Minds, Brains, and Functionalism

Abstract

According to functionalism, different mental states of an organism are realized by its different physical states. Each mental state has its own distinct physical state as a realizer. I argue that this view of atomistic realizations of mental states is made questionable by some considerations from ecologism and connectionism. My supposition is that at least in some cases a group of mental states are realised holistically by some same physical state. Functionalists emphasize the unreducibility of the mental to the physical. I argue that holistically realized mental states are more unreducible to physical states than atomistically realized ones because some quasi-reductive relations such as token identity and a kind of derivablity hold in the case of atomistic realizations.