While browsing the web, I found this blog which directly relates to our topic of last week's discussion. More specifically, this post detailed an interesting study that showed, through sensory imaging tests, that the mind-computer metaphor doesn't always work so well.
I find this metaphor interesting. I wonder if von Neumann thought he had hit the theoretical jackpot when he came up with this metaphor. All along, psychologists had been trying to answer the question of, "what is going on in the mind and why?" As Larry White put it in chapter 1 of his book, structuralism was a question of "what is mind?" and functionalism was a question of "what is mind for?" In my opinion, behaviorism was looking at "what can we do to control the mind?" and psychoanalysis was "how can we extract what is happening in the mind?" To answer this with a metaphor that explains the mind as a mass of connections that all have a specific purpose and specific applications seems to be the end point of wondering "what is going on in the mind?"
It doesn't answer the question of "why" though. And even though, at the time, not as much was known about computers as is now, doesn't it impersonalize our existence? If we can be programmed to perform in a certain way (which, I guess was the aim of behaviorism...) what is the point? And the computer metaphor does nothing for explaining emotion and other affectual things about the mind. However I think it was probably a breakthrough metaphor that also influenced the development of technology (which, as we all know, was extremely important and significant - without it we wouldn't be able to blog for class!).
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