03 Nov 2018 01:30 PM - 03:45 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T133020181103T1545America/VancouverEmbracing the Electronic Brain: Cold War Entanglements of Organisms, Minds, and Computers
During the 1950s, a surge of new research describing the electrophysiology of neural communication, behavior, and higher-order mental processes emerged alongside the first electronic, stored-program computers. Growing public consciousness of the affinities between information technologies and minds charged investigations into the nature of brain activity and brought the brain- computer metaphor into circulation. Such research was undertaken in mixed settings that enabled the breakdown of distinctions between describing, modeling, and engineering as styles of thought and practice. In this panel, we explore how these metaphorical affinities galvanized new practices, resulting in a diverse set of approaches that were often mutually incompatible.
Historians of science have long been fascinated by midcentury discourses on the limits of human rationality, or conversely, its extension into the worlds of transistorized circuits and animal behavior. These papers address a range of questions to push such inquiry forward and unsettle existing analytical categories. Where were new disciplinary boundaries drawn or existing ones gerrymandered? What role did new technical expertise, and the actors who bore it, play? What counted as ‘life’ and how did the cognitive order of nature disrupt, reinforce, or re-scale existing hierarchies of natural history? Moreover, how can we frame the lasting legacy of this period of ferment? Pushing at the boundaries of sweeping characterizations like information discourse, neuromolecular turn, and Cold War humanity allows us to re-imagine the practice, politics, and language of the Cold War mind and brain sciences.
Organized by Michael McGovern (Princeton University) and Youjung Shin (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and T ...
Chelan, First FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
During the 1950s, a surge of new research describing the electrophysiology of neural communication, behavior, and higher-order mental processes emerged alongside the first electronic, stored-program computers. Growing public consciousness of the affinities between information technologies and minds charged investigations into the nature of brain activity and brought the brain- computer metaphor into circulation. Such research was undertaken in mixed settings that enabled the breakdown of distinctions between describing, modeling, and engineering as styles of thought and practice. In this panel, we explore how these metaphorical affinities galvanized new practices, resulting in a diverse set of approaches that were often mutually incompatible.
Historians of science have long been fascinated by midcentury discourses on the limits of human rationality, or conversely, its extension into the worlds of transistorized circuits and animal behavior. These papers address a range of questions to push such inquiry forward and unsettle existing analytical categories. Where were new disciplinary boundaries drawn or existing ones gerrymandered? What role did new technical expertise, and the actors who bore it, play? What counted as ‘life’ and how did the cognitive order of nature disrupt, reinforce, or re-scale existing hierarchies of natural history? Moreover, how can we frame the lasting legacy of this period of ferment? Pushing at the boundaries of sweeping characterizations like information discourse, neuromolecular turn, and Cold War humanity allows us to re-imagine the practice, politics, and language of the Cold War mind and brain sciences.
Organized by Michael McGovern (Princeton University) and Youjung Shin (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
“Tortoise because he taught us”: Animality and Humanity in Grey Walter’s Cybernetic BrainsView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences01:30 PM - 02:03 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC
In the late 1940s and 1950s the emerging field of cybernetics raised the possibility that machines might match humans in their cognitive abilities. Especially in Britain, where cybernetics enjoyed a close institutional relationship with neurology, figures like William Grey Walter constructed machines in order to mimic the functioning of the brain. In his robots, which he constructed out of discarded war electronics, Walter sought to recreate the structure and function of “brain waves,” the study of which had made his name as a neurophysiologist. By exploring how Walter’s robots played simultaneously with biological/mechanical and human/animal differences, I show how they allowed him to reassert a hierarchy of creation that confirmed man’s exalted position in the animal kingdom while simultaneously developing a radically new vision of what it meant to be human.
Amphibian a priori: Filters, Fields, and the Contested Vision of NeuroscienceView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences02:03 PM - 02:36 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC
What makes one research program croak, and another purr? Touted as the origin point of second-order cybernetics, the 1959 paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” emerged from attempts by MIT’s Warren McCulloch, Jerome Lettvin, and others to apply cybernetic logic to living brains. It claimed that fibers in the frog optic nerve were coded to relay distinct signals to the brain, each having one of a variety of “filters” tailored to the survival needs of the frog. This interpretation was as controversial as the experiment underlying it was capricious; only Lettvin’s sensitive hand could reproduce results, and the group largely abandoned the research. At the same time, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel relocated from Johns Hopkins across the river to Harvard Medical School. Using a similar setup for the cat, they had just published a paper showing direction- specific “receptive fields” in single neurons of the cortex. This became the basis for studies of binocular vision that won them the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Through close reading of the published literature and engagement with oral histories and material from McCulloch’s archive, I argue that although they diverged substantially, these research programs were seen as complementary, particularly in early artificial intelligence research. While the cybernetics group invoked images of mental hardwiring, the Harvard team appealed to higher-order cognition. Such disciplinary distinctions, I suggest, reflect contests within the brain sciences over the character of liberal subjectivity in Cold War America.
Lively Artifacts: Heinz von Foerster and the Machines of his Biological Computer LaboratoryView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences02:36 PM - 03:09 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC
Over the course of the twentieth century, the concept of life has been loosened from its moorings to nature. Launched in 1958, the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provided the institutional and political context to stage the ‘liveliness’ of machines, an unprecedented and understudied development in the history of twentieth-century science. In this talk, I show how the BCL explored to serve examples from natures as templates and standards for engineering machines and computer programs. The lab’s artifice ranged from self-organizing automata to artificial sensory organs in neural networks, remarkable prefigurations of contemporary robots and computer programs from the realm of artificial intelligence. Drawing on the archives of the BCL, the personal collection of its founder, Austrian physicist and cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and oral histories, I reconstruct the lab’s working world using insights from historical epistemology and media archeology. In doing so, I examine both the historical conditions under which these machines appeared ‘lively’ and how they yielded knowledge as scientific media. The spectator-dependency of such machines, I argue, allows us to situate ‘liveliness’ as a driving force in the transition from a first-order cybernetics of communication and control to a second-order epistemology of embedded observation.
From Big Theory to Big Data: The Formation of Neuroscience as a Discipline in the U.S., 1960-1990View Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences03:09 PM - 03:42 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:42:00 UTC
It was no coincidence that the new field of neuroscience began to take shape in the early 1960s at MIT where cybernetics received much attention. This paper examines how the brain-computer metaphor was shared among mathematicians, computer scientists, and electrical engineers in the 1950s, and how it stimulated a biologist, Francis O. Schmitt, who laid the foundation of Neurosciences Research Program (NRP) at MIT in 1962. By analyzing his notes, speeches, and papers, made for not only scientific journals but also religious meetings, I underscore how Schmitt’s desire to develop a big theory for brain studies—something at the level of quantum theory—was reflected in the emergence of neuroscience in the U.S. I also show the effect of the decline of cybernetics in the new field of neuroscience from the mid-1970s. The ambition to unify brain studies through theory gave way to an emphasis on systematic data collection, which resulted in the launch of the U.S. Human Brain Project in the 1990s. From the vantage point of the rise and fall of the brain-computer metaphor, this paper revisits the history of neuroscience coming into its own as big science in the late twentieth century.
Presenters Youjung Shin Korea Advanced Institute Of Science And Technology
Michael McGovern
Jan Müggenburg
Youjung Shin