Freud's Androids by Clark Glymour, in the Cambridge Companion to Freud edited by Jerome Neu, Cambridge University Press, 1992

Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, Warren Weaver, pp. 95-117 in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1949.

Chapters 1, 2, 3, and epilogue, The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution, Howard E. Gardner, Basic Books, 2nd ed., 1987.

Benjamin Libet (1985), Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 8, pp. 529-566.

Michael Shadlen et al. (2001), Neural Computations that Underlie Decisions about Sensory Stimuli, Trends in Cognitive Science, vol. 5:1, pp. 10-16.

Arbib, M.A., 2000, Warren McCulloch's Search for the Logic of the Nervous System, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43:193-216.

Arbib, M.A., 1998, The metaphorical brains, Artificial Intelligence, 101:323-335. 

"The first paper is an overview of the current state of the field of
consciousness studies (with somewhat more emphasis on religion than might otherwise be expected, due to the nature of of the publication); it makes many
connections with cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy, and provides some historical contextualization.  The second paper presents a view of consciousness from the tradition of Russian activity theory (Vygotsky, etc.).  The third paper develops a notion of information that is grounded in the social, and (among other things) brings out the moral dimensions that follow from such a view.  Chapters 11 and 3 of the fourth reading (among other things) place cognitivist views of consciousness in the historical context of Western philosophy, drawing on ideas from Nishitani, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others."

A Cultural-Historical View of Human Nature by Michael Cole and Karl Levitin.

Towards a Social, Ethical Theory of Information by Joseph Goguen, pp. 27-56 in Social Science Research, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work, edited by Geoffrey Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star and William Turner, Erlbaum, 1997.

The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, MIT 1991: chapter 11, and optionally, chapter 3.  These chapters can now be printed from new links on the e-reserves web site.

In the late 19th century the medical school at the University of Vienna, where Freud was a student, researcher and post-doctoral lecturer was the European center for  the emerging subject of cognitive neuropsychology.  In 1891 using his own connectionist perspective, Freud produced a devastating attack on neuropsychological models and methods in aphasia research.  By 1895 he had developed a mixed connectionist model, including essentially what psychologists nowadays call the Hebb synapse, and a qualitative idea of Darwinian computational models.  His work on aphasia bears close resemblance to Martha Farah's work on Visual Agnosia, and his mixed model is in many respects similar to John Anderson's ACT* model. 

The problems with Freud's ambition to turn clinical and anatomical data into an empirically  well established theory of cognitive functioning became apparent to Freud, and his interests turned elsewhere. Arguably many of the same problems beset similar approaches to contemporary cognitive psychology.

talk notes

section  notes

My talk will focus on the history of the key paradigm which underlies not only modern computer science but also cognitive science: information theory.  How, when and why scientists came to assume that human perceptual and mental performance can be described using information theory?  Information theory emerged in the 1920s in response to the growth of modern telecommunications. The theory was originally developed by engineers in order to measure the efficiency of communication systems, such as telephone, radio, and television. In the late 1940s the theory left its engineering context and was taken up by psychologists faced with the practical task of designing human-machine systems which increasingly came to dominate both the battlefield and the workplace after World War II (radar screen, aircraft controls, computer terminals of the automated factory).  Information theory became a language used to characterise communication between a human and a machine, the two linked in a human-machine system. It also became an intellectual foundation for the new field of cognitive science aimed to describe the human in information processing and computational terms.

Erin Clark 

Evan Moreno-Davis

I draw on the (recent and not-so-recent) history of cognitive science to illuminate a challenge facing contemporary experimental approaches to the neurophysiology of cognition. My focus is the cognitive phenomenon of judgment, and in particular three attempts to tackle this phenomenon experimentally. One of the experimental approaches comes from more-or-less ancient history: David Hume's attempt to develop a theory of belief in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Of the other two, one is recent (Benjamin Libet on unconscious cerebral initiative) and one is contemporary (Michael Shadlen on the neural computation of decision).  I identify a common challenge that figures in all three approaches: an adequate theory of judgment must somehow do justice both to the broadly logical features of judgment and to its psychological and phenomenological features.  I show how in Hume's case, the tensions between these two commitments lead to a rather dramatic experimental failure.  I then assess attempts by modern experimentalists to navigate the challenge dramatized by Hume's failure.

This talk will be an account of the work of Warren McCulloch and his own experience in schema theory and brain modeling to chart (one view of) the historical relation between cybernetics, connectionism and current work in Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience.

I will show lots of AV and give some demos of old and current states of the arts.

This talk will survey the state of the art of consciousness studies, with some emphasis on its relation to cognitive science; it will also review the rise and fall of cognitivism, particularly in relation to its problems with consciousness.  In choosing topics and positions, I will draw on my experience as editor in chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Fox Harrell,
Eric Fine