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Absolutism Vs Functionalism

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After the cessation of the dark ages, the Renaissance was a period during which many philosophical theories and debates began in Europe. This was a time during which many intellectuals began to focus on human beings as individuals on how they are related with the surroundings (Hergenhahn, 2009). Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Spinoza disagreed with Descartes’ towards subtance view in double-aspect theory where mental and physical events are different aspects of the same subtance. Thus, he argued that there are two attributes of the same substance which physical matter perceived thorough sneses. The essential substance is the God, who is the universal essence of nature of everything that exists in the world (Tan, 2007). While he was agreeing …show more content…

Functionalism combined the advantages of behaviorism and identity theory to explain the mind and body relations. Functionalism is one of the major proposals on mind-body problem solution until today. In functionalism mental stated are defined in terms of their causal relations with environment on the body, other types of mental states and as well as bodily behavior (Block, 1996). Functionalism is focus between physical implementation and behavior input as well as their functional roles and it is different from Cartesian dualisms that only focus on mind (Block, 1996). Functionalism focus on the importance on hardware and software in respects in human mind and also the role as the possibility of mental causation being species of physical causation (Kim, 2000). Idea of casual roles will be formed along with suspicion that mental causation in different species of physical causation. According to Putnam (1967) and Fodor (1975) multiple realizability is an important part of some accounts of functionalism (Sober, 1999). Multiple reliability means in same mental state can be implemented by different physical states or events. They used multiple realizability against the identity theory. For example, pain, they argued that there are various of pains and other mental kinds can be realized in the body. Thus, mental kinds are not identical with physical kinds but they are related. They also argued that mental state would rely on causal roles rather than its realization

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