Who was first with the computer metaphor?

This entry was posted on 6/6/2007 7:20 AM and is filed under AI,Computation and Logic.

While it's quite easy to say who was first to suggest that the mind is a computational system (Leibniz, if you don't remember, in De arte combinatoria), I cannot remember who was first to say that the computer is just a metaphor of the (human) mind. (Well, I think that reducing computationalism to the claim that computer is a metaphor of something makes it uninteresting.) Anyway, I cannot really find the first one who made this weak claim. Or maybe I just don't see something so obvious... Help, anyone?

PS. BTW, this is my first post on Brains, so hello everyone

Trackbacks

• No trackbacks exist for this entry.

Comments

• 6/6/2007 9:38 AM Anibal wrote:
  It is just a tentative and preliminary opinion wihtout direct reference until someone with first hand reference come out here, but i guess were Warren MCculoch and Walter Pitts whom said that in modern times with their mathematical model or first formal model of the operations of the neuron based in a two valued logic, not explicitely but with his work.
  Reply to this
  1. 6/6/2007 5:01 PM marcin milkowski wrote:
     As far as I remember, McCulloch & Pitts seem to say that the brain is literally a computer. I'm looking for someone who said first that it's just a metaphor, and not a literal truth.
     Reply to this
• 6/6/2007 9:39 PM Chris wrote:
  I don't think McCulloch or Pitts ever used the computer-mind metaphor, but they may have inspired its first use. Most sources (see, e.g., Gigerenzer">http://www.dangoldstein.com/papers/GigerenzerGoldstein_MindAsComputer_CreativityResJ_1995.pdf">Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996) cite von Neumann's 1958 The Computer and the Brain, which was heavily influenced by M&P, as the first use of a metaphor comparing the nervous system as a whole to a computer. The first serious published use of the metaphor, however, was probably Newell and Simon's Human Problem Solving, though in the mid-to-late 1950s, several of the participants in the cognitive revolution were tossing the information processing metaphor around (e.g., George Miller).
  Reply to this
• 6/6/2007 10:35 PM Eric Thomson wrote:
  Searle certainly advocated that line of thought. Was he the first? A 1990 article where he discusses it explicitly is here">http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=93746.93752">here.
  
  That's the earliest my superficial Googling could find.
  
  Wait, I just found one from 1984 from another group here">http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0468.pdf">here.
  
  Ned Block mentions the "computer metaphor" in 1983 here">http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(198310)92%3A4%3C499%3AMPACS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G">here.
  Reply to this
• 6/7/2007 6:02 AM Pete Mandik wrote:
  There is a sense of the verb "compute" whereby many, if not all, people compute insofar as they calculate or figure stuff out. Insofar as they literally compute, they literally are computers. Further, the use of "compute" "computing" and "computer" as applied to non-human machines is, I would think, derivative of use as applied to humans.
  
  It strikes me as a bit odd, then, to say that calling people or their minds "computational" is something metaphorical.
  Reply to this
  1. 6/7/2007 7:20 AM Richard Brown wrote:
     

     Pete, I think the question is: who was the first to use the metaphor of the digital computer...

      

     Alsofor what its worth, though he did not use the digital computer as a metaphor, Hobbes' theory of rationality is clearly computational....

     
     Reply to this
• 6/7/2007 1:12 PM Eric Thomson wrote:
  I guess html tags for linking to other sites get mangled by this blog. Luckily it shows the full URLs to which it was supposed to link.
  
  OK, anyone find anything earlier than Block 1983? Is anyone here buddies with him who can ask him about the history?
  Reply to this
• 6/7/2007 3:39 PM Chris wrote:
  I guess my post wasn't clear, 'cause of the bad link. I know who first used it (or at least, who is credited with its first use): von Neumann in 1958. However, von Neumann was comparing the entire nervous system with a computer. The first serious use of the brain-computer (i.e., information processing machine) metaphor in the literature was by Newell and Simon, in 1972. Before that, it was used at conferences and the like by the early participants in the cogntiive revolution (you might find references to it in proceedings as early as 1956).
  Reply to this
  1. 6/8/2007 1:38 AM marcin milkowski wrote:
     Well, as far as I remember von Neumann, he never used it as a metaphor. That's the problem: people think it's a weaker, and thus a more defensible position, to say that a mind is metaphorically a computer. I have a decent Polish translation of von Neumann 1958 in the PDF, and metaphor doesn't ever show up.
     
     I'm sure the first use of the 'metaphor' (and I mean literally 'metaphor', not an idea of the computational mind, but a phrase 'computer metaphor') was earlier than 1972, as I have some old Polish psychology readers from 1970s and they all use 'metaphor' way of speaking.
     Reply to this
  2. 6/8/2007 3:51 AM anna-mari wrote:
     Ciao,
     
     and greetings from EuroCogSci07, Delphi, to everyone. It was great; Gallistel, Fodor, Nersessian, Boden...
     
     Marcin (and nice to meet you), did you mean the "computer" as a modern computer? I guess back in the 19th century some sort of similar metaphor was used.
     
     (Btw; where is that Italian when he is most needed? Usually Gualtiero knows all these things.)
     
     Anna-Mari
     Reply to this
• 6/7/2007 3:41 PM Chris wrote:
  Also, it might be interesting to note that Turing was making the reverse metaphor in the 1940s and 50s: the computer is like a mind (rather than computer as a metaphor for mind).
  Reply to this
• 6/11/2007 4:19 AM Anibal wrote:
  In the blog "Mind Hacks" (Mind Hacks.com) running by a group of editors (Vaughan, Alex, Misha...) specialised in differrent fields of the sciences of the mind/brain there is an interesting entry about methaphors of the mind.
  Reply to this
• 6/24/2007 7:39 AM gualtiero wrote:
  Sorry for being absent on this. I was out of town until recently and I only read it now.
  
  The theory (as opposed to the metaphor) that the brain is some kind of modern digital computer cannot be older than modern digital computers. Since modern computers were invented in the 1940s, that's when the theory also originates. As someone above pointed out, McCulloch and Pitts 1943 were the first to suggest something along the lines of, "thinking is computation in Turing's sense"; they didn't talk about computers because computers weren't around yet. The main players at the time were McCulloch and Pitts, Norbert Wiener (see his Cybernetics, 1948) and von Neumann (see his contribution to the Hixon Symposium). McCulloch has a 1949 paper entitled something like "The Brain as a Digital Computer".
  
  Criticisms of the theory that the brain is a computer began to appear shortly thereafter. They were certainly around by the 1950s. I suspect such critics, at some point, began talking of computers as metaphors for the mind--to stress that is was just a metaphor; it wasn't literally true (as McCulloch et al argued). Unfortunately, I don't know who introduced the term "computer metaphor", but the motivation for using it was already around by late 1940s.
  Reply to this
• 6/24/2007 3:24 PM marcin miłkowski wrote:
  Using Google Book Search, I found numerous instances of "computer metaphor" (and "artificial intelligence") in Daedalus from 1955 (for example, in a paper by Eccles, if I read the ugly scans correctly). So it seems that in 1955 the use was quite widespread as Daedalus never publishes original research.
  Reply to this

Leave a comment