Leonardo

268 Books contemporary scientists, a group to which Rosenbluethcertainlybelongs . Theseconcernsincreasingly involve them in speculationson Zen philosophy, chance and the viability of volitional self-maintenance of organized anti-entropic systems. Readers will be reminded of W. Heisenberg’sclassic,Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1962). Rosenblueth’s book is almost a neurophysiological parallel to Heisenberg’s book. Rosenblueth is well known as aneurophysiologistandasorganizerofthe seminar on a general scientificmethod in the 1930’s that received considerableinput from N.Wiener. Rosenblueth‘s concern is with the causal chain that begins with material events and ends with conscious sensations. He asserts that they are in direct relation to one another but that they do not interact. He proposes adopting a kind of mindbrain dualism in which structural isomorphism is maintained between mental and neurological events as it is between material events and coded afferent neural messages. This isomorphic mapping, however , does not allow us to make inferences on the ‘nature’ of the universe or the ‘nature’ of mental events from analysis of central neural transformations . Themappingonlyprovidesuswitha structural equivalency. Indeed then, sensations, such as color and pitch, are mental inferences and not material characteristics. Rosenblueth seems to adopt a structuralist interpretation of sensationand thelimitsimposedon our knowledgeby the structure of our sensory systems and states further, ‘the purpose of scienceis to constructa materialuniverse with a structure compatible with our conscious decodings’. I consider many of his views somewhat unsatisfactory , even though they are a beautiful working out of epistemological constructs, are backed by interpretations of solid evidence and are systematicallypresented . The one exception is the chapter in which he equates unconscious processes with ‘spuriousghosts or demons’ and angrily denounces attribution to them of creative capacities as nonsensical . Many of the conclusions tend to lead to inconsistencies. For example, Rosenblueth states that the only difference between living and nonliving aggregates (both may contain the same physical-chemicalprocesses)is that the latter do not have mental events. For instance,they do not seem to exhibit behavior indicative of consciousness of pleasure and pain. Realizing that analyzing neural events in response to stimuli might reveal much about neurons but little about the concomitant sensation,Rosenbluethcontentshimself withcalling mental and associated physical-chemical events in the brain differentaspects of the sameillusivething. A more fruitful approach might be to question the soundness of the original differentiation of aggregates with and without mental events. Many of these problems stem from difficultiesin the causal chain model and its irreversibility. Alternatively, one might consider consciousnessas the performing of integration processes such that potentialitiesare made evident. Resultant behavior may or may not be indicative of ‘possession of consciousness’by inferencefrom observationon the part of another aggregate. Thus, ‘living’and ‘nonliving ’ classificationslose much of their traditional meaning and become true complementarities, that is, the increasingprecision in definition of one leads necessarily to imprecisionin definition of the other. Further, since inferences about consciousness and mental events are derived mostly from subjective observations, they cannot belong to the world of real phenomena but to the world of tendencies toward reality. One can look to the truth in the old saying: ‘A man must, of necessity, disrupt his thoughts in order to scrutinize them’. Halacy’s book seems less significant by comparison , though it is not meant to cover the same ground. Hepresentsareadablesurveyof the history of advances in brain research as they relate to studies of memory. The author, who I believe is a science writer, does overstep occasionally his role when he speculateson the theoreticalsignificanceof some discoveries. For example, in a chapter on intelligence and memory several misleading definitions of intelligence are given and statements are made, such as: ‘And learningis little more than memory’. In the chapter on learning,remembering and forgetting,Halacy presents interestingmaterial about perception but states, ‘... for we generally learn by committing information to memory’. He doesnot point out that learninginvolvesassociation, integration, data reduction and volitional selection and maintenance of perception and recall. Pattern recognition models for perception, data reduction andreconstructionarealsonot adequatelydiscussed. Some important investigations that were not discussed include studies of the limits on memory and information processing by, for example, G. A. Miller in ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two’ (Psychol.Rev. 63, 181 (1956)) (though this was hinted at) and...