#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.*