The Cognitive Turn - Creatures, Technology, and Scientific Psychology

Creatures, Technology, and Scientific Psychology

2.7 The Cognitive Turn

functions in the cerebral cortex, which was seen to work as a whole through its system of neural connections.

This integration was studied by employing both electrical methods (electrical recording) and chemical ones (local strychninization), which represent “a powerful tool for delimiting the origin and ending of neurons in the central nervous system”

(Abraham 2003). At the same time, these methods paved the way for the momen- tous transformation which brought about the development of the cognitive sciences and technologies, particularly with McCulloch.

This mode of research sheds light on one important aspect of the transformation highlighted by Sheets-Johnstone (p. 181), when she observes that the de-animation of perception and the rise of cognitivist science are two intimately related phenomena. The reason for this is clearly connected to experimental praxis, as McCulloch explicitly confirms: “When one is working on the physics and chemistry of the anesthetized brain, as I was, one is doing biophysics and biochemistry necessary for neurophysiology, but falling short of physiology because the nervous system is then deprived of its functions; but even if it were working properly it would still be only physics and chemistry and not physiology unless one were studying the function also” (McCulloch 1974). Indeed, the neurophysiologist who anesthetizes the brain to study its mechanisms, connections, and organization isolates the brain, as a coherent whole, from any context and therefore ignores its relations with the out- side. The remarkable efforts made by cybernetics researchers largely go in this direction.³²

McCulloch undertook this formidable challenge by adopting the same research strategy as Helmholtz, supported by the same ontology—and revealing the same unexpected indebtedness to Kant. The ontology in question is the unthematized one that stands in continuity with ancient ontology. It grasps the nature of things starting from the paradigmatic view of production, whereby things, which are created according to their creator’s plan, are only fully accessible to him, while everyone else can only have a partial perception of them.³³

Just to what extent this hidden ontology steered McCulloch’s scientific praxis is revealed by a brief description provided by Lettvin, an associate as well as lifelong friend of his: “He devoted himself to discover how the brain works in the same way that an inventor knows exactly every single cog in the machine he has created. The key to such knowledge lies, not in observation, but in the construction of models which are then compared to the data available ... And McCulloch preferred to run the risk of failure in his attempt to create a brain, rather than succeed in furnishing an improved description of existing brains” (Dupuy 1985, p. 78).

This hidden ontology lay at the basis of a new way of conceiving experimentation, understood by Helmholtz as the actual reconstruction of the mechanism which underlies and generates the phenomenon to be explained; and what McCulloch sought to explain was the production of a priori synthetic judgments!

The focus on the brain in terms of connections and organization constituted the perspective from which de Barenne had developed his research, as well as the out- come of a whole tradition. By bringing forth this view, McCulloch—like Helmholtz—resorted not just to new technologies, but to all practical-conceptual resources available to reproduce the phenomena he had observed and identified in the laboratory.

In retrospect, McCulloch acknowledged that Leibniz’s logical machine, just like Turing’s idea of a “logical engine” for the process of mathematical computation, provided a significant source of inspiration (Abraham 2003). However, the most important role was arguably played by the mathematical biophysics of the Rashevsky school and, within this context, by McCulloch’s encounter with a mathematical genius, the then 17-year-old Walter Pitts (Smalheiser 2000). Pitts allowed McCulloch to axiomatize an intuition which he had had in the 1930s by providing him with the logico-mathematical means to analyze excitatory and inhibitory activity in a simple neural circuit. Thus, through a binary logic whose principles were embodied in the brain and its neurons—logically defined neurons characterized by on-off (0–1) functioning—it was in theory possible to understand the properties of neural nets.

“The all-or-none law of nervous activity—McCulloch and Pitts write in their famous 1943 paper—is sufficient to insure that the activity of any neuron may be represented as a proposition. Physiological relations existing among nervous activities correspond, of course, to relations among propositions” (p. 21).

33 Wenn ich aber Körper sehe so sehe Ich keine Substanzen sondern Erscheinungen. Ich kann auch gar nicht di Substanzen vernehmen; denn kein Wesen, als der Schöpfer allein, kann die Substanzen eines andern Dinges vernehmen (p. 97 Kant 1972). “When I see bodies, I do not see any substances, but rather phenomena. I cannot perceive substances at all. No being except the creator can perceive the substance of another thing.”

Hence, starting (a) from the states of activity and inactivity of every single neuron which correspond, respectively, to the logical values true and false (0 and 1), (b) from their connections—so that if two neurons tend to be active together, connect- ing up is facilitated, whereas the opposite state inhibits any connection (the rule governing the change is a [Boolean] function of two arguments [such as “and”

“or”]) , we obtain (c) that the brain is comparable to a machine operating by deduc- tion (Varela et al. 1991) (Fig. 2.1).

The spirit is embodied in the mechanism. Starting from basic operational rules, a machine would be capable of ordering concrete experience, that is, it would be capable of “thinking.” In such a way, following the Kantian tradition inaugurated by Helmholtz, it would be possible to reconstruct the physiological foundation of a priori synthetic judgments by identifying it with a network of logically defined neurons embodied in the brain.³⁴ Unlike Helmholtz, who conceived experimentation as the reproduction of a chain of physical causes that could account for the phenomenon observed on the basis of the voluntary, intervening activity of the observer, McCulloch freed experiments from the concrete action of the researcher, so to speak. Like Maxwell in physics, McCulloch dematerialized neurophysiology by assigning a new role to mathematical modeling and ultimately mathematizing neural phenomena.³⁵ In the introduction to another famous paper on the perception of

34 Among the many interpreters of McCulloch’s work, only Arbib (2000) would appear to have acknowledged the important role which the Kantian perspective played in the development of his research.

35 From this perspective it is possible to understand McCulloch’s great interest in the work of Craik, who had been the first to develop a psychology in which mental models played a leading role.

“Craik thought of human memory as a model of the world with us in it, which we update every tenth of a second for position, every two tenths for velocity, and every three tenths for acceleration as long as we are awake” (McCulloch p. 10, 1974). McCulloch was also responsible for the post- humous publication of Craik’s works. This line of research spawned the psychology of mental models (Johnson-Laird 2005).

Massachusetts institute of Thechnology, by permission of the MIT Press

a b

1 1

0 0

b 0

a OR

if a+b>1

otherwise C =

2.7 The Cognitive Turn

auditory and visual forms, Pitts and McCulloch write: “To demonstrate existential consequences of known characters of neurons, any theoretically conceivable net embodying the possibility will serve. It is equally legitimate to have every net accompanied by anatomical directions as to where to record the action of its sup- posed components ... But it is wise to construct even these nets so that their principal function is little perturbed by small perturbations in excitation, threshold, or detail of connection within the same neighborhood” (1947, p. 46).

Axiomatization—understood as a fundamental framework and support for any theoretically conceivable net—thus opens up a new space that is intrinsically hybrid, since it enables the reconstruction of a pre-existing reality which it helps confirm while at the same time resting on those very elements (actual neurons) from which it cuts itself off (Dahan and Pestre 2004). Moreover, if the activity of any neuron may be represented as a proposition, the most significant result is that this logico- mathematical way of conceiving facts pertaining to the brain provides the fundamental criterion and framework for the quantitative understanding of mental state as well. The mind which emerges through the regularity of neural interactions is a measurable, well-localized object. Hence, to the question, “Why is the mind in the head?”, McCulloch can only answer: “Because there, and only there, are hosts of possible connections to be formed as time and circumstance demand” (p. 86, 1951).

So if a correspondence is drawn between the operations of human reason and those of binary-logic neurons, the mind that carries out the axiomatization and the one that is its object must represent two related poles, although the actual relationship between them remains problematic.

The different orientations that shape the cognitive sciences reflect different ways of envisaging this dialectic. When cognition is viewed from the perspective of a computer, which is to say, that of the modeling of thought—as has been the case with cognitivism (linguistics, AI, cognitive psychology) since the late 1950s—it is bound to be defined as a form of information processing focused on symbolic representations: as the (explicit or implicit) rule-based processing of more or less appropriate representations of the real world. Mental representations are taken to be occurrences of a formal system, and the mind’s activity is what gives these representations their attitudinal color—beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. We will see what influence this perspective was to exert on cognitive psychotherapy.

By contrast, if we view cognition once again in its mechanized version, as in the previous case, but attribute its organization to the cooperation between logical neurons whose rules of connection vary on the basis of experience, as opposed to a framework of explicitly designed logical circuits, cognition emerges as an overall property of the system. This trajectory is what led to the idea of a connectionist modeling framework and to self-organization theories.

Finally, a third position, which brings together the two poles, is to be found in the new course inaugurated by Lettvin and Maturana’s famous 1959 paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.” The authors showed not just that the visual process is mediated by a topographically organized activity parallel distributed over layers but, most significantly, that the retina processes features of the visual input in a way related to the frog’s ethology, instead of transmitting some more or less

accurate copy of the distribution of light. In other words, the frog they studied generated and specified its own relation to the environment on the basis of a mode of organization of its visual system, whereby it visually identified what had species- specific significance in the context (i.e., insects or worms, any object of the same size, or any possible enemies to avoid).Therefore, the different perceptual experi- ences which the frog had of its own world did not so much represent external reality as reflect the animal’s perceptual-motor structure. This is the starting point of second cybernetics, whose mantra is that reality is constructed rather than represented.

Hence the circularity predicted by Magnus—“those strange loops the cyberneti- cians were so crazy about” (Dupuy 2009)—which later enabled Maturana and Varela (1973) to grasp the mutual specification between a particular way of being and the appearance of the world, i.e., between the knowing subject and the objectiv- ity adopted, that was only intuited in the 1959 paper. Therefore, if every organism negotiates its own survival by reacting to significant environmental stimuli through the generation of perceptual-motor structures determined by its own biological organization, the physiological a priori cannot be localized in the head, but must concern the relationship which all living systems have with the environment which they inhabit and bring forth.

Fifty years after McCulloch posed his famous question, Varela was to state that the mind “is in this non-place of the co-determination of inner and outer” (Varela and Shear 1999a, b).

Bibliography

Abraham TH (2003) Integrating mind and brain: Warren S. McCulloch, cerebral localization, and experimental epistemology. Endeavour 27(1):32–36

Arbib MA (2000) Warren McCulloch’s search for the logic of the nervous system. Perspect Biol Med 43(2):193–216

Arciero G, Bondolfi G (2009) Selfhood, identity and personality styles. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester

Baur M (2003) Kant, Lonergan, and Fichte on the critique of immediacy and the epistemology of constraint in human knowing. Int Philos Q 43(1):91–112

Brain RM, Wise MN, Biagioli M (1999) The science studies reader. Psychology Press, Hove Brock C (2011) Toys are us: models and metaphors in brain research. In: Choudhury S, Slaby J

(eds) Critical neuroscience: a handbook of the social and cultural contexts of neuroscience.

Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, pp 113–134

Cahan D (ed) (1993) Hermann von Helmholtz and the foundations of nineteenth-century science.

In: University of California Press, Berkeley, CA

Cahan D (1995) Science and culture: popular and philosophical essays. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Courtine JF (1990) Suarez et le système de la métaphysique. Presses universitaires de France, Paris Dahan A, Pestre D (2004) Transferring Formal and mathematical Tools from war management

to Political, Technological, and social Intervention (1940-1960). In: Lucertini M, Gasca AM, Nicolo F (eds) Technological concepts and mathematical models in the evolution of modern engineering systems. Birkhäuser, Basel, pp 79–100

de Barenne JD (1934) The disturbances after laminar thermo-coagulation of the motor cerebral cortex. Brain 57(4):517–526

Bibliography

de Barenne JD, McCulloch WS (1938) The direct functional interrelation of sensory cortex and optic thalamus. J Neurophysiol 1:176–186

De Barenne JD, McCulloch WS (1939) Physiological delimitation of neurones in the central nervous system. Am J Physiol 127(4):620–628

De Kock L (2011) Some preliminary considerations on Helmholtz’s Fichte: towards a naturalized epistemology of constraint? Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte, 2 | 2011

Dupuy JP (1985) L’essor de la première cybernétique (1943-1953). Cahiers du CREA 7:7–140 Dupuy JP (2009) On the origins of cognitive science: the mechanization of the mind. MIT Press,

Cambridge, MA

Feist R, Sweet W (2003) Husserl and Stein. Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, Washington

Fichte JG, Breazeale D (1998) Foundations of transcendental philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1796/99). Cornell University Press, Ithaca

Gallagher S (2000) Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science.

Trends Cogn Sci 4:14–21

Gurevič AJ (1996) La nascita dell’individuo nell’Europa medievale. Laterza, Roma-Bari Hart JG (1995) Husserl and Fichte: with special regard to Husserl’s lectures on “Fichte’s ideal of

humanity”. Husserl Stud 12(2):135–163 Heidegger GA 28 1997

Heidelberger M (1993) Force, law, and experiment: the evolution of Helmholtz’s philosophy of science. In: Cahan D (ed) Hermann von Helmholtz and the foundations of nineteenth-century science. University of California Press, Berkeley

Hyppolite J (1959) L’idée fichtéenne de la doctrine de la science et le projet husserlien. Husserl et la Pensée Moderne–Husserl und das Denken der Neuzeit. Nijhoff, The Hague

Johnson-Laird PN (2005) Mental models and thought. In: Holyoak KJ, Morrison RG (eds) The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 185–208

Kant I (1972) Vorlesungen über Metaphysik und Rationaltheologie. (Metaphysik L1). Gerhard Lehmann

Kant E (1992) On the form and principles of the sensible and the intelligible world [Inaugural Dissertation]. In: Walford D, Meerbote R (eds) Theoretical philosophy, 1755–1770 (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Lenoir T (1988) Social interests and the organic physics of 1847. In: Science in reflection. Springer,

Netherlands, pp 169–191

Lenoir T (1994) Helmholtz and the materialities of communication. Osiris 9:184–207

Lopez-Dominguez V (2010) Political realism in idealism: Fichte versus Hegel and their different versions of the foundation of right. In: Breazeale D, Rockmore T (eds) Fichte, German idealism, and early romanticism, vol 24. Rodopi, Amsterdam

Magnus R (1906) Goethe als Naturforscher Vorlesungen. Barth, Leipzig

Magnus R (1925) Croonian lecture: animal posture. Proc R Soc Lond Ser B Biol Sci 98(690):339–353

Magnus R (1926) The physiology of posture: cameron lectures. Lancet 211:531–536

Martin WM (2003) Nothing more or less than logic: general logic, transcendental philosophy, and Kant’s repudiation of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. Topoi 22(1):29–39

Maturana H, Varela F (1973) De Máquinas y Seres Vivos: una caracterización de la organización biológica. Editorial Universitaria, Santiago

McCulloch WS (1951) Why the mind is in die head. In: Jeffress LA (ed) Cerebral mechanisms in behavior. The Hixon symposium. John Wiley and Sons, New York, pp 42–111

McCulloch WS (1974) Recollections of the many sources of cybernetics. ASC Forum 6(2):5–16 Morris C (1972) The discovery of the individual, 1050-1200, vol 5. University of Toronto Press,

Toronto

Nelson B, Parnas J, Sass LA (2014) Disturbance of minimal self (ipseity) in schizophrenia: clari- fication and current status. Schizophr Bull 40(3):479–482

Nuzzo A (2006) The role of the human body in Fichte’s Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796–97).

In: Breazeale D, Rockmore T (eds) Rights, bodies and recognition: new essays on Fichte’s Foundations of natural right. Ashgate Publishing, Farnham

Nuzzo A (2010) Phenomenologies of intersubjectivity: Fichte between Hegel and Husserl. In:

Waibel VL, Breazeale D, Rockmore T (eds) Fichte and the phenomenological tradition. De Gruyter, New York

Otis L (2007) Mullers Lab. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Patočka J (1996) Heretical essays in the philosophy of history. Open Court, Chicago

Pihlström S (2009) Pragmatism and naturalized transcendental subjectivity. Contemporary Pragmatism 6(1):1–13

Pitts W, McCulloch WS (1947) How we know universals the perception of auditory and visual forms. Bull Math Biophys 9(3):127–147

Sheets-Johnstone M (2011) The primacy of movement, vol 82. John Benjamins Publishing Smalheiser NR (2000) Walter Pitts. Perspect Biol Med 43(2):217–226

Turner RS (1977) The Ohm-Seebeck dispute, Hermann von Helmholtz, and the origins of physiological acoustics. Br J Hist Sci 10(01):1–24

Uexkull JV (1903) Der biologische Bauplan des Sipunculus. Zeitschr f Biol 44:269–344

Varela F, Shear J (1999a) (eds) The view from within: first-person methodologies in the study of consciousness (Special Issue). J Consc Stud 6 (2–3)

Varela FJ, Shear J (1999b) First-person methodologies: what, why, how. J Consc Stud 6(2-3):1–14 Varela FJ, Thompson E, Rosch E (1991) The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experi-

ence. MIT press, Cambridge Bibliography

3

Dalam dokumen The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy (Halaman 63-70)