Altered States and Virtual Beliefs

Functionalism avoids a potentially fatal infinite regress by realising the low level phenomena of mind in mere Turing machines rather than via undischarged homunculae. Adopting a narrow, logical view of human inferential competence; and a wide divergence between the supposed competence and observable human performance. These problems have produced a retreat to instrumentalism about folk psychological concepts - a retreat that has long been trumpeted by certain philosophers.
We argue that abandoning hope in this way is premature. The problems arise from two quarters: an impoverished notion of competence models that divorce them too far from performance models; and too narrow a view of possible functional mechanisms. We explore the consequences of retaining a traditional view of inference, while adopting a new mechanism for memory. We motivate the latter by developing a seemingly unnatural picture of von Neumann machines, taking their finite memory seriously. Together, the two repairs suffice to make instrumentalism avoidable.