Embodiments of Mind

About this book

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 McCullochs 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 psychology: "There is one answer only one toward which Ive 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 Frogs Eye Tells the Frogs 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 McCullochs poems and sonnets.