"I began my training in a very different manner from Dr. McCulloch. I began as an anatomist and became interested in physiology much later. Therefore, I am still very much of an anatomist, and visualize everything in anatomical terms. According to your discussion, Dr. von Neumann, of the McCulloch and Pitts automaton, anything that can be expressed in words can be performed by the automaton. To this I would say that I can remember what you said, but that the McCulloch-Pitts automaton could not remember what you said. No, the automaton does not function in the way that our nervous system does, because the only way in which that could happen, as far as I can visualize, is by having some change continuously maintained. Possibly the automaton can be made to maintain memory, but the automaton that does would not have the properties of our nervous system. We agree on that, I believe. The only thing that I wanted was to make the fact clear."
OH SNAP
Von, Neumann John, and A. H. Taub. “The General and Logical Theory of Automata.” John Von Neumann Collected Works. Vol. 5. Oxford: Pergamon, 1963. 289-328. Print.
Dr. Rafael Lorente de Nó, responding to von Neumann’s Theory of Automata and referencing the following from McCulloch and Pitt’s “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943):
“Moreover, the regenerative activity of Constituent circles renders reference indefinite as to time past. Thus our knowledge of the world, including ourselves, is incomplete
as to space and indefinite as to time. This ignorance, implicit in all our brains, is the counterpart of the abstraction which renders our knowledge useful. The role of brains in determining the epistemic relations of our theories to our observations and of these to the facts is all too clear, for it is apparent that every idea and every sensation is realized by activity within that net, and by no such activity are the actual afferents fully determined. There is no theory we may hold and no observation we can make that will retain so much as its old defective reference to the facts if the net be altered. Tinitus, paraestheaias, hallucinations, delusions, confusions and disorientations intervene. Thus empiry confirms that if our nets are undefined, our facts are undefined, and to the “real” we can attribute not so much as one quality or “form.” With determination of the net, the unknowable object of knowledge, the “thing in itself,” ceases to be unknowable.” (129)
“The psychiatrist may take comfort from the obvious conclusion concerning causality—that, for prognosis, history is never necessary.” (132)
