The Importance of Functionalism

Theory borrows from the software hardware distinction in digital computation to essentially suggest that consciousness is a particular software running on the hardware of your brain. So you could have an alien with different chemistry or a different set of biological constructs enacting some form of consciousness because it's just a program that is being run Similarly you could have artificial intelligence made out of silicone and it could be totally artificially constructed in a very mechanical way and Yet it's running a consciousness program. And so the software is the consciousness and it's really not determined by the medium, but it's more determined by the function Hence functionalism.