Is Ned Block’s ‘homunculi-headed robots’ objection to functionalism effective?

Ned Block’s homunculi-headed robots objection to functionalism is an attack on functionalism’s liberal tendencies. By ‘liberal’, Block is referring to functionalism’s classification of certain systems that lack mental abilities as, in fact, possessing mental abilities (Block 2002, p. 96). In what follows I will provide a brief outline of what a homunculus-head is and I will evaluate whether the homunculus-head is an effective approach to counter functionalism.

Functionalism is the theory that a given mental state, a pain for example, is identical to a particular functional state, being causally dependant upon the functional state’s inputs (senses), outputs (behaviours), and other internal (mental) states (Block 2002, p. 94; Levin 2004). Further, Machine Functionalism claims that all mental states are analogous to given machine-table states (Block 2002, p. 97). The example of the Turing Machine is often used to illustrate this point and Block outlines one such system, the homunculus-head. To understand Block’s homunculus-head imagine a robot externally similar to a human but internally drastically different. Instead of nerves picture a series of wires that when the sense organs are stimulated turn on certain lights inside the robot. To control the muscles, and hence the robot’s behaviour, there are a series of buttons inside the robot too. Also, inside the robot, is a machine table that describes the ‘person’ that is the robot and a man that is trained to interpret the light…