Tutorial #3. Functionalism. Discussion Questions

After having read Ned Block's Troubles with Functionalism try to think about these questions:

Image from Geoff Draper's Cartoon Page

• Can pain turn out to be correlated with different brain processes in different creatures? If so, would that be the same “kind” of pain?
• Could a robot feel pain?
• Unlike the behaviorist, the functionalist believes that mental states are real internal states that cause our behavior. But the functionalist wants to retain the behaviorist's idea that there are close conceptual connections between our mental states and the types of behavior caused by them. How can the functionalist describe the connections between any one mental state (e.g. a belief) and behavior, until he has already defined lots of other mental states (e.g. desires, intentions, emotions, thoughts, hopes etc.)?
• Is the mind a computer?
  
• What is multiple realizability and how it motivates functionalism?
• From Bickle, J (2006). Multiple Realizabilityn In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  

Consider what appears to be a genuine case of multiple realizability: two objects that “do the same thing” but in very different ways. Either the realizing kinds genuinely differ in their causally relevant properties or they do not. If they do not, then we don't really have a case of multiple realizability (like the corkscrews that differ only in color or composition). If they do, then they are different kinds. But then they are not the same kind and again we don't have an instance of multiple realizability—of a single kind with distinct realizations.

• Do you find this argument convincing? Can you give an example of a genuine case of multiple realizability?
• What is the "input-output" problem for functionalism?
• Can a functionalist account for what we take to be the causal efficacy of our mental states? For example, if pain is realized in me by some neural state-type, then insofar as there are purely physical law-like generalizations linking states of that type with pain behaviour, one can give a complete causal explanation of my behaviour by citing the occurrence of that neural state (and the properties by virtue of which it figures in those laws). Are functional properties causally irrelevant then?
• Functionalists attempt to characterize mental states exclusively in relational, causal, terms. A common and persistent objection, however, is that no such characterizations can capture the qualitative character, or “qualia”, of experiential states such as perceptions, emotions, and bodily sensations, since they would leave out certain of their essential properties, namely, “what it's like”. Do you agree?