Mind

I heard about the analogy of a computer and the mind, but I'm fuzzy about the connection. Please help!

Comments

One attraction of this analogy stems from the distinction between hardware and software (program) for computers. Computers are physical things, but the same program may run on physically different computers, so the states of the program are not to be identified with particular physical states. Instead, it seems that program states are to be understood 'functionally', in terms of their causes and effects, which may in turn be other program states. What makes the analogy attractive is the thought that mental states might also be functional states. Thus the same kind of thought might be 'run' on or 'realized' in different physical states on different occasions, just as the same program might be run on different types of computer hardware. One attraction of this idea is that it seems to capture the intuition that mental states are not simply identifiable with lumps of matter, while avoiding any suggestion that they are spooky non-physical stuff.

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