Body and Mind through the Lens of Mechanistic Metaphors: The History of Semantic Aberrations

The mechanistic profile of the computer metaphor of consciousness has special attractive properties. The history of the formation of mechanistic explanations of the nature of the mind indicates a deep relationship between the methods of the epistemology and the level of development of engineering and technical knowledge of a particular era. The semantic transfer of the properties of mechanisms or machine computers to the idea of the structure of the body and the principles of the mind indicates figurative universals that have been preserved in the computer metaphor of recent times. Despite the rapid growth of knowledge and technology in the field of computer science, the computational approach to explaining the nature of mind and consciousness continues to retain archaic mechanistic features. At the first stage of the discussion, I turn to the key question of the reasons and cultural context for the transformation of the expression “The body is a machine (mechanism)” into the expression “The mind is a machine (mechanism).” Due to its technological efficiency, the ideology of mechanicism formed in European cognitive culture the logical principle of transferring bodily properties to mental properties, despite the obvious contradictions. This paper provides a detailed analysis of these contradictions. The paper goes on to substantiate the connecting link between the psychophysical problem of consciousness and the reduction of mathematical functions to computational procedures implemented through physical machine calculation has become a connecting link in the psychophysical problem of consciousness. From a mechanistic point of view, a computing machine began to represent a motor and comparative model of the work of thinking. The final part examines the further evolution of computationalism and the correlation of the methods of this approach with discoveries in the field of computer science. The reasons for the “stability” of the mechanistic vocabulary in modern cognitive sciences are identified.