Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Triviality arguments

Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and others have offered further arguments that functionalism is trivial, i.e. that the internal structures functionalism tries to discuss turn out to be present everywhere, so that either functionalism turns out to reduce to behaviorism, or to complete triviality and therefore a form of panpsychism. These arguments typically use the assumption that physics leads to a progression of unique states, and that functionalist realization is present whenever there is a mapping from the proposed set of mental states to physical states of the system. Given that the states of a physical system are always at least slightly unique, such a mapping will always exist, so any system is a mind. Formulations of functionalism which stipulate absolute requirements on interaction with external objects (external to the functional account, meaning not defined functionally) are reduced to behaviorism instead of absolute triviality, because the input-output behavior is still required.
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