Abstract
Recently, metric psychology and its parent, neutral monism, have begun to encourage “functionalist” approaches to the mind. These liken the mental processes of living, sentient organisms to the workings of a machine.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The mechanistic view of life has found a plentitude of support over the centuries. During the Italian Renaissance, Giovanni Borelli gave a mechanistic spin to selected features of muscle action. The seventeenth-century physiologist William Harvey explained the circulation of blood in the body in terms of hydraulic and anatomical mechanisms. In the eighteenth century, Le Mettrie asserted that the entire human body operates on mechanical principles. Jacques Loeb’s mechanistic biology, put forward in his book The Mechanistic Conception of Life, encouraged the idea of behavior as a “tropism”, which “forces” movements of organisms through the agency of environmental imperatives. During the early twentieth century, the theory that life functions on a mechanical basis found an advocate in Joseph Needham (Capra, pp. 105–108, 115, 167, 172).
Flanagan, pp. 180, 220.
Fodor, p. 119.
Jeremy Bernstein, The Analytical Engine (New York: William Morrow, 1981), p. 71.
John Von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 74.
J. Bernstein, p. 112.
Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (New York: Ace, 1966), pp. 7–302.
Flanagan, pp. 180, 220.
Fodor, p. 119.
Scott Ladd, The Computer and the Brain (New York: Bantam, 1986), pp. 46–47.
Robert Hooke first coined the term cell in the seventeenth century in response to observations made through the microscope, which had just been invented. Later, the concept of cells as the basic building blocks of life became commonplace among mechanistic biologists. The cell itself was seen to function like a miniature factory (Capra, 109).
Digital concepts of mind began with David Hume, who visualized the association of elementary perceptions as a progressive attraction of ideas, an analogy to Newton’s force of gravity. Such ideas later became the basis of his so-called “elementist” school of psychology, which in the 1870s asserted that “atomic” perceptual elements and their associations form the basis of mind (Capra, pp. 168–169, 172).
Ladd, p. 47.
Capra, pp. 168, 169, 173–174.
Hearnshaw, pp. 116–119.
“Golgi, Camillo” (no author given), in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, p. 296.
David Hubel, “The Brain,” in Gerard Piel et al., eds., The Brain, p. 5.
“Ramon y Cajal, Santiago” (no author given), in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, p. 671.
Hearnshaw, pp. 116–119.
Georges Thines, “Sherrington, Sir Charles Scott,” in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, pp. 709–713.
Changeux, p. 52.
Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid., pp. 116–118.
Ibid.
Mary Brazier, Electrical Activity of the Nervous System (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1977), p. 175.
Changeux, pp. 32, 68.
Berger was born in 1873. He earned his doctorate in Jena and became a member of the psychiatric staff there. After doing research on spinal cord and brain regulation of blood flow and temperature, Berger entered the army for service during the First World War. He returned to become a professor in Jena and in 1924 began his major investigation, recording the first human electroencephalogram. His findings at the outset found little acceptance, but in 1934, Adrian and Matthews confirmed them in their own studies. Berger went on to try linking brain electricity with mental activity. This work led to his discovery of the so-called “alpha” wave associated with quiescence in the waking state. Berger retired in 1938 but became depressed and committed suicide in 1941.
W. Cheyne McCallum, “Berger, Hans,” in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, p. 81.
Adrian was born in 1889 in London. He attended Westminster School and Cambridge, where he earned his degree in medicine and became a professor. He did his postgraduate medical training at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, in London. He served as a physician in the military during World War I and then again took up research that he had started previously at the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory. There he succeeded in proving the “all-or-nothing” nature of the nerve action potential. Adrian became a world leader in electrophysiological research on nervous tissue, making original discoveries, employing new technologies, and confirming the findings of others like Berger. He wrote a classic monograph entitled The Basis of Sensation. He earned the Nobel Prize in 1932 jointly with Sherrington. Lord Adrian became a Baron in 1955 and Chancellor of Cambridge in 1967. He died in 1977.
O. L. Zangwill and Y. Zotterman, “Adrian, Edgar Douglas,” in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, pp. 7–8.
Brazier, p. 14.
Ladd, 45, 57.
Hearnshaw, pp. 116–119, 252–253.
Hubel, p. 6
Gerard Piel et al., eds., p. 141.
Hubel, p. 10.
Michael D. Devous, “Imaging Brain Function by Single-Photon Emission Computer Tomography,” in Andreasen, ed., Brain Imaging, pp. 184–185.
Hubel, p. 6.
F. H. C. Crick, “Thinking About the Brain,” in Gerard Piel et al., eds., The Brain, p. 133.
Ibid., p. 137.
Andreasen, The Broken Brain, p. 90.
Ibid., p. 219.
Frattaroli, p. 76.
Andreasen, The Broken Brain, p. 219.
Ibid., p. 221.
The idea of digital genes, both in their early abstract form and later as concrete biochemical entities embodied in the molecules of DNA, changed conceptions of the basic units of life. These units were thought to be cells in the nineteenth century but genes in the twentieth. Thus, Gregor Mendel’s initial discovery that genes and observable traits exhibit a one-to-one correspondence led to the ultimate notion of genes as computable “bits” of heredity (Capra, pp. 113–114, 116).
Flanagan, p. 269, 292–293, 300.
Hearnshaw, p. 258.
Johnson-Laird, p. 50.
Koestler, pp. 115, 159–160.
The pioneering ethological field studies of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen showed that many innate behaviors in animals are inherited and exhibit features associated with constitutionally fixed mechanisms. Further support for the ethological viewpoint came from some human behaviors that appear not to vary in different cultural contexts. Ethology thus acquired the authority to inspire Bowlby’s psychiatric work on the origin of human mental illness in maternal deprivation during innately determined critical periods of infant development (Hearnshaw, pp. 142, 258–262).
Calvin Hall introduced quantitative elements into the discipline of psychogenetics. In 1951, he advocated controlled animal breeding experiments to tease out behavioral differences among genetic strains. Fuller and Thompson expanded this idea in 1960 to include statistical analysis of inherited behavioral patterns in human populations as well. Spinoff projects evolved, including Freeman’s comparisons of behaviors in separated twins and foster children. Such data prompted psychiatrists to conclude that “studies of twins ... reared apart ... demonstrate a major genetic influence on personality development. ...” Burt’s multifactorial analysis applied to inheritance of intellect and chromosome studies of anomalies in intelligence also appeared in the research literature. Other researchers studied the genetic shaping of aggressive behavior through animal breeding experiments as well as human family behavior patterns (Eichelman, p. 489; Hearnshaw, pp. 256–257; Siever and Davis, p. 1648).
Hearnshaw, pp. 19, 141, 143.
D. R. D., “Morgan, Conwy Lloyd,” in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, p. 496.
Hearnshaw, pp. 141, 143.
O. L. Zangwill, “Jackson, John Hughlings,” in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, p. 395.
Flanagan, p. 325.
Koestler, pp. 98, 275, 286–287, 289.
Charles Hampden-Turner, Maps of the Mind (New York: Collier Books, 1982), p. 80.
Freedman, p. 865.
Hampden-Turner, pp. 80–83.
Hearnshaw, p. 119.
Francois Jacob, The Possible and the Actual (New York: Pantheon, 1982), pp. 36–37.
Koestler, pp. 273, 281–284, 299, 319–322, 332.
Thorne, ed., p. 122.
Hearnshaw, p. 118.
“Cannon, Walter Bradford” (no author given), in Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion, p. 125.
Hearnshaw, p. 250
Andreasen, The Broken Brain, pp. 121–122.
Hearnshaw, pp. 248, 253, 255.
Koestler, p. 98.
Winson, pp. 42–43.
Crick, pp. 134, 136.
Flanagan, pp. 226, 231.
Crick, p. 134.
Ibid.
Changeux, p. 19.
Ladd, pp. 44–45.
Following the lead of rabies researchers, physiologists tried to firm up links between violent behavior and abnormal electrical activity in limbic brain structures as well as neighboring areas like the hypothalamus and mesial temporal lobe. It became known that experimental damage to septal nuclei in the rat’s limbic system increases defensive behavior, that injury to a related part of the hypothalamus augments offensive activity, and that other maneuvers affect predatory aggression.
Eichelman, pp. 488, 494.
Restak, “See No Evil,” p. 18.
Winson, p. 242.
Andreasen, The Broken Brain, pp. 108–109.
Gerard Piel et al., eds., p. 142.
Sandra Witelson, “Cognitive Neuroanatomy,” Neurology 42 (April 1992), p. 709.
Hearnshaw, p. 255.
Witelson, pp. 709, 711.
Justin Weiss and Larry Seidman, “The Clinical Use of Tests,” in Nicholi, ed., The New Harvard Guide, p. 47.
Sandra Weintraub and M. Marsel Mesulam, “Mental State Assessment of Young and Elderly Adults in Behavioral Neurology,” in Principles of Behavioral Neurology, ed. M. Marsel Mesulam (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1985), p. 76–123.
Andreasen, The Broken Brain, pp. 108, 172–173.
Mender, CT, MRI, PET scanning lecture notes.
Crick, p. 132–133.
Changeux, pp. 16, 17, 21.
Freedman, pp. 863–864.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Donald Mender
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mender, D. (1994). Computers and the Mind. In: The Myth of Neuropsychiatry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6010-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6010-8_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-306-44652-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-6010-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive