Representation in digital systems
Vincent C. Müller · PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) · 2008
Abstract. Cognition is commonly taken to be computational manipulation of representations. These representations are assumed to be digital, but it is not usually specified what that means and what relevance it has for the theory. I propose a specification for being a digital state in a digital system, especially a digital computational system. The specification shows that identification of digital states requires functional directedness, either for someone or for the system of which the state is a part. In the case of digital representations, the function of the type is to represent, that of the token just to be a token of that representational type. 1. Digital Representations and the Computationalist Program In this paper, I will attempt to clarify one aspect of a notion that is commonly used in the cognitive sciences, but has come under considerable criticism in recent years: the notion of representation. Rep-resentations are typically invoked in a ‘computational theory of the mind’, where mental processes are understood as information processing through computational operations over representations. The standard theory is the computational representational theory of mind (CRM or “computationalism”), which says that the human mind is a functional computational mechanism operating over representa-tions. These representational abilities are then to be explained naturalistically, either as a result of in-