Abstract
After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in Chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that—unlike computers—in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes.
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Notes
- 1.
For another well-known interpretation of Searle’s argument in the light of the symbol grounding problem which however suggests—differently from Harnad—that we completely abandon a formal model of cognition: Thompson (1997).
- 2.
For a recent review of Searle’s and Harnad’s arguments see e.g. Rodríguez et al. (2012).
- 3.
In particular, Neisser expresses strong skepticism about the general idea that the study of formal and computational processes can help us understand specific aspects of human behavior such as emotions: “Unlike men, ‘artificially intelligent’ programs tend to be single-minded, undistractable, and unemotional” (Neisser 1967: 9).
- 4.
- 5.
According to Gibson, all bodily sensations are perceptions of the same kind. Gibson welcomes the notion of ‘somaethesis’ introduced by Boring (1942), which encompass ‘tactual sensibility’, ‘organic sensibility’, ‘kinesthesis’, feelings of ‘pressure’, ‘muscle tension’, ‘pain’ and ‘temperature’. In fact, he considers all these experiences to be part of the same complex perceptual system: “the feelings of the body were so much allied as to be subsumed under one name” (Gibson [1966] 1983: 98). In this sense, in Gibson’s view, “Boring’s somaesthesis […] includes Sherrington’s interoception” (Gibson [1968] 1987). On current philosophical developments concerning somaesthesis see Shusterman 2008, 2012.
- 6.
In this sense, proprioception is a constitutive component of all the systems of our organism, to include the postural system, the system that coordinates orientation and locomotion, the appetitive, performative expressive and semantic systems. Any of these systems involve proprioceptive information (Gibson [1966] 1983: 57). Since in Gibson’s terms proproception indicates mainly bodily awareness (see Gibson [1974] 1987, [1975] 1987), each of these systems contribute to forming the internal perspective of the first person that humans experience as a result of the embodiment of their cognitive system.
- 7.
The hypothesis that the information provided by the various systems that collect information on the internal states of the body (mainly proprioception meant in the narrow sense as information on body position and body movements; interoception and nociception) is de facto integrated and that it is therefore appropriate to consider it unitarily has been put forward e.g. by Feinberg (2009) and by Craig (2015). On this see below Sect. 5.
- 8.
Damasio also distinguished between background feelings and background emotions (Damasio 2000, Chap. 2). Strictly speaking, the real analogy should be between existential feelings and background emotions. Background emotions are a subset of background feelings: while background feelings describe generically all kinds of bodily feelings (including also those directed towards the body for example being satiated or experiencing an almost imperceptible pain in the foot while sitting etc.), background emotions only denote those background feelings that determine our relationship with the external world and others. However, the really relevant element of this analogy is that both authors consider bodily feelings as the common background for all kinds of internal states: emotional as well as physical.
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Dellantonio, S., Pastore, L. (2017). The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. In: Internal Perception. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 40. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55763-1_2
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