On the legacy of W.S. McCulloch
Introduction
Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898–1969) was a brain research scientist at Yale University, professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and later, a scientist at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, in Cambridge, MA. Together with Wiener, von Neumann, von Foerster and others, he is credited with having been one of the pillars of cybernetics from the forties on and one of the great thinkers of the previous century. In the search for an experimental theory of the origin, nature, methods and limits of knowledge (experimental epistemology, a physiological theory of knowledge) he went from psychology to psychiatry, and on to neurophysiology, to which he brought an array of mathematical, logical and symbolic skills (Fig. 1).
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From early times to the University of Yale
McCulloch had, since his youth, a multidisciplinary education. As a freshman, he took courses in theology, along with considerable philosophy, psychology, mathematics and mathematical physics at Haverford College and later at Yale University. He had served during World War II as a second class seaman engaged in marlin-spike seamanship and semaphore (he considered these to be topology and communication) and from very early, he was attracted to the epistemic problems of mathematics. He used to
At the University of Illinois and the Macy Foundation Conferences
In 1941 McCulloch went to the University of Illinois (Chicago) to organize a team of specialists to form the biological basis of the Department of Psychiatry. They were to be involved in neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, physics and chemistry, excluding behavioural problems, treated somewhere else. Among his collaborators at that time were Jerry Lettvin, Patrick Wall and Walter Pitts. Their research produced relevant work on cortico-cortical mapping, schizofrenia, control of posture and motion.
At the research laboratory of electronics, MIT
In 1952 McCulloch moved to M.I.T., where Norbert Wiener was. He continued neurophysiologic, logical and epistemological work and essays with his Chicago collaborators Jerry Lettvin, Walter Pitts and Patrick Wall. A young anatomist from Chile, Humberto Maturana, joined the group. In 1955 they published their finding of presynaptic inhibition (Howland et al., 1955). In 1959 they produced a landmark in epistemic science, this time in epistemological neurophysiology: What the Frog’s Eye tells the
References (15)
- Da Fonseca, J.L., McCulloch, W.S., 1967. Synthesis and linearization of nonlinear feedback shift registers—basis for a...
- et al.
Reflex inhibition by dorsal root interaction
J. Neurophysiol.
(1955) - et al.
What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain
Proc. Inst. Radio Eng.
(1959) - et al.
Two remarks on the visual system of the frog
Agatha Tyche: of nervous nets–the lucky reckoners
- McCulloch, W.S., 1961. What is a number that a man may know it, and a man, that he may know a number? General Semantics...
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