Functions and Qualia

In recent years, much of the hope for the basic project of materialism, that of explaining mentality in purely physical terms, has been vested in materialist varieties of functionalism (Kim 1998, 73). 1 Instead of identifying mentality with either behavior or brain states as the failed approaches of behaviorism and physicalism do, functionalism identifies mental states as “consisting of a disposition to act in certain ways and to have certain mental states, given certain sensory inputs and certain mental states” (Block 2002, 94). Thus, for the materialist functionalist, “mental states are functional states and functional states are physical states ... in virtue of their causal relations” (Searle 1997, 141). This approach to the mind seems promising, as it “is supposed to combine the best features of physicalism and behaviorism, while avoiding many of their difficulties” (Searle 1997, 139). Functionalism avoids the problems of physicalism by embracing the multiple realizability argument as its central thesis. And it avoids the problems of behaviorism by not limiting itself to external inputs and outputs, but also including internal causal relations between the mental states themselves. In these ways, functionalism appears to be the best possible continuation of the materialist inquiry into the nature of the mind at the present time. But, we must ask, does functionalism adequately account for the central feature of mentality, namely phenomenal consciousness? The answer, in short, is no. The absent and inverted qualia arguments indicate that functionalism has not accounted for the “what its like to be” of mentality. Additionally, its account of the mind simply avoids discussing what ought to be central to any properly functional explanation, namely phenomenal consciousness.