Mind-brain identity is also challenged by nondualists who think that the development of computers reveals the hypothesis that minds are brains to be much too narrow. The possibility of artificial intelligence, which is the construction of computers capable of reasoning and learning, suggests that we should identify mental processes more generally with computational processes that can occur, not just in brains, but also in machines made out of silicon chips or other kinds of hardware. This view is called functionalism, because it says that mental states are inherently functional, providing causal connections between inputs and outputs in ways that produce intelligent behaviors. Computers and other machines, or maybe even extraterrestrial organisms, can have such functional states without
having brains, so identification of mind and brain is a mistake. It is mental software that makes minds work, and the particular hardware on which it runs is not very important. I found this computational view appealing when I first got interested in cognitive science in 1978, but came to doubt it in the late
1980s when I began to work on neural network models, and even more in the 1990s when I started research on emotion.