I’ve generally been more sympathetic with functionalism than any other realist view about the nature of consciousness. This project caused me to update on two things.
1.) Functionalism can be developed in a number of different ways, and many of those ways will not allow for digital consciousness in contemporary computer architectures, even if they were to run a program faithfully simulating a human mind. The main thing is abstraction. Some versions of functionalism allow a system to count as running a program if some highly convoluted abstractions on that system can be constructed that mirror that program. Some versions require the program to have a fairly concrete mapping to the system. I think digital consciousness requires the former kind of view, and I don’t think that there are good reasons to favor that kind of functionalism over the other.
2.) Functionalism is a weirder view than I think a lot of people give it credit for and there really aren’t much in the way of good arguments for it. A lot of the arguments come down to intuitions about cases, but it is hard to know why we should trust our intuitions about whether random complex systems are conscious. Functionalism seems most reasonable if you don’t take consciousness very seriously to begin with and you think that our intuitions are constitutive in carving off a category that we happen to care about, rather than getting at an important boundary in the world.
Overall, I feel more confused than I used to be. My probability of functionalism went down, but it didn’t go to a rival theory.
Interesting project! I’m curious – did doing this work update you towards or away from ~functionalist theories of consciousness?
I’ve generally been more sympathetic with functionalism than any other realist view about the nature of consciousness. This project caused me to update on two things.
1.) Functionalism can be developed in a number of different ways, and many of those ways will not allow for digital consciousness in contemporary computer architectures, even if they were to run a program faithfully simulating a human mind. The main thing is abstraction. Some versions of functionalism allow a system to count as running a program if some highly convoluted abstractions on that system can be constructed that mirror that program. Some versions require the program to have a fairly concrete mapping to the system. I think digital consciousness requires the former kind of view, and I don’t think that there are good reasons to favor that kind of functionalism over the other.
2.) Functionalism is a weirder view than I think a lot of people give it credit for and there really aren’t much in the way of good arguments for it. A lot of the arguments come down to intuitions about cases, but it is hard to know why we should trust our intuitions about whether random complex systems are conscious. Functionalism seems most reasonable if you don’t take consciousness very seriously to begin with and you think that our intuitions are constitutive in carving off a category that we happen to care about, rather than getting at an important boundary in the world.
Overall, I feel more confused than I used to be. My probability of functionalism went down, but it didn’t go to a rival theory.