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“The Action of the Brain”

Machine Models and Adaptive Functions in Turing and Ashby

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Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence 2017 (PT-AI 2017)

Part of the book series: Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics ((SAPERE,volume 44))

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Abstract

Given the personal acquaintance between Alan M. Turing and W. Ross Ashby and the partial proximity of their research fields, a comparative view of Turing’s and Ashby’s works on modelling “the action of the brain” (in a 1946 letter from Turing to Ashby) will help to shed light on the seemingly strict symbolic/embodied dichotomy: while it is a straightforward matter to demonstrate Turing’s and Ashby’s respective commitments to formal, computational and material, analogue methods of modelling, there is no unambiguous mapping of these approaches onto symbol-based AI and embodiment-centered views respectively. Instead, it will be argued that both approaches, starting from a formal core, were at least partly concerned with biological and embodied phenomena, albeit in revealingly distinct ways.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The best historical accounts of the Ratio Club and Turing’s and Ashby’s roles therein are Husbands and Holland (2008), Holland and Husbands (2011).

  2. 2.

    In the introduction to a posthumous collection of Turing’s writings on morphogenesis, Peter T. Saunders claims that Turing (1952) “is still very frequently cited (more than the rest of Turing’s works taken together [...])” (Saunders 1992, p. xvi). If Google Scholar and citation counts are resources to go by, the parenthetical part of this statement is an exaggeration, but Turing (1952) still ranks approximately 10 and 20% higher in number of citations respectively than the other two of his most-referenced works, Turing (1950) and (1936): https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=VWCHlwkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao (accessed March 28th, 2018). The Thomson Reuters and Scopus databases have an incomplete record of the original editions, hence cannot be used for comparison.

  3. 3.

    For anti-individualistic views of Turing’s approach, see the reading of Turing (1948) proposed by Herold (2003) and the claim that Turing machines are situated systems by virtue of their tapes being part of their local environments (Fabry 2018).

  4. 4.

    For Ashby’s discussion of “Darwinian Machinery”, see also Asaro (2008, pp. 166–168).

  5. 5.

    A lucid secondary source on the modern synthesis is Depew and Weber (1995, Pt. II).

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Acknowledgements

This paper has been developed from a research proposal currently under review with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project ref. P31136. Particular thanks go out to the reviewers of this paper, Aaron Sloman and Torben Swoboda.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Hajo Greif

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Hajo Greif

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  1. Hajo Greif
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  1. Interdisciplinary Ethics Applied (IDEA) Centre, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

    Vincent C. Müller

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Greif, H. (2018). “The Action of the Brain”. In: Müller, V. (eds) Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence 2017. PT-AI 2017. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96448-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96448-5_3

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