#HvFoerster on the origins of #computational_neuroscience
For reasons that still baffle me, it was the pragmatic American engineers and scientists, not the romantic Europeans, who began to toss anthropomorphic sand into the gear box of evolving notions and ideas. To name two such cases, the computer people began to talk about a machine’s storage system as if it were a computer’s #memory, and the communication engineers began to talk about signals as if they were #information.
Perhaps these were the precursors for the second derailment which, ironically, was the inverse of the first. lt worked as follows. The first phase was #anthropomorphization: mental functions projected into machines. However, we knew how these machines worked because we built them and wrote the programs. Consequently, an appropriate “#mechanomorphization,” the concepts dealing with computer hard- and software were projected back into the workings of the brain and, presto!, we knew how the #mind worked.
Heinz Von Foerster
*To know and to let know - an applied theory of knowledge
Canadian Library Journal, Vol. 39, No. 5, October l982.*
idem …
The concept of #language was modeled more and more after those emerging from interactions with computers, the “computer languages.” It is clear that the syntax of these languages must be obeyed meticulously, otherwise ‘‘garbage in - garbage out.”
Unfortunately, under the leadership of one of the foremost linguists in America, Noam Chomsky, the logico-mathematical principle of fulfilling rigorous #syntactic requirements in so-called “well-formed formulae” was transplanted into the domain of natural languages and became a criterion for “linguistic competence.” This aspect of language ignores the essential role as a means of #communication and perceives language as an end in itself. It is in this castrated form that one believes language is “linear,” that questions have unique answers, that the linguistic problem is to generate “well-formed sentences,” and other misconceptions that have their roots in perceiving language as a monologue.
Unfortunately, it is not me. 😀
It is all Heinz from back in 1982. I just happen to agree with what he is saying.
Thanks for the tip. Language is not my primary area of interest but I’ll check it out. Sounds interesting.
@Kihbernetics I’m not sure I entirely follow you and yet I agree that language as primarily information transmission protocol is not only inhuman but also inaccurate. I am in the midst of rereading ‘How we talk’ by N.J. Enfield which describes modern research on how we actually talk. Strongly suggest https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_We_Talk/-I2YDgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gl=US