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81 Computers
The brain has been compared to a digital computer because the neuron, like a switch or valve, either does or does not complete a circuit. But at that point the similarity ends. The switch in the digital computer is constant in its effect, and its effect is large in proportion to the total output of the machine. The effect produced by the neuron varies with its recovery from [the] refractory phase and with its metabolic state. The number of neurons involved in any action runs into millions so that the influence of any one is negligible.... Any cell in the system can be dispensed with.... The brain is an analogical machine, not digital. Analysis of the integrative activities will probably have to be in statistical terms. (Lashley, quoted in Beach, Hebb, Morgan & Nissen, 1960, p. 539)It is essential to realize that a computer is not a mere "number cruncher," or supercalculating arithmetic machine, although this is how computers are commonly regarded by people having no familiarity with artificial intelligence. Computers do not crunch numbers; they manipulate symbols.... Digital computers originally developed with mathematical problems in mind, are in fact general purpose symbol manipulating machines....The terms "computer" and "computation" are themselves unfortunate, in view of their misleading arithmetical connotations. The definition of artificial intelligence previously cited-"the study of intelligence as computation"-does not imply that intelligence is really counting. Intelligence may be defined as the ability creatively to manipulate symbols, or process information, given the requirements of the task in hand. (Boden, 1981, pp. 15, 16-17)The task is to get computers to explain things to themselves, to ask questions about their experiences so as to cause those explanations to be forthcoming, and to be creative in coming up with explanations that have not been previously available. (Schank, 1986, p. 19)In What Computers Can't Do, written in 1969 (2nd edition, 1972), the main objection to AI was the impossibility of using rules to select only those facts about the real world that were relevant in a given situation. The "Introduction" to the paperback edition of the book, published by Harper & Row in 1979, pointed out further that no one had the slightest idea how to represent the common sense understanding possessed even by a four-year-old. (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, p. 102)A popular myth says that the invention of the computer diminishes our sense of ourselves, because it shows that rational thought is not special to human beings, but can be carried on by a mere machine. It is a short stop from there to the conclusion that intelligence is mechanical, which many people find to be an affront to all that is most precious and singular about their humanness.In fact, the computer, early in its career, was not an instrument of the philistines, but a humanizing influence. It helped to revive an idea that had fallen into disrepute: the idea that the mind is real, that it has an inner structure and a complex organization, and can be understood in scientific terms. For some three decades, until the 1940s, American psychology had lain in the grip of the ice age of behaviorism, which was antimental through and through. During these years, extreme behaviorists banished the study of thought from their agenda. Mind and consciousness, thinking, imagining, planning, solving problems, were dismissed as worthless for anything except speculation. Only the external aspects of behavior, the surface manifestations, were grist for the scientist's mill, because only they could be observed and measured....It is one of the surprising gifts of the computer in the history of ideas that it played a part in giving back to psychology what it had lost, which was nothing less than the mind itself. In particular, there was a revival of interest in how the mind represents the world internally to itself, by means of knowledge structures such as ideas, symbols, images, and inner narratives, all of which had been consigned to the realm of mysticism. (Campbell, 1989, p. 10)[Our artifacts] only have meaning because we give it to them; their intentionality, like that of smoke signals and writing, is essentially borrowed, hence derivative. To put it bluntly: computers themselves don't mean anything by their tokens (any more than books do)-they only mean what we say they do. Genuine understanding, on the other hand, is intentional "in its own right" and not derivatively from something else. (Haugeland, 1981a, pp. 32-33)he debate over the possibility of computer thought will never be won or lost; it will simply cease to be of interest, like the previous debate over man as a clockwork mechanism. (Bolter, 1984, p. 190)t takes us a long time to emotionally digest a new idea. The computer is too big a step, and too recently made, for us to quickly recover our balance and gauge its potential. It's an enormous accelerator, perhaps the greatest one since the plow, twelve thousand years ago. As an intelligence amplifier, it speeds up everything-including itself-and it continually improves because its heart is information or, more plainly, ideas. We can no more calculate its consequences than Babbage could have foreseen antibiotics, the Pill, or space stations.Further, the effects of those ideas are rapidly compounding, because a computer design is itself just a set of ideas. As we get better at manipulating ideas by building ever better computers, we get better at building even better computers-it's an ever-escalating upward spiral. The early nineteenth century, when the computer's story began, is already so far back that it may as well be the Stone Age. (Rawlins, 1997, p. 19)According to weak AI, the principle value of the computer in the study of the mind is that it gives us a very powerful tool. For example, it enables us to formulate and test hypotheses in a more rigorous and precise fashion than before. But according to strong AI the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states. And according to strong AI, because the programmed computer has cognitive states, the programs are not mere tools that enable us to test psychological explanations; rather, the programs are themselves the explanations. (Searle, 1981b, p. 353)What makes people smarter than machines? They certainly are not quicker or more precise. Yet people are far better at perceiving objects in natural scenes and noting their relations, at understanding language and retrieving contextually appropriate information from memory, at making plans and carrying out contextually appropriate actions, and at a wide range of other natural cognitive tasks. People are also far better at learning to do these things more accurately and fluently through processing experience.What is the basis for these differences? One answer, perhaps the classic one we might expect from artificial intelligence, is "software." If we only had the right computer program, the argument goes, we might be able to capture the fluidity and adaptability of human information processing. Certainly this answer is partially correct. There have been great breakthroughs in our understanding of cognition as a result of the development of expressive high-level computer languages and powerful algorithms. However, we do not think that software is the whole story.In our view, people are smarter than today's computers because the brain employs a basic computational architecture that is more suited to deal with a central aspect of the natural information processing tasks that people are so good at.... hese tasks generally require the simultaneous consideration of many pieces of information or constraints. Each constraint may be imperfectly specified and ambiguous, yet each can play a potentially decisive role in determining the outcome of processing. (McClelland, Rumelhart & Hinton, 1986, pp. 3-4)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Computers
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82 Introspection
1) Experimental Introspection Is the One Reliable Method of Knowing OurselvesWhen we are trying to understand the mental processes of a child or a dog or an insect as shown by conduct and action, the outward signs of mental processes,... we must always fall back upon experimental introspection... [;] we cannot imagine processes in another mind that we do not find in our own. Experimental introspection is thus our one reliable method of knowing ourselves; it is the sole gateway to psychology. (Titchener, 1914, p. 32)There is a somewhat misleading point of view that one's own experience provides a sufficient understanding of mental life for scientific purposes. Indeed, early in the history of experimental psychology, the main method for studying cognition was introspection. By observing one's own mind, the argument went, one could say how one carried out cognitive activities....Yet introspection failed to be a good technique for the elucidation of mental processes in general. There are two simple reasons for this. First, so many things which we can do seem to be quite unrelated to conscious experience. Someone asks you your name. You do not know how you retrieve it, yet obviously there is some process by which the retrieval occurs. In the same way, when someone speaks to you, you understand what they say, but you do not know how you came to understand. Yet somehow processes take place in which words are picked out from the jumble of sound waves which reach your ears, in-built knowledge of syntax and semantics gives it meaning, and the significance of the message comes to be appreciated. Clearly, introspection is not of much use here, but it is undeniable that understanding language is as much a part of mental life as is thinking.As if these arguments were not enough, it is also the case that introspective data are notoriously difficult to evaluate. Because it is private to the experiencer, and experience may be difficult to convey in words to somebody else. Many early introspective protocols were very confusing to read and, even worse, the kinds of introspection reported tended to conform to the theoretical categories used in different laboratories. Clearly, what was needed was both a change in experimental method and a different (non-subjective) theoretical framework to describe mental life. (Sanford, 1987, pp. 2-3)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Introspection
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83 Mind
It becomes, therefore, no inconsiderable part of science... to know the different operations of the mind, to separate them from each other, to class them under their proper heads, and to correct all that seeming disorder in which they lie involved when made the object of reflection and inquiry.... It cannot be doubted that the mind is endowed with several powers and faculties, that these powers are distinct from one another, and that what is really distinct to the immediate perception may be distinguished by reflection and, consequently, that there is a truth and falsehood which lie not beyond the compass of human understanding. (Hume, 1955, p. 22)Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas: How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from Experience. (Locke, quoted in Herrnstein & Boring, 1965, p. 584)The kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and... the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of things to which it is applied.... Man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man's mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and unchanging powers. (Leґvi-Strauss, 1963, p. 230)MIND. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with. (Bierce, quoted in Minsky, 1986, p. 55)[Philosophy] understands the foundations of knowledge and it finds these foundations in a study of man-as-knower, of the "mental processes" or the "activity of representation" which make knowledge possible. To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind, so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representation.... We owe the notion of a "theory of knowledge" based on an understanding of "mental processes" to the seventeenth century, and especially to Locke. We owe the notion of "the mind" as a separate entity in which "processes" occur to the same period, and especially to Descartes. We owe the notion of philosophy as a tribunal of pure reason, upholding or denying the claims of the rest of culture, to the eighteenth century and especially to Kant, but this Kantian notion presupposed general assent to Lockean notions of mental processes and Cartesian notions of mental substance. (Rorty, 1979, pp. 3-4)Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to Victorians-threat, obsession, taboo, and fascination. (Turkle, 1984, p. 313)7) Understanding the Mind Remains as Resistant to Neurological as to Cognitive AnalysesRecent years have been exciting for researchers in the brain and cognitive sciences. Both fields have flourished, each spurred on by methodological and conceptual developments, and although understanding the mechanisms of mind is an objective shared by many workers in these areas, their theories and approaches to the problem are vastly different....Early experimental psychologists, such as Wundt and James, were as interested in and knowledgeable about the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system as about the young science of the mind. However, the experimental study of mental processes was short-lived, being eclipsed by the rise of behaviorism early in this century. It was not until the late 1950s that the signs of a new mentalism first appeared in scattered writings of linguists, philosophers, computer enthusiasts, and psychologists.In this new incarnation, the science of mind had a specific mission: to challenge and replace behaviorism. In the meantime, brain science had in many ways become allied with a behaviorist approach.... While behaviorism sought to reduce the mind to statements about bodily action, brain science seeks to explain the mind in terms of physiochemical events occurring in the nervous system. These approaches contrast with contemporary cognitive science, which tries to understand the mind as it is, without any reduction, a view sometimes described as functionalism.The cognitive revolution is now in place. Cognition is the subject of contemporary psychology. This was achieved with little or no talk of neurons, action potentials, and neurotransmitters. Similarly, neuroscience has risen to an esteemed position among the biological sciences without much talk of cognitive processes. Do the fields need each other?... [Y]es because the problem of understanding the mind, unlike the wouldbe problem solvers, respects no disciplinary boundaries. It remains as resistant to neurological as to cognitive analyses. (LeDoux & Hirst, 1986, pp. 1-2)Since the Second World War scientists from different disciplines have turned to the study of the human mind. Computer scientists have tried to emulate its capacity for visual perception. Linguists have struggled with the puzzle of how children acquire language. Ethologists have sought the innate roots of social behaviour. Neurophysiologists have begun to relate the function of nerve cells to complex perceptual and motor processes. Neurologists and neuropsychologists have used the pattern of competence and incompetence of their brain-damaged patients to elucidate the normal workings of the brain. Anthropologists have examined the conceptual structure of cultural practices to advance hypotheses about the basic principles of the mind. These days one meets engineers who work on speech perception, biologists who investigate the mental representation of spatial relations, and physicists who want to understand consciousness. And, of course, psychologists continue to study perception, memory, thought and action.... [W]orkers in many disciplines have converged on a number of central problems and explanatory ideas. They have realized that no single approach is likely to unravel the workings of the mind: it will not give up its secrets to psychology alone; nor is any other isolated discipline-artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology, neurophysiology, philosophy-going to have any greater success. (Johnson-Laird, 1988, p. 7)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Mind
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84 Writing
Very gradually I have discovered ways of writing with a minimum of worry and anxiety. When I was young each fresh piece of serious work used to seem to me for a time-perhaps a long time-to be beyond my powers. I would fret myself into a nervous state from fear that it was never going to come right. I would make one unsatisfying attempt after another, and in the end have to discard them all. At last I found that such fumbling attempts were a waste of time. It appeared that after first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking. Sometimes I would find, after a time, that I had made a mistake, and that I could not write the book I had had in mind. But often I was more fortunate. Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconsciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation. (Russell, 1965, p. 195)Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thought in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness. (Ong, 1982, p. 78)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Writing
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