Philosophy of Mind 4.2 - Objections to Functionalism

I examine some of the main objections to functionalism, including the inverted qualia problem and John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment.
7:05 - On the incoherence of inverted colour qualia: cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3...
Various other kinds of qualia inversion are discussed here: www.d.umn.edu/~dcole/inverted_...
7:35 - Pseudonormal vision: cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3...
33:10 - Gould & Lewontin's "Spandrels of San Marco": faculty.washington.edu/lynnhan...

[@absupinhere]

God bless you for making all these vids man. Just discovered your channel by accident a few weeks ago and I'm hooked. You're my favorite channel on youtube right now! Seriously!

[@namirisa2692]

Thank you so much for this video! I was trying to read Ned Block's article and was struggling trying to understand the chinese brain thought experiment and what not, but your explanation was clear and incredibly helpful. I'll be checking your other videos as well!

[@RagingBlast2Fan]

Saying that it was helpful would be putting it mildly. Thanks for another great lecture.

[@KaneB]

Thank you for the comments, I really appreciate it.

[@KaneB]

Yes, that was on another channel, which I forgot the password to. I'll be uploading a video on eliminativism as part of my phil of mind series here... I should get around to it within the next couple of weeks.

[@KaneB]

***** Yes, that's fine. Glad to hear that they're helpful. I'm a philosophy student, and philosophy of mind is one of my main interests.

[@Brian.001]

I don't agree that Mary just acquires an ability. Red looks a certain way to those who can see it, and how it looks is what Mary learns when she leaves the room. The fact that it cannot be known through accepted scientific channels (3rd person observation) is what suggests that it is non-physical.*****

[@jimmydaylcity]

You're an excellent teacher

[@Notapizzathief]

This was incredibly helpful, thank you very much!

[@aidanleather]

Another great video - thanks!

[@vincentchevrier6341]

Thanks a lot for these videos

[@sabhez]

Great lecture, thank you! Could you tell me where I find Searles´ argument of "syntax is observer relative"?

[@KaneB]

It's in his book "The Rediscovery of Mind", chapter 9 (it's worth reading the whole book though - it's very interesting, and not too difficult).

[@Brian.001]

Regarding the qualia problem - even if we could establish that particular qualia are linked to particular functional profiles (1-1 correspondence), functionalism is still just a way of classifying qualia types as functional types. It tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the experience.

[@CosmicFaust]

Have you did a video on objections to behaviourism?

[@KaneB]

Go to about 26 minutes in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oqjEpWyQe9V7hLc

[@CosmicFaust]

Kane B Ok thank you. I myself am making a mini video series soon with the problems that materialism have. You don't mind if I use some of the arguments you have already discussed?

[@KaneB]

That's no problem, most of the arguments I discuss are the standard ones in philosophy of mind.

[@BrianTomasik]

Great video! I don't understand why one would think that if the red and green neurons are swapped, there would be any differences in qualia. If a swapped person sees grass, he'll be told by those in his culture "that's green", so he'll associate firing of whatever neurons those are with green. Those green neurons will trigger all the same associations (frogs, leaves, Irish symbols) and play all the same functional roles as some other set of neurons would for a regular person. If in the swapped mind the neurons now hooked up to green somehow behave differently than those in a normal person, then we lose functional equivalence. This example seems to be just begging the question. If you're a functionalist, then tautologically you won't buy the premise that there is any qualia inversion in a functionally equivalent swap. :)

[@Brian.001]

Yes, but if there are qualia at all, they will be inverted if you swap the neural connections, regardless of what the functionalist says. That, combined with the assumption that the functional state of seeing red remains the same as before (social, linguistic conditioning) entails that the qualia do not supervene on the functional states. So if there are qualia, functionalism fails to pin them down.

[@BrianTomasik]

Good point. :) I was using the word "qualia" in a theory-neutral way, allowing for the possibility that qualia do turn out to be functional. But another use of the word "qualia" is to mean non-functional phenomenal properties, which seems to be the usage in your reply.

[@Brian.001]

Yes. In the end, I think it comes down to the question of how likely it seems that qualia could be uniquely picked out via functional states. It seems obvious that two people brought up together might have different qualia for the same input, and yet their responses would never expose the difference.

[@Brian.001]

@@arletottens6349 Hmmm.... not sure about that. It seems to me that functionalism per se has nothing specific to say about qualia. Once we become functionalists we have accepted that mental states are to be classified in functional terms, but we still have the question of qualia to deal with. It is the same position that any other identity theorists find themselves in. Are 'qualia' reducible to physical/functional states, or do they not exist?

[@Brian.001]

@@arletottens6349 Ok, so this is a very familiar position to take. I just haven't been able for the life of me to understand what you did with what I took to be my subjective experience of greenness, or redness. It is a conscious experience, and as such is not included in what your functional filing cabinets contain. It's OK, I don't expect a sudden eureka moment here, so we might as well just leave it.

[@TheHunterGracchus]

A functional description of lungs would be something like "an organ that extracts oxygen from the atmosphere". That appeals to the tidal-breathing chauvanism of human beings. But birds are have lungs and air sacs. From the functional perspective, those are both just lungs, but that violates the fact that air sacs are not lungs. Moreover, there are gills, spiracles, etc.

[@stanleylewis6513]

Is there any way you could explain the response to inverted qualia of dancing qualia

[@pseudophilosophischegedank2247]

9:40 - "The qualia are different but the pigment in the [...] are different as well." I don't see how this goes against the spirit of functionalism. It's not about the physical realization but the actual function is changed if you swap the pigments / swap the wires, so to say. The functional inputs are changed, not simply the material. So that's a completely valid point and the correct one in my opinion. If color inversion is possible, some individuals will be in a different functional state but their behavior might not change. It might not be observable, but still their functional state and their qualia will be different. The outputs in regard to their behavior might not change but some outputs might change (perhaps in relation to other mental states?). My understanding is that functionalism is not a model to solve the qualia problem - that problem persists no matter what model you might accept. So the assumption that "if color inversion is true: different qualia but same functional state" does not hold. It's a different functional state, but perhaps not detectable.

[@horsymandias-ur]

Would a person with pseudonormal vision be found out when they mix primary colors to get secondary colors, decompose secondary colors to get primary ones, or relate colors to their “inverses” (yellow to purple, red to green, blue to orange)?

[@cloudiow]

Subbed!

[@alquinn8576]

so did they call the foxes "cocker spandrels?"

[@georgejenkins5186]

Most British sounding man but writes z in stead of s?

[@absupinhere]

and says zee instead of zed.

[@Alice98561]

An attempted refutation of the chinese room: Why can't semantics be an emergent property? The argument in the thought experiment is that one program can't be attributed semantics, but what about many programs? To reduce to absurdity I could make the same argument about our own brains. No single molecule can be conscious, our brains are made of molecules, therefore we are not conscious. To put another way, molecules doesn't have semantics, therefore minds doesn't. But consciousness isn't a thing, it's a process. Our minds aren't the matter our brains are made of but the particular configuration of matter, right? We could view our brains as containing a vast number of simple processes that all together constitutes a complex mind, so why not the same for computer programs?

[@snoski2697]

Alice Svensson Sorry for providing such a short answer, but I think a response to your objection would be that syntax doesn’t arise from semantics because semantics cannot be achieved from rule-following behaviour alone. Rather, semantics arises from *you* making the judgement that something counts as such and such, e.g. a sound counting as a specific word or a word conveying a certain meaning. Semantics requires you to be able to stipulate, modify, follow and re-evaluate your own “conditions of satisfaction” of what counts as what... I.e. you have to be able to properly think for yourself. This cannot be an emergent property from syntax, because no matter how to the T you follow an increasingly complex rule book, you are still only executing the logic of given rules. Of course, minds are still subjective and observer dependent, just like Searle points out that syntax is. But somebody running on syntax alone cannot tell whether someone counts as having a mind because they don’t have semantics, i.e. the capacity to say that something counts as something.

[@forrestfyre925]

I have doubts that the pseudonormal vision argument pans out empirically. The reason for this objection has nothing to do with defending functionalism per se; it's simply that I think you're using an incorrect theory of color vision. Our cones don't work like RGB cameras as suggested by the argument. Though the names have stuck, the cones are less misleadingly just L, M, and S. L and M specifically both peak near green in the spectrum (L just peaks _slightly_ more towards the red end, at a slightly greenish yellow... far from actual red). The raw signals to the L and M cone never make it to the optic nerve. Instead, the actual production of red versus green is a result of the red green opponent color channel of color vision, which results from a singular measure performed by ganglia cells of the _difference_ between L and M sensitivity (this comprises the red green opponent color process). As I understand, color vision development is itself "learned" at this level; these ganglia that measure L and M differences find the "interesting" cones to measure according to what cones in a local area yield more difference (imagine them measuring difference, but wanting to maximize their signals). So while learning color vision, if a young eye looks at a red object, then in particular local areas, L cone sensitivity would be greater than M's, leading ganglia to connect to L and M. Similar co-associations with L's would be made at higher levels simply due to the fact that while looking at red objects, if an L is active, it's very likely an L is active right next to it. If our eyes were just RGB cameras, this would seem like a clear cut case. But given that they aren't, and given that our eyes actually learn to see color in this fashion, I'm not so sure you can rely on this argument; there _might_ be inverted spectra, but simply pointing out that genetic conditions that swap L and M opsins exist isn't sufficient to demonstrate any; to invert the spectra you need the red-green opponency ganglia to _inhibit_ signals from cones _with_ particular opsins differently in one person than in another. This is a technical point... but since it was specifically pointed out as an empirical reason for believing in inverted spectra, I think it might be important here.

[@heresa_notion_6831]

The Block/Searle counters seem like attacks of strawman descriptions of functionalism. What functionalism needs is a functional description of what semantics is/does/provides for our existence. That's a tough order for every theory of mind on offer, but I think functionalism provides the most intuitions on how to build a Commander Data (i.e., Star Trek: TNG android and functional human, which one may speculate has consciousness and qualia, through different implementation than ours).

[@justus4684]

24:28 This objection strikes me as incredibly weak Even if my chair can be called a computer, the computers that are relevant in the case of consciousness are a specific set of computers

[@rath60]

The syntax independence argument has only proven that from a random pattern any signal can be decoded or put otherwise randomness is the maximally compressed state. But the data in your computer is not random it is structured and the structures necessary for decoding the that information already exist in the computer. Yes the computer has no sense of meaning but it does have a powerful rule book that allows it to execute algorithms. In general I can't imagine that the anti-functmiionalist isn't simply begging the question. The only way to fully discredit this argument is to say that minds are Turing machines deduce a contradiction. But if you keep using intuition to slip and Turing machines can't be minds you aren't doing your job. Chine's mind: Creates a human simulation of a brain and says the simulation doesn't think, that is what your trying to prove. China room: Creates a chat bot and says the chat bot doesn't understand meaning. Well yeah you don't need meaning to chat. But the functionalist isn't limited to chatting. There are functions for writing dissertations and functions for discovering/inventing mathematical proofs, functions for enjoying sex and functions for taking a poo. Once your chine's room can do these things does it still not understand meaning if you fall back on your intuition once more you're begging the question. Cement word processor: Only minds give syntax to a system. Once again you are saying that the machine cannot learn syntax. Well machines can learn create functional space for natural language processing so I would say yeah they actually can turn language into numbers that it can then manipulate. But the anti-functionalist has to prove something even harder than minds exceed the capacity of Turing machines. They have to prove that no machine f(feature space)= mental state which I think is logically impossible especially since f can 'learn' etc.

[@nathanphilosophylover6017]

1 for attitude pls mrs wells

[@kayaxe]

Wayyyy better than Ben Blumson

[@rath60]

For the Chines room general intellect is not necessary to fool a user into believing they are speaking with a sapient being. Fine then lets allow the room to have a rule book complex enough to allow for learning, creative reasoning, writing, etc. Is the room still absent meaning? Couldn't the rooms rules, memory and creativity constitute meaning and knowledge? Humans (perhaps with paper and pencil and external storage) maybe Turing complete but humans cannot memorize or even understand the sort of rule books we use to create bots that can pass the Turing test which is another name for the Chine's room. Therefore what Turing machines are capable of doing is unknown to humans. Once again it possible that a Turing machine may not be able to simulate a human brain but this is not an argument against functionalism. As perhaps a different machine yet unconceived may do so, (although like already in existence, seriously what sort of thing is a mental state if not a function).

[@Brian.001]

Chauvinism is pronounced "sho-vinism". Good videos, though.

[@nineironshore]

Lol, good one.

[@karachaffee3343]

Isn't the whole of Christianity a huge hedonic inversion ?

[@nineironshore]

I don't think functionalism needs to be argued against. It's an unbelievably silly idea.

[@Brian.001]

It is, yes. Incomprehensible. What happened to phenomenal properties of experience? There aren't any, because they cannot be assigned unique functional profiles!

[@REDPUMPERNICKEL]

7:45 Regardless of wavelength, cones emit neural discharge frequencies but it is the destination of those frequencies that plays the qualia defining role. ("In fact, individual cones, like rods, are entirely color blind in that their response is simply a reflection of the number of photons they capture, regardless of the wavelength of the photon." - www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11059/ ) (self: an instance of the being conscious process and the thought unique in being about its self (every other thought being about something else)). We cannot experience or know what it's like to be a different self. Selfs agree on what's red via linguistic convention (a feature programmed into selfs by the culture that creates them). There is no red or green or blue inside me. There are only neural discharge frequency encoded 'analogies'. Different selfs have different experiences given identical stimulations because selfs are what's responsible for stimulus *interpretation* . All selfs are the same in being instances of the being conscious process but each self is made unique by the analogies being processed except when the analogies being processed are in the form of language. Shared language is what unites selfs into superorganisms... societies. Language evolved so, like bodies, there's significant complexity involved. (Even two millennia ago, the fabricators of the bible knew, variety of language was definitely linked to inter tribal conflict (Babel) (and the variety of gods likewise, hence the push for only one)). ttyl