Television example for exploring relationship between “components, systems, and interfaces”
Consider a television set in comparison to a block of marble. The former, we are inclined to say, is highly systematic, composed of many nested interacting subsystems, whereas the latter is hardly systematic at all. Why? One suggestion might be that the tv is composed of many different kinds of material, arranged in complicated shapes and patterns, whereas the marble contains relatively few materials and is nearly (though not quite) homogeneous. This cannot be the right answer, however, because a computer microchip (an integrated circuit) is surely more systematic than a compost of rotting table scraps, even though the former contains relatively few materials and is nearly homogeneous, whereas the latter is diverse and messy.
Rather, the difference must lie in the nature of the discontinuities within the whole, and the character of the interactions across them. To see this, think of how the tv is organized. If we suppose that, at some level of analysis, it consists of a thousand components, then we can ask how these components are distinguished. One possible decomposition would be neatly geometrical: assuming the set is roughly cubical, divide it into ten equal slices along each axis, to yield a thousand smaller cubes, of which the entire set exactly consists. What’s wrong with this “decomposition”? Well, consider one of the “component” cubes—say, one near the center. It contains half of a transistor, two thirds of a capacitor, several fragments of wire, a small triangle of glass from the picture tube, and a lot of hot air. Obviously, this is an incoherent jumble that makes no sense—even though a thousand equally crazy “pieces”, put together exactly right, would make up a tv set. Our task is to say why.
A resistor is a quintessential electronic component. It has two wires coming out of it, and its only “job”, as the name suggests, is to resist (to some specified degree) the flow of electricity between them. It doesn’t matter how it does that job—nor, within limits, does anything else about it matter—just so long as it does that job properly and reliably, and doesn’t interfere with any other components. An electronic component, like a resistor, is a relatively independent and self-contained portion of a larger electronic circuit. This means several things. In the first place, it means that the resistor does not interact with the rest of the system except through its circuit connections—namely, those two wires. That is, nothing that happens outside of it affects anything that happens inside, or vice versa, except by affecting the currents in those connections. (To be more precise, all effects other than these are negligible, either because they are so slight or because they are irrelevant.) Second, it means that the relevant interactions through those connections are themselves well-defined, reliable, and relatively simple. For instance, it’s only a flow of electrons, not of chemicals, contagion, or contraband. Finally, it means that it is not itself a composite of components at a comparable level of independence and self-containedness: a resistor plus a capacitor do not add up to a distinct component. (However, a suitable larger arrangement of resistors, capacitors, and transistors might add up to a pre-amp— which could in turn be a component in a higher-level system.)
An electronic component’s connecting wires constitute its “interface” to the rest of the system.
—Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded, pp. 6-7. Chapter 9 in Haugeland, J., 2000: Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Harvard University Press.
author:haugeland-john book:haugeland-having-thought paper:haugeland-mind-embodied-and-embedded snip:tv-example-components-systems-interfaces component system interface definition example list:mind-body-world
