Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind / Computer Analogy The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information

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 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017 S. Dellantonio and L. Pastore, Internal Perception, Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics 40, DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-55763-1_2 47 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. 1 The Idea of a Symbol System and the Grounding Problem Representation is one of the foundational notions in classical cognitive science. Representations are most simply defined as any kind of internal information, organized in a discrete form, that conveys the knowledge an organism has acquired and which serves to orient that organism’s subsequent behavior. At the heart of the cognitivist argument is the idea that a capacity to represent the state of affairs of the world is necessary in performing any kind of intelligent behavior (see e.g. Varela et al. 1991: 40). As e.g. Jean Mandler suggests: Representation is defined most simply as stored information (The terms representation and knowledge can be considered synonymous, but the term representation emphasizes the format in which knowledge is stored). Any organism that takes in information from the world in such a fashion that it influences its later behavior is storing information and so can be said to represent that information. All learning requires storage of information and so requires representation in some form or other (Mandler 1998: 257). Classical cognitive science focuses mainly on a particular kind of mental representations, i.e. conceptual representations, which are the means humans use to know (to categorize) the external world and thus to organize the information taken from it. These representations allow us to carry out all the high-level cognitive processes we are capable of performing starting with thinking and speaking (i.e. acquiring natural languages). This notion of representation is understood in relation to the so called mind/computer analogy, which both cognitivism and functionalism—i.e. the models of mind that became predominant after the crisis of behaviorism (see Chap. 1)—use to interpret the very concept of mind. As this analogy turns out to offer a powerful explanatory framework, it has become the reference model for many of the investigations dealing with the problem of individuating mental capacities and explaining their functioning. In this perspective, the mind is metaphorically understood as software that works independently of the kind of material (the hardware) on which it is implemented, e.g. in the case of human beings, the brain. Mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. they are interpreted in terms of manipulations of symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). 48 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy