Orly Shenker: 'The Emperor's New Clothes: Functionalism is Dualism'
During the second half of the 20th century it appeared as if we no longer need to face the dilemma between materialism and dualism: varieties of so-called Non-Reductive Physicalism (NRP) promised a third option, and became the dominant view in the philosophy of mind, as well as in understanding the role and nature of the special sciences. Most popular among the varieties of NRP are varieties of functionalism, and among those the most popular view is computational functionalism, which is the basis for scientific research programs like computational neuroscience. However, this whole line of thinking is misguided: two major problems lurk at the foundations of NRP, and their analysis shows that the availability of a third option was an illusion, since it is an incoherent view: to remain coherent we need to decide between reductive physicalism (such as the recently developed theory called Flat Physicalism) and (any form of) non-reductive dualism (I don’t discuss idealism and varieties of double-aspect theories). In this talk, I will discuss mainly one of the two major problems with NRP, namely, that of multiple realizability, and if time permits will comment also on the second major problem, that of multiple computations.
