Lessons from Descartes, part 3: hardware and software dualism

(You might want to read part 1 and part 2 before this article, although these are not related directly).

Unfortunately, one of the most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is what is often called “mind-body dualism”. ?Humans have both physical properties and mental properties, and many mind-body problem studies were concerned about the relationship between these two sets of properties. Mind was regarded as the reasoning engine, without consideration of, for example, motivation and emotion.

With internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence we might be facing new version of this rationalist perspective on separation of duties. Hardware versus software, with many “middleware” in-between, has been often studied separately, for example in cybersecurity communities. Only recently, with digital supply chain attacks, open-source hardware, or growth of physical attacks on IoT devices, integration of hardware-based and software-based security became more prominent. “Security by design” was a buzzword for too long, by too many. Same thing for “Cogito, ergo sum”.