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Tuesday, 8 January 2019



Functionalism is the idea that there are only outsides and no insides, and that what are taken to be insides are just a disposable illusion, or a mythology adhering to a world of outsides. One consequence of this is 'substrate independence' or 'multiple realisability', which is scandalous to the degree that one refuses to entirely give up on insides - after which surrender it would be a matter of course and of new hope. The opposite position could be called idealism, the notion that there are only insides and that outsides are a sort of masquerade, a trick that insides play on themselves, originally in fun, but somehow having got out of hand and become quite serious, even tragic, before perhaps some final recuperation. An intermediate position might be called realism, in a naive sense, for which there are both insides and outsides which are cunningly and complexly interwoven and easily confused - the task of the subject being to remove that confusion as far as possible through a careful anatomisation of experience. Wherever insides are taken seriously there is such a thing as intrinsic nature, or at least it makes sense to think in this way, and 'substrate independence' does not exist, is an idea that expresses a removable confusion of insides and outsides. Intrinsic nature provides a foundation for value, a concept which belongs wholly with a world having insides. The functionalist world can't provide any ground for value at all, which might explain why functionalists tend to be obsessed with ethics, especially of a utilitarian flavour, making the biggest display to cover the places where they are most naked. In travelling one gets the impression that some countries are more functionalist by nature than others, reality there being more wholly made up of pure outsides, being more 'transactional' in essence than others, despite the various metaphysical views of the inhabitants. Or else that there is a rising tide of such functionalism which is almost impossible to reverse. This might be called nihilism, but again the use of such a term betrays vestigal inside-ism. Whether the two poles, pushed far enough respectively, meet up in the end is an open question.  

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