Embodied Functionalism and Inner Complexity: Simon’s Twenty-first Century Mind

Abstract

One can hardly overestimate Herbert Simon’s influence on contemporary cognitive science and empirically oriented philosophy of mind. Working with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and the Rand Corporation, he wrote Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver (GPS) and thereby helped to set the agenda for early work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Simon and Newell, 1971). These projects also provided AI with some of its fundamental tools: in their work in the 1950s on Logic Theorist and other programs, Simon and colleagues invented list processing (which, in John McCarthy’s hands, became LISP — McCarthy, 1960), while the conceptual framework of GPS gave birth to production systems (and became SOAR — Rosenbloom et al., 1991). In 1981, John Haugeland included Newell and Simon’s computationalist manifesto (‘Computer science as empirical enquiry: Symbols and search’ — Newell and Simon 1976) in his widely read anthology Mind Design (Haugeland, 1981). As a result, the names of Newell and Simon became, in the philosophical world, nearly synonymous with the computational theory of the mind — at the top of the list with Fodor’s (1975) and Pylyshyn’s (1984). Moreover, in their early work, Simon and the Carnegie—Rand group emphasized the relative independence of an information-processing-based characterization of thought from the material components of the system so engaged (Newell et al., 1958a, p. 51; 1958b, p. 163, cf. Vera and Simon, 1993, p. 9).