Skimmed: an excerpt of the 1975 reprint, not the 1967 original. Enough to state the hypothesis and condition (3) verbatim; not enough to say what the elided text contains.
Contribution
It is the founding statement of machine-state functionalism about pain. Pain is the state of an organism with a certain functional organisation, offered as an empirical hypothesis that beats the brain-state hypothesis on plausibility. The hypothesis also carries the first anti-nesting principle in the functionalist literature, introduced by stipulation.
Key insight
The brain-state theorist must find one physical-chemical state shared by every possible pain-feeler: mammal, octopus, extraterrestrial. The functionalist needs only a shared organisation, and behaviour is evidence for shared organisation and weak evidence for shared physics. Once pain is organisation, though, anything organised the right way qualifies, swarms included. Condition (3) is where Putnam stops that.
Assumptions
- Probabilistic automata with sensory inputs and motor outputs. States are “specified only ‘implicitly’”, by the transition probabilities of the Machine Table.
- Description. A Description of a system S is any true statement that S has states S1…Sn related to one another and to inputs and outputs by a given Machine Table. That table is S’s Functional Organization relative to the Description.
- Method. Philosophy puts forward “schemata for hypotheses”, not finished theories. Identification is accepted for its fruitful predictions and questions.
Key results
The hypothesis, verbatim from the excerpt:
(1) All organisms capable of feeling pain are Probabilistic Automata. (2) Every organism capable of feeling pain possesses at least one Description of a certain kind (i.e., being capable of feeling pain is possessing an appropriate kind of Functional Organization). (3) No organism capable of feeling pain possesses a decomposition into parts which separately possess Descriptions of the kind referred to in (2). (4) For every Description of the kind referred to in (2), there exists a subset of the sensory inputs such that an organism with that Description is in pain when and only when some of its sensory inputs are in that subset.
- The organisation must include something like a “preference function”, an “inductive logic” and “pain sensors” whose inputs have high disvalue.
- “The purpose of condition (3) is to rule out such ‘organisms’ (if they can count as such) as swarms of bees as single pain-feelers.”
- Condition (1) “is, in fact, empty, since everything is a Probabilistic Automaton under some Description”.
- The functional-state hypothesis “is not incompatible with dualism”: a body plus a soul can be a probabilistic automaton.
- Against the brain-state hypothesis: one psychological predicate applicable to mammal and octopus with different physical correlates collapses it, and “it seems to me overwhelmingly probable that we can do this”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Pain is a functional state of a whole organism, not a brain state | hypothesis, argued as more plausible | comparative plausibility argument (octopus, extraterrestrials) |
| C2 | No pain-feeler has parts that separately possess the pain-capable Description | stipulation | one sentence of motive, the bees (in the passage read) |
| C3 | The functional hypothesis is less vague and more investigable than the brain-state hypothesis | assertion | ”I contend, in passing” |
| C4 | The functional state explains pain behaviour, not merely correlates with it | assertion | methodological section |
Concepts
- Description / Functional Organization / Total State — relative to a Machine Table; one physical system can realise many.
- Anti-nesting condition (3) — a condition on the organisation of parts, not on whether they feel pain.
Connections
- Block (LIT-407, NOTE-366) quotes condition (3) in the same words and attacks it as ad hoc (§1.5). His reading of what (3) is for agrees with this excerpt.
- Schwitzgebel (LIT-159, NOTE-131) quotes (3) in a paraphrase (“parts which are separately capable of feeling pain”), dates it 1965 (the colloquium) and cites p. 163. Neither the wording nor the page matches what could be checked. See LIT-396.
- IIT (LIT-185): the exclusion postulate is a later anti-nesting rule. Putnam’s gives the verdict to the parts and denies it to the whole; IIT’s gives it to the level of maximal integration.
Bearing on the record
It is the anti-nesting principle itself, so a THEORY drawing the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge should quote it from here, in Putnam’s words, and not in Schwitzgebel’s paraphrase. Clause (1)‘s emptiness (“everything is a Probabilistic Automaton under some Description”) is the liberalism that (3) is patching. That is worth quoting beside Block’s case.
Limitations
- An excerpt of a reprint, with elisions, and with summaries by the course between excerpts. Whether the 1967 printing differs is unknown.
- The text just before the bees sentence is elided (”…”), so this reading cannot confirm that no other motive for (3) is given.
Open questions
- Does the 1967 printing (pp. 37–48) word condition (3) and its motive as the reprint does?
- What do the pages that follow the paper in the volume (pp. 49–68 of Crossref’s chapter record) contain, and do they discuss condition (3)?
Corrections
- none to a seeded skim (there was no seed)
- The quotation in NOTE-131 (“parts which are separately capable of feeling pain”) is Schwitzgebel’s paraphrase. Putnam’s words are “parts which separately possess Descriptions of the kind referred to in (2)”.