The Role of the Computer Metaphor in Understanding the Mind

Professor Sherry Turkle has mentioned that when children look inside a computer toy, they find something utterly inscrutable: a little chip with no moving parts. They cannot make any sense of it at all. The same thing is true, of course, if you take off the top of somebody’s skull and look at his brain. Absolute inscrutability. And oddly enough, it does not help if you take out your microscope and look at the details of the brain very closely. You will no more see a thought or an idea or a pain or an intention if you look at the synapses or neurotransmitters than if you look at the hypothalamus or occipital cortex or the other large parts of the brain. There are several responses to this inscrutability or opacity of the brain. The first, and traditional, response is dualism: the ball of stuff we see between the ears could not possibly explain the mind, so the mind must be made of some other stuff altogether, some God-like, nonmechanical stuff. This is a well-known scientific dead end; in fact, it is giving up on science altogether. It amounts to “Let God do it.” Another response that I will say more about shortly is what I call mysticism about the organic brain: dualism is false: the mind must be the brain somehow, but it must be essentially mysterious. “I wonder if we will ever understand how!” The third response is “Roll up your sleeves and dig in.” The brain is mysterious, in fact quite inscrutable, but let us just start at the periphery and work our way slowly in, seeing if we can make sense of it. This is often called “bottom-up” as opposed to “top-down” research in the sciences of the mind. “Top down” starts at the mind and mental events and works down, hoping to get someday to the synapses: “bottom up” starts at the synapses and hopes to work up eventually to the mind. This is a responsible and legitimate reaction to inscrutability. We have seen at this conference several good examples of research conducted in this spirit, but it is not the approach I am going to talk about here. I am going to talk about yet a fourth reaction: the strategy of theoretical idealization. As John Searle put it in the panel discussion [Part VII], according to this research strategy, “the brain does not matter”-for the moment! According to this strategy, we should ignore the messy, fine details of the brain for awhile and see if we can find some theoretical idealization that will enable us to begin to get a grip on how the activities and processes of the mind might be organized.