PHILOS 1E03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Inverted Spectrum, Folk Psychology, Eliminative Materialism
8 Dec 2014
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Simple illustration of how to picture the mind. Fodor drawn to computational theory of the mind. Perhaps the identity theory is too chauvinistic, in that it makes it too hard to have a mind. But functionalism is too permissive; it makes it too easy to have a mind. One way to put a common worry about functionalism: Some possibilities: consciousness of subjective experience, understanding, creativity or free will. One way to press the objection that functionalism does not accommodate the subjective quality of experience is to appeal to the possibility of an inverted spectrum. Imagine two people alike in all relevant psychological ways except that one has the subjective experience when seeing red that the other has when seeing green, and vice versa. Since their mental states plausibility play identical causal roles, the functionalist cannot distinguish them yet their mental states seem to have different qualitative content . A related way of pushing the same worry:
