Functionalism and Physicalism Theories in the philosophy of mind can be awfully technical. So much so, that to the average reader — and to trained philosophers — there will be disputes as to what the real differences lie. So I thought I’d write an article that briefly lays out some of the core views and the differences among them. I’ll address three standard views in philosophy of mind: functionalism, physicalism & illusionism. Two of them are viewed in the literature as responses to the mind-body problem — or, for our purposes, the hard problem of conscious — that’s physicalism and illusionism. Functionalism is different. It’s a theory of what mental states are. Let’s start by saying that many functionalists are physicalists. Indeed, one of the big reasons many philosophers are functionalists is because it offers a neat way -for those invested in the project- of conceiving of how mental states are in fact physical. But that is not the core of what functionalism as a theory tells us. Functionalism at its core is a theory of the nature of mental states, not a theory about the nature of the world. This distinguishes functionalism from various views that present as solutions to the mind-body problem which asks a different question: where does the mind fit into our theory of the physical world? That is, the issue of whether mental states are fundamentally physical or fundamentally mental. Some have asked me before to suggest readings for how to understand the word ‘fundamental’, as it is used in philosophy of mind. It’s a good question. It’s one of those words that gets bandied around without ever being defined. The basic idea is whether that thing — e.g., the mind or ‘mental states’ — is a basic ontological entity in its own right, i.e., something that cannot be reduced to anything else, or whether it in fact reduces to something else (the physical) So, if you think dualism is true, and that the mind is distinct from the physical in some way, then you think the...