Zenon Pylyshyn
(1937-2022)
Zenon Pylyshyn was a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist who argued that the idea that cognition can be understood as computation is ubiquitous in modern cognitive theorizing, even among those who do not use computer programs to express models of cognitive processes.
This is because cognition is clearly "information processing." And computers are information processing machines. Pylyshyn argues that cognitive processes can be understood as formal operations carried out on symbol structures.
This flawed idea goes back to a
few years before the first digital computers were actually built (ENIAC in 1946). In 1943
Warren McCulloch and
Walter Pitts, the first a neurophysiologist and symbolic logician and the second a self-taught expert in the symbolic logic of
Bertrand Russell and
Rudolf Carnap, thought that the synapses between neurons could be binary logical gates that would support symbolic logic in the brain.
But man is not a machine. And the brain is not a digital computer. It is an entirely analog information processor we call an
experience recorder and reproducer.
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