Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

level, one asks what physical mechanisms are responsible for bringing a particular
architecture to life.
My goal in this chapter is to introduce these different levels of investigation.
Later chapters reveal that different approaches within cognitive science have differing
perspectives on the relative importance, and on the particular details, of
each level.
2.1 Machines and Minds
Animism is the assignment of lifelike properties to inanimate, but moving, objects.
Animism characterizes the thinking of young children, who may believe that a car,
for instance, is alive because it can move on its own (Piaget, 1929). Animism was
also apparent in the occult tradition of the Renaissance; the influential memory
systems of Lull and of Bruno imbued moving images with powerful, magical properties
(Yates, 1966).
Animism was important to the development of scientific and mathematical
methods in the seventeenth century: “The Renaissance conception of an animistic
universe, operated by magic, prepared the way for a conception of a mechanical
universe, operated by mathematics” (Yates, 1966, p. 224). Note the animism in the
introduction to Hobbes’ (1967) Leviathan:
For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal
part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves
by means of springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what
is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Springs; and the Joynts,
but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the
Artificer? (Hobbes, 1967, p. 3)
Such appeals to animism raised new problems. How were moving humans to be distinguished
from machines and animals? Cartesian philosophy grounded humanity
in mechanistic principles, but went on to distinguish humans-as-machines from
animals because only the former possessed a soul, whose essence was “only to think”
(Descartes, 1960, p. 41).
Seventeenth-century philosophy was the source of the mechanical view of
man (Grenville, 2001; Wood, 2002). It was also the home of a reverse inquiry: was
it possible for human artifacts, such as clockwork mechanisms, to become alive or
intelligent?
By the eighteenth century, such philosophical ponderings were fuelled by
“living machines” that had made their appearance to great public acclaim. Between
1768 and 1774, Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz constructed elaborate clockwork
androids that wrote, sketched, or played the harpsichord (Wood, 2002). The
20 Chapter 2