Thoughts and Notes on Cognition - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 172

now works on ILLIAC III promises that “he” will be operative soon. But
ILLIAC IV reaches into quite different dimensions. The planners say that
when “she” will be switched on, the world's computing power will be
doubled.
Again, these anthropomorphisms are perfectly all right inasmuch as they
help us establish good working relations with these tools. Since most of the
people I know in our computer department are heterosexual males, it is
clear that they prefer the days and nights of their work spent with a “she,”
rather than with an “it.”
However, in the last decade or so something odd and distressing devel-
oped, namely, that not only the engineers who work with these systems
gradually began to believe that those mental functions whose names were
first metaphorically applied to some machine operations are indeed resid-
ing in these machines, but also some biologists—tempted by the absence
of a comprehensive theory of mentation—began to believe that certain
machine operations which unfortunately carried the names of some men-
tal processes are indeed functional isomorphs of these operations. For
example, in the search for a physiological basis of memory, they began to
look for neural mechanisms which are analogues of electromagnetic or elec-
trodynamic mechanisms that “freeze” temporal configurations (magnetic
tapes, drums, or cores) or spatial configurations (holograms) of the elec-
tromagnetic field so that they may be inspected at a later time.
The delusion, which takes for granted a functional isomorphism between
various and distinct processes that happen to be called by the same name,
is so well established in these two professions that he who follows Lorenz's
example and attempts now to “de-anthropomorphize” machines and to “de-
mechanize” man is prone to encounter antagonisms similar to those Lorenz
encountered when he began to “animalize” animals.
On the other hand, this reluctance to adopt a conceptual framework in
which apparently separable higher mental faculties as, for example, “to
learn,” “to remember,” “to perceive,” “to recall,” “to predict,” etc., are seen
as various manifestations of a single, more inclusive phenomenon, namely,
“cognition,” is quite understandable. It would mean abandoning the com-
fortable position in which these faculties can be treated in isolation and thus
can be reduced to rather trivial mechanisms. Memory, for instance, con-
templated in isolation is reduced to “recording,” learning to “change,” per-
ception to “input,” etc. In other words, by separating these functions from
the totality of cognitive processes one has abandoned the original problem
and now searches for mechanisms that implement entirely different func-
tions that may or may not have any semblance with some processes that
are, as Maturana* pointed out, subservient to the maintenance of the
integrity of the organism as a functioning unit.
* See Chapter 1, pages 3-23.