Functionalism

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Functionalism agrees that brain states are responsible for mental states, but disagrees that they are identical with them. To do this, functionalists argue that neurological states or brain activity help to realize mental states, which then lead to behavior. This argument proposes that brain states are "low level" activities that help realize "high level" mental states.
To help understand this idea I will use the usual Functionalist example of a computer. Imagine that you ask a computer to add the numbers 3 and 7. On one level (the low level) what is happening in the computer is dependent on the hardware; on the other level (the high level) the computer's software is calculating the answer. The Functionalist argues that the process of calculation is simply released by the hardware. Therefore, the software is a function of the hardware.
We can take our computer example and translate that into terms of the brain. Mental states are dependent upon brain states in the same way that the functions of a computer program are dependent upon computer hardware. The way Functionalists speak about this is to say that brain states help to realize mental states and that the mind is in fact a total functional system. By this they mean that a mind is made up of the total possible functional (mental) states that it can have and that these interact with the “inputs” and each other in order to produce “outputs.”
Functionalists say that if we think of mental states in this wa...

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