Thoughts and Notes on Cognition - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 174

Of course, these systems do not store information, they store topics, tapes,
microfiche or other sorts of documents, and it is again these topics, tapes,
microfiche or other documents that are retrieved which only if looked upon
by a human mind may yield the desired information. Calling these collec-
tions of documents “information storage and retrieval systems” is tanta-
mount to calling a garage a “transportation storage and retrieval system.”
By confusing vehicles for potential information with information , one puts
again the problem of cognition nicely into one's blind spot of intellectual
vision, and the problem conveniently disappears. If indeed the brain were
seriously compared with one of these storage and retrieval systems, distinct
from these only by its quantity of storage rather than by quality of process,
such a theory would require a demon with cognitive powers to zoom
through this huge system in order to extract from its contents the informa-
tion that is vital to the owner of this brain.
Dificile est satiram non scribere . Obviously, I have failed to overcome this
difficulty, and I am afraid that I will also fail in overcoming the other diffi-
culty, namely, to say now what cognition really is. At this moment, I even
have difficulties in relating my feelings on the profoundness of our problem,
if one cares to approach it in its full extension. In a group like ours, there
are probably as many ways to look at it as there are pairs of eyes. I am still
baffled by the mystery that when Jim, a friend of Joe, hears the noises that
are associated with reading aloud from the black marks that follow.
ANN IS THE SISTER OF JOE
—or just sees these marks—knows that indeed Ann is the sister of Joe, and,
de facto , changes his whole attitude toward the world, commensurate with
his new insight into a relational structure of elements in this world.
To my knowledge, we do not yet understand the “cognitive processes”
which establish this insight from certain sensations. I shall not worry at this
moment whether these sensations are caused by an interaction of the organ-
ism with objects in the world or with their symbolic representations. For, if
I understood Dr. Maturana correctly, these two problems, when properly
formulated, will boil down to the same problem, namely, that of cognition
per se .
In order to clarify this issue for myself, I gathered the following notes
which are presented as six propositions labeled n = 1 Æ 6. Propositions
numbered n. 1, n .2, n .3, etc., are comments on proposition numbered n .
Propositions numbered n.m 1, n.m 2, etc., are comments on proposition n.m ,
and so on.
Here they are.
Notes
1 A living organism, W, is a bounded, autonomous unit whose functional
and structural organization is determined by the interaction of its contigu-
ous elementary constituents.