Role Functionalism and Life after Death

Role functionalism is a version of functionalism in contemporary philosophy of mind and a subclass of causal-role functionalism. On this version of functionalism, psychological states and properties are characterized as second-order functional (in a causal sense), and it is emphasized that they are not reducible to material or non-material realizers of those roles. In particular, role functionalism employs the metaphysical concept of realization in its characterization of the relation between psychological states and bodily or brain states. After a brief account of the central components of role functionalism, and in particular, its materialist version, the paper offers an argument to show that materialist functionalism involves an internal inconsistency. I then point out that role functionalism does not entail materialism, and then, ignoring the above inconsistency, I seek to examine the implications of role functionalism for the possibility of life after death, and certain advantages as well as problems of the formulation of life after death in terms of functionalism.