Is Your Brain a Computer?

Functionalism is, colloquially speaking, the theory that the mind is what the brain does. The most popular form of functionalism is computer functionalism, which posits that the mind is to the brain as software is to hardware. Computer functionalism proposes that thought is a kind of computation.

There are several strong reasons to believe that functionalism is not true. The most popular argument against functionalism is Searle's Chinese Room argument. The argument was published in 1980 by J...