The Universe Within
Blumenthal, Arthur L.
Mapping our minds THE UNIVERSE WITHIN Morton Hunt Simon and Schuster, $18.75, 415 pp. Arthur L. Blumenlhol Norton HUNT has endured more than his share of esoteric conversation. He is one of the...
...Taylor, in contrast, consults primarily the researchers at M.I.T.'s Neuroscience Research Program and at the Brain Research Institute (Los Angeles...
...Taylor focuses on the recent work on the nature of consciousness as a natural biological phenomenon, one that is being investigated and explained in scientific ways...
...When such specialists come together they are now collectively called "cognitive scientists" - the hottest new buzz-word in many a university psychology department...
...But alas, in many cases the date of the predicted supersession of the machine has already passed uneventfully...
...Of the books listed above, it is closest in spirit to Taylor's book, although each of the above is quite different from the others...
...This explains many of the differences between the two books...
...It is from these individuals that we receive the predictions about computers taking over human capacities - instantaneously comprehending human speech, surpassing human problem-solving abilities, perceptual abilities, creativity, indeed even entirely replacing homo sapiens on this planet...
...Hunt focuses on studies of human intelligence, problem-solving, and creativity with special emphasis on comparisons of human performance against that of the electronic computer...
...Hunt has done an admirable job in summarizing the promises and not too solid advances of current cognitive psychology...
...In Hunt's book, however, consciousness receives at most a few pages and is treated as a completely mystifying puzzle barely touched by scientists...
...This is where he examines the claims of a group of cognitive scientists for whom the computer metaphor appears to have become more interesting than the phenomenon (person) it was intended to describe...
...And well it should be...
...He is one of the most ambitious in a long line of journalists who have penetrated the sanctuaries of academic and scientific entrepreneurs to survey their work and to expose their idiosyncracies...
...It is only a comment on the overwhelming size and complexity of this field to say that he has not seen all that passes under that title, nor has he seen the intricate relations of this recent work to the broader history of psychology...
...But any historical naivete probably rests more with the cognitive scientists than with Morton Hunt...
...While the first psychological laboratories were being founded with much flourish in the 1880s and 1890s, a series of procedures was worked out for teasing apart mental processes and structures...
...It was around that time that popular books explaining this enterprise to laymen first appeared (or if not exactly explaining it, at least conveying its spirit and excitement...
...The source of largess is the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which has designated $20 million for cognitive science research...
...Another of the authorities that Hunt relies on most directly is Kenneth Klivington, Program Officer of the Sloan Foundation...
...Indeed some real progress was made in those early years, as anyone who carefully examines that early research can discover...
...In the heady atmosphere of that time stunning predictions were made of impending breakthroughs in explaining the workings of the mind...
...In a final coda it leaves a flourish of comments on morality and values as the characteristics that distinguish humans from machines...
...Ever since it became a laboratory science about a century ago psychology has been a popular topic for such surveys...
...Those comparisons are an interdisciplinary enterprise that goes beyond psychologists to include computer engineers, logicians, linguists, philosophers, and others...
...The forecasted dates are all rather shocking - typically before the end of this century...
...For to be known as a cognitive scientist makes one a potential candidate for a generous research grant from a rich source at a time when most other grant sources are drying up and when many research projects are forced to shut down...
...The committees of experts that Sloan chose to define the field of "cognitive science" are also many of those who receive Sloan funds, and who are, for the most part, the focus of this book...
...The methods were based mostly on reaction-time measurements, but included a variety of other techniques (all still in use today...
...At least psychology's history has well served those writers who enjoy reporting its latest progress to laymen...
...Each renewal contributed something of value but also changed the definition of psychology and provided it with a new technical vocabulary - which helped separate the newest movement from earlier ones...
...Perhaps the best example from the 1900s is E. W. Scripture's The New Psychology (1895...
...Hunt's book certainly stands out as one of the best of this genre...
...Hunt shows what a shallow form of thinking underlies such predictions and even how shallow it would be to keep moving the date back a few years each time the predicted evolution of computer intelligence fails to appear...
...As anyone who has been through a college-level introductory psychology course should know, the "new" psychology of a century ago has been renewed and re-renewed with at least every subsequent generation of psychologists...
...Of the several themes in cognitive science as defined by the Sloan Foundation, the one that seems most pervasive is the computer as a model or metaphor for describing human mental processes - a theme throughout Hunt's book...
...Hunt's authorities may still share some of the behaviorists' classic uneasiness about consciousness as a scientific topic...
...Such a pattern is found, to some degree, in every science...
...That progress added to the excitement when the new laboratory psychology first came into public view in a pavilion of its own at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893...
...Psychology's case, however, may be the most extreme...
...Each renewal, whether it was behaviorism, psychoanalysis, learning theory, gestalt psychology, or'cognitive psychology (the topic of Hunt's book), claimed the same revolutionary spirit, shared the same tendency to dismiss what had gone before (usually distorting or misrepresenting the work of the previous generation), and shared the tendency to make startling predictions about impending breakthroughs...
...This well-written book ends on that note...
...The consulted individuals differ from book to book, and so the designation of leading research problems also differs...
...A sample of those reports from the past decade is Nigel Calder's The Mind of Man (Viking, 1971), Maggie Scarfs Body, Mind, Behavior (New Republic Books, 1976), Gordon Ratay Taylor's The Natural History of the Mind (Dutton, 1979), Joseph Jastrow's The Enchanted Loom: The Universe of the Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1981), Eric Harth's Window on the Mind (Morrow, 1982), and now Morton Hunt's The Universe Within...
...Hunt relies heavily on the guidance of Donald Norman, Director of the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, and also on John Lockhead, Director of the Cognitive Development Project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...In this engaging book he unravels the mysterious and complex ways of a new breed of psychologists who call themselves "cognitive scientists...
...In most cases the authors have consulted a few leading psychologists and brain scientists, basing their books on the descriptions, judgments, and biases of those authorities...
...Hunt is generally sympathetic to the scientists he interviews, but in one place (Chapter 9), a high point in the book, he is less so...
Vol. 109 • October 1982 • No. 18
