Embodiments of Mind

by Warren S. McCulloch, Seymour A. Papert (Contributor)

Embodiments of Mind, first published more than two decades ago, teems with intriguing concepts about the mind/brain that are highly relevant to current developments in neuroscience and neural networks. Preface by Jerome Y. Lettvin. Warren S. McCulloch was an original thinker, in many respects far ahead of his time. "Of all our contemporaries in brain research McCulloch is the most personal, idiosyncratic... he is at the center, the pivot of a whirligig of explosive thinking," wrote a colleague in 1966. Embodiments of Mind , first published more than two decades ago, teems with intriguing concepts about the mind/brain that are highly relevant to current developments in neuroscience and neural networks. In his preface to this timely reissue of McCulloch's work, Jerome Lettvin notes in particular that among the papers are two classics coauthored with Walter Pitts. One applies Boolean algebra to neurons considered as gates; another shows the kind of nervous circuitry that could be used in perceiving universals. These first models are part of the basis of artificial intelligence. McCulloch, who was a doctor, a philosopher, a teacher, a mathematician and a poet, terms his work "experimental epistemology." In this collection of 21 essays and lectures he pursues a physiological theory of knowledge that touches on philosophy, neurology, and "There is one answer, only one, toward which I've groped for thirty years; to find out how brains work..."Chapters range from "What is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number," and "Why the Mind is in the Head," to "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (with Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, and Walter Pitts), "Machines that Think and Want," and "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity (with Walter Pitts). Embodiments of Mind concludes with a selection of McCulloch's poems and sonnets.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction

402 pages, Paperback

First published September 19, 2000

Reviews

[Blaine Snow]

Here is embodied mind cognitive science in its earliest form, essays from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s by MIT scholar Warren McCulloch on mind, nature, the brain, and body. These were the early days of general system theory and cybernetics, when feedback mechanisms were first being understood in the "control and communication" of living organisms. McCulloch was among the pioneers of early embodiment of mind studies along with the many systems theorists and cyberneticists Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, Heinz Von Foerster, Stafford Beer, John Von Neumann, Humberto Maturana, Herbert Simon, Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, Ervin Laszlo, Erich Jantsch, many many others, and of course, Gregory Bateson and James Gibson - two important pioneers of the early embodied mind paradigm.

This is a book of essays by McCulloch and many also by his close colleague Walter Pitts on issues dealing with brain, mind, body, and environment. These essays are mostly of historical interest since so much has changed since they were written. Nonetheless, they're worthy of seeing where scientific approaches to mind/nature studies were in the early post-war period.

Here is a list of other books exploring the history of and early approaches to embodied cognition and complex systems:

1. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
2. Mind and Nature
3. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
4. General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications
5. Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
6. An Introduction to Cybernetics
7. The Sciences of the Artificial
8. Heinz Von Foerster 1911-2002 (Cybernetics & Human Knowing)
9. The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time
10. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications
11. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living
12. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature
13. Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order Through Fluctuations
14. Synergetics: Introduction and Advanced Topics
15. An Approach to General Systems Theory
16. The Mind's New Science: A History Of The Cognitive Revolution

[Fadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare interview with the author...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe87_...

[Shourov Hasonov Pre · Rating 4 out of 5]

🧠🔀⚙️📚