“Triviality arguments” against functionalism in the philosophy of mind hold that the claim that some complex physical system
exhibits a given functional organization is either trivial or has much less content than is usually supposed. I survey several
earlier arguments of this kind, and present a new one that overcomes some limitations in the earlier arguments. Resisting
triviality arguments is possible, but requires functionalists to revise popular views about the “autonomy” of functional description.
Keywords Functionalism - Mind - Computation - Realization - Causal role