Quick questions on Behaviourism and Functionalism - TCE Philosophy (Tasmania)

Behaviourism, in the philosophical form developed by Gilbert Ryle, holds that statements about the mind are really statements about behaviour and dispositions to behave in certain ways. To say someone believes it will rain is to say they are disposed to carry an umbrella, agree that rain is coming, and so on. Ryle attacked what he called the dogma of the ghost in the machine, the dualist picture of an inner private mind directing the body, arguing it rests on a category mistake. There is no hidden inner theatre; the mind is a way of describing how a person behaves and is disposed to behave.

Functionalism, developed by Hilary Putnam and others, says mental states are functional states: a state counts as pain because of the role it plays, being typically caused by bodily damage, causing the belief that one is hurt and the desire to relieve it, and tending to produce avoidance behaviour. What physically realises that role can vary. This is the great strength of functionalism, since it accommodates multiple realisability: a human brain, a very different animal nervous system, or in principle a machine could all have a state filling the pain role, and so all could be in pain. The mind is likened to software that can run on different hardware.

Functionalism faces challenges centred on conscious experience. The inverted qualia problem asks whether two people could share all the same functional states yet have systematically different colour experiences, your red being like my green, with no functional difference to mark it; if so, function does not fix experience. The absent qualia or China brain worry asks whether a system could fill all the functional roles, perhaps the population of a whole nation passing signals, yet have no conscious experience at all. These suggest that role alone may not capture the felt, qualitative side of mind.