`Loving the Computer'

Abstract

Cognitive psychology has been founded on a model of the mind as an information-processing machine. This paper is not concerned with the arguments for or against modelling the mind on computers, as these arguments are already well rehearsed in the literature. Instead I am interested in what the relation between computer, cognition and the thinking man promises or guarantees. Specifically, I am concerned with how cognition comes to be constituted through certain dominant fantasies of embodiment that the computer metaphor promotes. To what extent does psychology's computational machinery prescribe a disembodied cognition? And in what ways is such a prescription of cognition indebted to the logic of a masculine morphology? The paper draws on Turing's classic essay `Computing Machinery and Intelligence', Atkinson and Shiffrin's early model of human memory, Irigaray's formulation of sexed morphology and Tausk's analysis of the influencing machine in paranoid delusions to argue that at the heart of cognitive theories we find the body of the thinking man.