concept

Functionalism

The philosophical view that the mind is simply *what a system does*, entirely independent of the material it is made of. If something - whether a meat brain, a silicon chip, or a root network - takes in information, stores memories, and solves problems as effectively as a brain, then by functionalism it *is* a mind. It is the view friendliest to the idea of a forest that thinks: what matters is the causal role of a state, not what it is built from. But critics counter that a machine perfectly mimicking every function could still be dark inside, with no experience at all.