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Descartes Among the Robots

Computer Science and the Inner/Outer Distinction

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Abstract

We consider the symbol grounding problem, and apply to it philosophical arguments against Cartesianism developed by Sellars and McDowell: the problematic issue is the dichotomy between inside and outside which the definition of a physical symbol system presupposes. Surprisingly, one can question this dichotomy and still do symbolic computation: a detailed examination of the hardware and software of serial ports shows this.

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Notes

  1. Cf. (Millikan 1984, p. 87): “The specialness that turns a mathematical mapping function into a representation-related relation in a given case must have to be some kind of special status that this function has in the real, the natural, or the causal order rather than the logical order.”

  2. We use the term mechanism in a rather loose sense: it will also include biological organisms, for which these distinctions are also available, and for which we can find a developed theory in (Millikan 1984). On the other hand, Newell and Simon do not seem to have functionalism in mind, although they do speak, in a rather unspecified way, of the interpretations being determined by the “mutual relation” of symbol tokens. We shall, accordingly, not insist on functionalism at this stage.

  3. Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter: see Lawyer (2008, §1.6, §19)

  4. Pedantically speaking, one should point out that Java actually divides what we have called exceptions into three subsets: Exceptions, Errors, and RuntimeExceptions. Errors are those which are so serious that there is no point in trying to recover from them: Exceptions and RuntimeExceptions are as we have described (but differ in whether the provision of code to handle them is mandatory or not).

  5. For example, the classes in java which report input-output errors (namely, the subclasses of java.io.IOException) include classes such as MalformedURLException, which typically arises locally, as well as RemoteException, which is, of course, remote, as well as ProtocolException, which is something arising out of the interaction between local and remote machines.

  6. Still less, of course, are we licensed to suppose that there should be some sort of metaphysical distinction between things on either side of the boundary: there is less temptation to do that now than in Descartes’ time, but attempts are still made.

  7. Contextually defined mappings in both directions are, of course, possible, and there is software to do it: compilers translate from high-level language to assembly code, and decompilers do the reverse (not always very successfuly).

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  1. School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Graham White

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White, G. Descartes Among the Robots. Minds & Machines 21, 179–202 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-011-9232-4

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