Minds are not (necessarily) machines
A response to Meghan O’Gieblyn’s essay ‘Babel’ in n+1 magazine [issue 40]
How will the future relationship between humans and the digital world they have created look like? Will artificial intelligence one day be able to perfectly mimic ‘natural’ language? What aspects of the human condition will be outsourced to computers? Will human-made culture become a relic of the past?
Meghan O’Gieblyn’s insightful essay reminds the reader that, inevitably, they will have to confront these uncomfortable questions.
Throughout the essay, she reminds us that there is an explicit analogy in the background: that the mind is like a machine (specifically, a computer). This is perhaps the most refreshing feature of her article since, despite their ubiquity, the conceptual role of metaphors in framing discussions of science and technology is often overlooked.
Precisely because of this awareness of metaphorical language, I expected to see a disclaimer on the limits of such an analogy between minds—or brains—and machines. But this warning never came. In fact, the reader is left with the impression that O’Gieblyn accepts the metaphor as fundamentally correct.
This assumption is, at the very least, controversial. Despite the initial plausibility of the comparison, there are many disanalogies — some potentially critical — between minds and computers. Neurons, for example, are much more malleable than silicon, do not take on binary values, and do not run on electricity.
Conceptualizing living beings in terms of machines — a tradition that goes back to Descartes — provides a clean and simplified picture the biological world. It therefore makes sense that our “conceptual metaphor” for the mind is a computer: these are, after all, the most advanced pieces of machinery that we have available. (The brain used to be compared to a water clock when this was the most impressive technology around.)
One must, however, proceed with caution: blindly perpetuating the analogy of the mind as a machine can have potentially dangerous consequences. For example, without more careful thought, one might imply that ‘fixing’ a mind is like fixing an engine, modulo some complexities. But treating a mental condition often requires more than rewiring the brain — it might require therapy and a change in the surrounding social conditions.
There is much to learn about the mind from this analogy; whether it captures the most essential parts of the mind, however, is almost certainly false. Mechanistic explanation can be powerful, but it is not the only kind of explanation in science.
When a hypnotist tells O’Gieblyn that the brain is “essentially a computer” — an assumption she shares — he is continuing a longstanding custom by charlatans of using the language of existing technology to give their dubious practices an aura of legitimacy (see, for example, ‘quantum healing’). There might be benefits to hypnosis; but that the practice allows one to access the metaphorical hardware of the mind is doubtful, not just because of the technique but because it is likely there is no mental hardware to access.
