IMS 103 Assignment Blog

I think we have switched from thinking of minds as printing presses to thinking of minds as computers; I think this was a natural switch given the increase in technology. Today, printing presses are obsolete in the minds of most people (they do exist, but people don’t think about them) while computers are constantly on the minds of many people. The implications of such a switch are that people are likely to believe that their minds are like computer memory – somewhat changeable, rather than etched in stone like content from a printing press. I don’t have any scientific data to back up my claim, but I personally think that people change their minds much more in modern times than they did in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

The “mind = printing press” metaphor hides that minds can be changed. When I think of what is created with a printing press, I think of permanent intellectual property – not able to be easily changed. The metaphor highlights the ability of a mind to make mistakes when printing (remembering) something, just like when a printing press’s operator made mistakes in laying out the type, resulting in mistakes on the finished product.

The “mind = computer” metaphor highlights that people now think of their minds as machines. Matteo Ricci’s “mind palace” idea is a decent example of this. A mind palace is a structure built in the mind that helps the individual remember things by association – IE, remembering that you have soccer practice by placing a soccer ball in a room of your palace.

The printing press metaphor helped us to understand that minds are able to hold information and that minds are capable of sometimes holding wrong information (mistakes in “printing” to the mind).
the rest is coming, having technical difficulties with posting right now.