What did people in the eighteenth century think the human mind was? According to Sean Silver, whatever they happened to work with: “The age is littered with people modeling their intellect on the spaces in which they worked. John Locke says the mind is like a cabinet; Joseph Addison compares it to a drawer of medals; Francis Bacon calls it a repository; Robert Hooke calls it a workshop. The thing to notice is this: Locke was a bibliophile, Addison a coin collector, Bacon a collector of curiosities, Hooke a laboratory technician.... We should ... attend to Locke’s cabinet, Addison’s medals, Bacon’s repository, and Hooke’s workshop, not as curiosities of museology, but as histories of ideas.” Is there any wonder, then, that people today think the mind is a computer?
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