The Mind as a Control System

Many people who favour the design-based approach to the study of mind, including the author previously, have thought of the mind as a computational system, though they don’t all agree regarding the forms of computation required for mentality. Because of ambiguities in the notion of ‘computation’ and also because it tends to be too closely linked to the concept of an algorithm, it is suggested in this paper that we should rather construe the mind (or an agent with a mind) as a control system involving many interacting control loops of various kinds, most of them implemented in high level virtual machines, and many of them hierarchically organised. (Some of the sub-processes are clearly computational in character, though not necessarily all.) A number of implications are drawn out, including the implication that there are many informational substates, some incorporating factual information, some control information, using diverse forms of representation. The notion of architecture, i.e. functional differentiation into interacting components, is explained, and the conjecture put forward that in order to account for the main characteristics of the human mind it is more important to get the architecture right than to get the mechanisms right (e.g. symbolic vs neural mechanisms). Architecture dominates mechanism