Function vs Structure (A Purple Peril)

One of the apparently controversial things that I say is that psychology, as a science, needs to address function before it gets worried about structure; what is the brain trying to do, vs how is it doing it? This Peril lays out the argument in a little more detail. As always, this is my current thinking not my final thinking and I am happy as ever to hear arguments for and against this proposal.

Structure (the details of how a function is implemented) is important, there is no doubt. But I see two related arguments about putting function first, or at least giving it the driver's seat in our science.

There's More Than One Way to Rhythmically Move a Lobster

I'm slowly working my way through Olaf Sporn's excellent book, Networks of the Mind. The purpose of this book is to introduce neuroscientists to network theory, and vice versa; I'm eavesdropping and tooling up on both. It's slow going only because it's pretty much all new territory to me, but I'm seeing a lot of potential in the overall approach to the brain, and this just confirms for me that Sporns understands what he does pretty deeply. 

Anyway, a while back, Bruce Hood tweeted the following:

Fact: in the digestive tract of the lobster, its nervous system can have 100k-200k different neural states that produce the same behavior

This struck me as an astonishing fact; to my mind, it throws the idea that hunting for the neural correlates of behaviour into serious doubt. At the very least, it needs to radically change what you expect to find. I finally found the reference for this fact in Sporns' book (Prinz, Bucher & Marder, 2004; download), and Sporns has some interesting context for this fact (which Hood undersells - see below) and why it's interesting, rather than soul-crushingly depressing. There are some interesting potential consequences relevant to my current ponderings on the brain, although it's definitely still at the 'these sound like the same sort of principle' level of analysis.