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A debate arose in Psychology almost immediately after it was established, 133 years ago. The debate was between three theories of how to study the mind, and the split was between the Psychological theories of Structuralism, Functionalism, and Freudian Psychoanalysis. Structuralism sought to understand the mind the way a chemist might examine a complex substance, by pulling it apart and trying to identify and understand the most basic elements. Functionalism used Darwinian theories to try to identify why our behaviors formed in the first place and what use they were to us. Sigmund Freud took Descartes’ concept of the mind and split it into two main parts, the conscious and subconscious, and sought to “cure” people of aberrant behaviors by exposing their conscious minds to what he believed to be the unconscious workings of their emotions. Today, all three theories have been shown both useful but inadequate. As the field progressed, those theories became stepping-stones into the realm of the Mind, but few serious researchers still linger that close to the shore today.
A debate arose in Psychology almost immediately after it was established, 133 years ago. The debate was between three theories of how to study the mind, and the split was between the Psychological theories of Structuralism, Functionalism, and Freudian Psychoanalysis. Structuralism sought to understand the mind the way a chemist might examine a complex substance, by pulling it apart and trying to identify and understand the most basic elements. Functionalism used Darwinian theories to try to identify why our behaviors formed in the first place and what use they were to us. Sigmund Freud took Descartes’ concept of the mind and split it into two main parts, the conscious and subconscious, and sought to “cure” people of aberrant behaviors by exposing their conscious minds to what he believed to be the unconscious workings of their emotions. Today, all three theories have been shown both useful but inadequate. As the field progressed, those theories became stepping-stones into the realm of the Mind, but few serious researchers still linger that close to the shore today.
It is important to note that Psychology is a specialized field of study, which concerns itself with answering how the mind works, and is incapable of answering some of the more basic (or rather really deep) questions we have been asking about the Mind. Neurobiology continues to expand our understanding of how the brain works, and Philosophy continues to explore what the mind is. Each field academically interacts and informs the rest.
Of particular interest to Philosophers of the Mind was the theory of Functionalism, which lent its name to a theory first hinted at over 2,300 years ago by Aristotle and supported by a notion that Thomas Hobbes had in the early 17th century. Aristotle believed in the soul, or rather reasoned his way to a non-religious view of it. He thought that there was a difference between the matter of something and the form of something. He described them as the potentiality and actuality of a thing, which in combination gave rise to an emergent type of substance we’d call life.
Hobbes, on the other hand, viewed life in very materialist sense, thinking that all living creatures were complex machines that were motivated solely by observable, predictable, deterministic stimuli (where rules determine outcomes of interactions).
For one of the first noteworthy times in Western history, the same observations about life and death did not lead to the same conclusion. Hobbes had proposed that even humans were little more than apparatus performing a function, and that there was no such thing as an immortal soul or free-floating disembodied mind that would survive the death of the body. Doubtlessly, in some indirect fashion, Shelley played around with the fear this thought generated in the early 1800’s bookworms in a way that still resonates with readers today.
Nonetheless, this new trend in thinking, with a combination of Aristotle’s study of potentialities and actualities, Hobbes calculating machines, and the methodology of study of the purpose of behavior, the Philosophic theory of Functionalism brought a new answer. The mind/body interaction is software running in a computer. (Okay, they didn’t use those terms at the time, but since you’re reading this on a computer, it’s safe to assume you know more about computers today than they could have imagined back then.)
Behaviors are the predictable outcomes of and are reducible to mental states. Events in the environment generate causally links (a chain of causes and effects) to every kind of mental states like love, hate, pain, joy, hope, and despair. People act the way they do, because of physics-like interactions between the components that make them up as people and the things that happen to them.
Seems perfectly reasonable. If you hold the view that much of the scientific world does that existence as a whole is causally linked with outcomes of interactions determined by a set of laws (like the laws of thermodynamics, planetary motion, etc.), it may be the only real answer possible. Logic dictates that if instance one A + B = C, in instance two A + B = C, and in instance two + (whatever random number you want to apply) A + B = C, then there is no reason to believe that in instance 3,000 A + B will equal D. A + B should always equal C, unless there is some other factor that wasn’t properly represented in your first formula.
The reverse can be true as well (keep reading to find out why ‘can’ is a horrible word). If the universe is casual, governed by the laws of physics and only changed by interactions with predictable results. The galaxy is also that way, the solar system is that way, the earth is, continental plates are, the weather is – in short, everything that we can observe is exactly like that, then there doesn’t appear to be any reason to leave room for non-causal, non-deterministic souls by any name. There, problem solved, question answered. The telos, purpose or end (as in means to an …), of life is to produce more life because that appears to be the function of life. We, the things that are alive, have no point to existing except to exist long enough to produce more of us.
Of course, that is a horrible oversimplification. Aristotle would have argued that the telos humanity is not simply to produce more humans, but to use our adaptive, rational “souls” to produce the optimum humanity, the best possible things that create the greatest amount of happiness, which is a basic “good”. Despite sounding hedonistic, even after careful examination of his statements, they seem to be well founded even under the stark Functionalist worldview. He reasoned that the “soul” was a thing that motivated life, the chief difference between organic and inorganic materials. In the thousands of years that have passed since him, no one can emphatically say that he was wrong, his answer is just not nearly as nuanced as modern ones.
However, that does make his theories less adequate, because the devil is in the details. The best theory fits all of the observations. Aristotle’s “soul” theory isn’t the gold-standard of scientific education these days because he didn’t know about all the smaller, microscopic parts and processes of life like cells, metabolism, the exact role water plays in biology, DNA or RNA. He didn’t even have microscopes.
Even now that we’ve created synthetic life, we cannot say that we really have a complete answer to the question, “what is the purpose of life?” That, of course, is a different, more complex metaphysical question that rather depends on getting one good answer to “what is life?” Although not exactly within the scope of the Philosophy of Mind that Functionalism falls under, our understanding of the mind still informs and influences our stances on that question.
[Jump to part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
[Jump to part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
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