• Corpus ID: 55541383

The analog/digital distinction in the philosophy of mind

@inproceedings{Epp1993TheAD,
  title={The analog/digital distinction in the philosophy of mind},
  author={Ellie Epp},
  year={1993}
}

• Ellie Epp
• Published 1993
• Philosophy

The computer metaphor of mind has been developed in an era when the serial digital computer is in ascendancy, and those classical cognitivists who support a notion of strong equivalence between mental and computational processes have had a von Neumann architecture in mind. Analog computers have offered an alternative picture of computation, and von Neumann's The Computer and the Brain, published in 1958, brought this sense of an alternative into the philosophy of mind by suggesting that human cognition is a function of processes some of which are analog not digital. I have examined the analogldigital distinction in the light of this suggestion, looking first at the engineering community's uses of the contrast, and then at several sorts of philosophic construal of the terms. I conclude that, seen at the hardware level, there is no philosophically important difference between analog and digital computation, and that the contrast has its primary use in a dispute among language communities those who offer explanations in formal/linguistic terms, and those who offer explanations in physical/mathematical terms. Analog or connectionist systems are not easily interpreted as symbol-using systems, because they lack disjoint, finitely differentiated elements. Their intransigance in code terms, combined as it is with computational efficacy, suggests that we do not have to think of computation in terms of symbols. But those who offer a logical systems explanation have tended to think of the brain as code-using as well as code-describable. Those who say that some if not all intelligent processes do not use code, have tended to avoid logical systems explanation in f a v g of pt p. explanation in dynamical systems terms. I argue that this separation of vocabularies is not necessary if we do not assume symbol-describable cognition is symbol-using cognition, and that any sort of formal modeling, whether logical or mathematical, implies symbol-describability at some level. The larger importance of connectionist processing does not lie in its resistance to description in symbol terms, but in the suggestions it offers about how cognitive states may have intrinsic content. We wish to be able to say for some principled and not merely pragmatic reasons that some components of the cognitive system are more accurately described in biological (and ultimately physical) terms, while others demand a computational description. And we would like this distinction to coincide with the one between analog and digital. (Demopoulos, 1987, 83) The issue is within what class of systems should a description of intelligent systems be sought. On one side were those who, following the lead of p science and engineering, adopted sets of continuous variables as the under state descriptions. They adopted a range of devices for expressing the la differential equations, excitatory and inhibitory networks, statistical and probabilistic systems. Although there were important differences between these types of laws, they all shared the use of continuous variables. The other side adopted the programming system itself as the way to describe intelligent systems. This has come to be better described as the class of symbolic systems, that is, systems whose state is characterized by a set of symbols and their associ structures. But initially, it was simply the acceptance of programs per se as t theoretical medium. (Newell, 1983, 198) THE ANALOGIDIGITAL DISTINCTION IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND