Thoughts and Notes on Cognition - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 173

Perhaps the following three examples will make this point more explicit.
I shall begin with “memory.” When engineers talk about a computer's
“memory” they really don't mean a computer's memory, they refer to
devices, or systems of devices, for recording electric signals which when
needed for further manipulations can be played back again. Hence, these
devices are stores, or storage systems, with the characteristic of all stores,
namely, the conservation of quality of that which is stored at one time,
and then is retrieved at a later time. The content of these stores is a record,
and in the pre-semantic-confusion times this was also the name properly
given to those thin black disks which play back the music recorded on them.
I can see the big eyes of the clerk in a music shop who is asked for the
“memory” of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony . She may refer the customer to
the bookstore next door. And rightly so, for memories of past experiences
do not reproduce the causes for these experiences, but—by changing the
domains of quality—transform these experiences by a set of complex
processes into utterances or into other forms of symbolic or purposeful
behavior. When asked about the contents of my breakfast, I shall not
produce scrambled eggs, I just say, “scrambled eggs.” It is clear that a com-
puter's “memory” has nothing to do with such transformations, it was never
intended to have. This does not mean, however, that I do not believe
that these machines may eventually write their own memoirs. But in
order to get them there we still have to solve some unsolved epistemolog-
ical problems before we can turn to the problem of designing the appro-
priate software and hardware.
If “memory” is a misleading metaphor for recording devices, so is the
epithet “problem solver” for our computing machines. Of course, they are
no problem solvers, because they do not have any problems in the first
place. It is our problems they help us solve like any other useful tool, say,
a hammer which may be dubbed a “problem solver” for driving nails into
a board. The danger in this subtle semantic twist by which the responsibil-
ity for action is shifted from man to a machine lies in making us lose sight
of the problem of cognition. By making us believe that the issue is how to
find solutions to some well defined problems, we may forget to ask first what
constitutes a “problem,” what is its “solution,” and—when a problem is
identified—what makes us want to solve it.
Another case of pathological semantics—and the last example in
my polemics—is the widespread abuse of the term “information.” This
poor thing is nowadays “processed,” “stored,” “retrieved,” “compressed,”
“chopped,” etc., as if it were hamburger meat. Since the case history of this
modern disease may easily fill an entire volume, I only shall pick on the so-
called “information storage and retrieval systems” which in the form of
some advanced library search and retrieval systems, computer based data
processing systems, the nationwide Educational Resources Information
Center (ERIC), etc., have been seriously suggested to serve as analogies for
the workings of the brain.