Abstract

This book is a lively, readable sequel in which Lycan answers critics and extends the homuncular functionalist view of consciousness given in his 1987 Consciousness, also published by MIT Press. Both books aim to defend a materialist view of human beings by countering nonmaterialist accounts of consciousness, subjectivity, qualia, and sensation. The original line of defense, behaviorism, gave way to identity theory which was followed by functionalism. Identity theory refers to the “ type-type” identification of the mental with the neurophysiological. It argues that mental states are inner and mediate between stimulus and response. “They are states of the central nervous system, describable in neuroanatomical terms”. Functionalism sees identity theory as “an empirically special case of Functionalism... that locates all mental states at the same very low level of institutional abstraction—the neuroanatomical”.