain this by saying that the difference between a creature with an inner life and one without an inner life is that there is something that it feels like to be a creature with an inner life, but nothing that it feels like to be a creature without one.
If a person has an experience—say, seeing something red— we can ask what it feels like to have that experience. So, for example, if you, like me, are neither blind nor color-blind, then you know what it feels like to see red.Suppose there was a machine that was sensitive to red things and had internal states that led it to say “That's red” and, generally, to do all the things that people do with visual information. The phenom- enologist believes we could still not be sure that the machine knew what it felt like to see red. That is why the phenomenologist thinks that a functionalist might mistakenly think that a machine had a mind.
How are we to settle this dispute between the phenomenologist and the functionalist? It will help, I think, to consider it in the light of specific examples again; and, as we shall see, M and your mother provide just the right kinds of examples.
1.10