- Email: [email protected]
Closing comment
379
CLOSING
COMMENT
Elimination of imagery inherited from previous generations of philosophers has always meant progress in science. The idea of a unidirectional flow of events from sensation through perception to motor planning and final execution may have been a stroke of genius in the mind of the philosopher who first thought of it as an ordering principle in psychology, but its (nearly) universal acceptance did not do much for our understanding of the brain. The recent emphasis on the cognitive level as a filter interposed between the sensory inflow and the motor output only stresses the point, and can hardly hide the embarrassment which springs from the confrontation of our simplistic schemes with the psychological reality. However, over the years, there had always been some who did not succumb to the temptation of unidirectional causal analysis in the style of traditional physics, and instead proposed such ideas as circular causation, feedback, sensory-motor integration, or brains as models of reality. Within the orthodox community, these writers were easily put aside as extravagant, if amusing mavericks, and most of the groundwork in physiology, being limited to restricted segments of the global picture, could well do without their contributions. Some philosophers of the constructivist school saw the point and scolded the neurophysiologists (and computer engineers) for their narrow-mindedness, but they did not speak the language of the laboratory and therefore had little resonance in scientific circles. As the Italian saying goes, every snarl eventually gets to the comb (tutti i nodi vengono al pettine). The intriguing phenomena of attention, unilateral neglect, stability of the perception of space, constancy of object size, form and colour, could no longer be relegated to the realm of psychic oddities when very similar problems were seen to lurk in robotics and artificial intelligence. As it had happened before, for instance with the acceptance of Shannonian information as a conceptual tool in brain theory, or with the idea of neuronal "computation", again it was the synthetic approach of engineering which was instrumental in opening up new vistas in brain science. And suddenly, the ones who had been the mavericks of brain science before, appear to have been the pioneers of a new era which promises to come much closer to the solutions that truly interest us.
V. Braitenberg Tiibingen, February 1996
CLOSING
COMMENT
Elimination of imagery inherited from previous generations of philosophers has always meant progress in science. The idea of a unidirectional flow of events from sensation through perception to motor planning and final execution may have been a stroke of genius in the mind of the philosopher who first thought of it as an ordering principle in psychology, but its (nearly) universal acceptance did not do much for our understanding of the brain. The recent emphasis on the cognitive level as a filter interposed between the sensory inflow and the motor output only stresses the point, and can hardly hide the embarrassment which springs from the confrontation of our simplistic schemes with the psychological reality. However, over the years, there had always been some who did not succumb to the temptation of unidirectional causal analysis in the style of traditional physics, and instead proposed such ideas as circular causation, feedback, sensory-motor integration, or brains as models of reality. Within the orthodox community, these writers were easily put aside as extravagant, if amusing mavericks, and most of the groundwork in physiology, being limited to restricted segments of the global picture, could well do without their contributions. Some philosophers of the constructivist school saw the point and scolded the neurophysiologists (and computer engineers) for their narrow-mindedness, but they did not speak the language of the laboratory and therefore had little resonance in scientific circles. As the Italian saying goes, every snarl eventually gets to the comb (tutti i nodi vengono al pettine). The intriguing phenomena of attention, unilateral neglect, stability of the perception of space, constancy of object size, form and colour, could no longer be relegated to the realm of psychic oddities when very similar problems were seen to lurk in robotics and artificial intelligence. As it had happened before, for instance with the acceptance of Shannonian information as a conceptual tool in brain theory, or with the idea of neuronal "computation", again it was the synthetic approach of engineering which was instrumental in opening up new vistas in brain science. And suddenly, the ones who had been the mavericks of brain science before, appear to have been the pioneers of a new era which promises to come much closer to the solutions that truly interest us.
V. Braitenberg Tiibingen, February 1996