Psychologists From The United States

"That man, that wretched man, that drunkard! Why, if I had the money I would buy him a case of Scotch whisky so he could drink himself to death!"

"One of the issues that John von Neumann and McCulloch discussed was reliability in the brain. One version of the story was that McCulloch got a 3:00 AM phone call from von Neumann to say, “I have just finished a bottle of creme de menthe. The thresholds of all my neurons are shot to hell. How is it I can still think?” (In other versions of the story, von Neumann was called by McCulloch, and the drink was whisky.)"

"[A] famous photograph... showing McCulloch (1898–1969) and Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) with British Cyberneticians Ross Ashby (1903–1972) and Grey Walter (1910–1977), first appeared in de Latil (1953) with the caption "The four pioneers of Cybernetics get together in Paris", and encapsulates a view of the development of cybernetics that has slowly become more accepted: that there were important British contributions from the outset... Warren McCulloch embraced these influences and had significant contact with a number of British cyberneticians, forming friendships and collaborations with several, as well as mentoring others."

"As a young man, Warren McCulloch set himself the goal of developing an experimental epistemology, to understand the mind in terms of the brain. More particularly, he sought to discover the logical calculus immanent in nervous activity."

"And he had a grand view of this, the importance of cybernetics, which was correct, so, otherwise you would have said he was delusional. . .but I must have spent the most part of a year just hanging around him and trying to understand how he could see such importance in ordinary things"

"I met Walter Pitts, then in his teens, who promptly set me right in matters of theory. It is to him that I am principally indebted for all subsequent success. He remains my best adviser and sharpest critic. You shall never publish this until it passes through his hands."

"With all of these limitations and hazards well in mind, let us ask whether a knower so conceived is capable of constructing the physics of the world which includes himself. But, in so doing, let us be perfectly frank to admit that causality is a superstition."

"My object, as a psychologist, was to invent a kind of least psychic event, or "psychon," that would have the following properties: First, it was to be so simple an event that it either happened or else it did not happen. Second, it was to happen only if its bound cause had happened – shades of Duns Scotus! – that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent. Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons. Fourth, these were to be compounded to produce the equivalents of more complicated propositions concerning their antecedents."

"No more would I go along with Plato in exiling the poets, who play on the limbic cortex. Not even they are powerful enough to evoke the whole of man. If we are to survive our own destruction of our world and of ourselves by our advance of culture we had better learn soon to modify our genes to make us more intelligent. It is our last chance, that by increasing our diversity we may be able to make some sort of man that can survive without an ecological niche on this our earth. We may be able to live in gas masks and eat algae and distill the ocean. I doubt that we have time enough. We are, I think, nearing the end of a course that left the main line of evolution to overspecialize in brain to its own undoing. Time will tell."

"Because of the "all-or-none" character of nervous activity, events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic. It is found that the behaviour of every net can be described in these terms, with the addition of more complicated logical means for nets containing cycles; and that for any logical expression satisfying certain conditions, one can find in net behaving ever fashion it describes."

"We suppose that some axonal terminations cannot at first excite the succeeding neuron; but if at any time the neuron fires, and the axonal terminations are simultaneously excited, they become synapses of the ordinary kind, henceforth capable of exciting the neuron. The loss of an inhibitory synapse gives an entirely equivalent result."

"To make psychology into experimental epistemology is to attempt to understand the embodiment of mind. Here we are confronted by what seem to be three questions, although they may ultimately be only one. The three exist as categorically disperate desiderata. The first is at the logical level: We lack an adequate, appropriate calculus for triadic relations. The second is the psychological level: We do not know how we generate hypotheses that are natural and simple. The third is that the physiological level: we have no circuit theory for the reticular formation that marshals our abductions. Logically, the problem is far from simple. To be exact, no proposed theory of relations yields a calculus to handle our problem. When I was growing up, only the Aristotelian logic of classes was ever taught, and that badly. The Organon itself contains only a clumsy description of the apagoge - perhaps from the notes of some students who have not understand his master..."

"[1917 Winter] Rufus Jones called me in. "Warren," said he, "what is thee going to be?" And I said, "I don't know." "And what is thee going to do?" And again I said, "I have no idea; but there is one question I would like to answer: What is a number, that a man may know it, and a man, that he may know a number?" He smiled and said, "Friend, thee will be busy as long as thee lives.""

"This book is not for the engineer content with hardware, nor for the biologist uneasy outside his specialty; for it depicts that miscegenation of Art and Science which begets inanimate objects that behave like living systems. They regulate themselves and survive: They adapt and they compute: They invent. They co-operate and they compete. Naturally they evolve rapidly. Pure mathematics, being mere tautology, and pure physics, being mere fact, could not have engendered them; for creatures to live, must sense the useful and the good; and engines to run must have energy available as work : and both, to endure, must regulate themselves. So it is to Thermodynamics and to its brother Σp log p, called Information Theory, that we look for the distinctions between work and energy and between signal and noise. For like cause we look to reflexology and its brother feedback, christened Multiple Closed Loop Servo Theory, for mechanical explanation of Entelechy in Homeostasis and in appetition. This is that governance, whether in living creatures and their societies or in our living artefacts, that is now called Cybernetics."

"Don't bite my finger, look where I am pointing."

"You have to have the facts before you can pervert them."

"When McCulloch's essays are hard to understand, the trouble lies less often in the internal logic of the individual arguments than in the perception of a unifying theme that runs, sometimes with exuberant clarity, sometimes in a tantalizingly elusive way, through the whole work. The consequent perplexity is partly intentional -- McCulloch is at least as much concerned with questions as with answers -- and partly the result of his way of expressing the general through the particular."

"Ernst von Glasersfeld, who founded radical constructivism (RC) in the 1970s, is clearly on Kuhn's side"

"The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each individual constructs his or her own "reality" (Foerster, 1973) and that knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world of experience (von Glasersfeld, 1987)."

"For me, as I later came to say, cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium in a world of possibilities and constraints. This is not just a romantic description, it portrays the new way of thinking quite accurately. Cybernetics differs from the traditional scientific procedure, because it does not try to explain phenomena by searching for their causes, but rather by specifying the constraints that determine the direction of their development."

"From an explorer who is condemned to seek 'structural properties' of an inaccessible reality, the experiencing organism now turns-into a builder of cognitive structures intended to solve such problems as the organism perceives."

".. in spite of the fact that it often feels as though the meaning of words and sentences were conveyed to us by the sounds of speech or the signs on a printed page, It is easy to show that meanings do not travel through space and must under all circumstances be constructed in the head of the language users."

"Once knowing is no longer understood as the search for an iconic representation of ontological reality but, instead, as a search for fitting ways of behaving and thinking, the traditional problem disappears. Knowledge can now be seen as something which the organism builds up in the attempt to order the as such amorphous flow of experience by establishing repeatable experiences and relatively reliable relations between them. The possibilities of constructing such an order are determined and perpetually constrained by the preceding steps in the construction. That means that the “real” world manifests itself exclusively there where our constructions break down. But since we can describe and explain these breakdowns only in the very concepts that we have used to build the failing structures, this process can never yield a picture of a world that we could hold responsible for their failure."

"...I believe I have come to adopt a cybernetic way of thinking... I became aware of this in the many conversations with students who were worrying about their future and asked for advice. I heard myself telling them that it was far more important to know what one did not want to do, than to have detailed plans of what one did want to do. One day it dawned on me that this was plain cybernetic advice; It is more useful to specify constraints rather than goals. - And then I explained it by adding that in one’s teens or twenties one usually has already discovered a number of things that one cannot stand, whereas it is quite impossible to foresee what, ten or twenty years later, will provide the satisfactions needed to maintain one’s equilibrium."

"What we call knowledge does not and cannot have the purpose of producing representations of an independent reality, but instead has an adaptive function."

"The history of scientific ideas shows all too blatantly that there has been no overall linear progression."

"As a metaphor - and I stress that it is intended as a metaphor - the concept of an invariant that arises out of mutually or cyclically balancing changes may help us to approach the concept of self. In cybernetics this metaphor is implemented in the ‘closed loop’, the circular arrangement of feedback mechanisms that maintain a given value within certain limits. They work toward an invariant, but the invariant is achieved not by a steady resistance, the way a rock stands unmoved in the wind, but by compensation over time. Whenever we happen to look in a feedback loop, we find the present act pitted against the immediate past, but already on the way to being compensated itself by the immediate future. The invariant the system achieves can, therefore, never be found or frozen in a single element because, by its very nature, it consists in one or more relationships - and relationships are not in things but between them. If the self, as I suggest, is a relational entity, it cannot have a locus in the world of experiential objects. It does not reside in the heart, as Aristotle thought, nor in the brain, as we tend to think today. It resides in no place at all, but merely manifests itself in the continuity of our acts of differentiating and relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours."

"We respect science because it tests its hypotheses. We respect ourselves when we do the same."

"You can see why you must nominate yourself as the hero of your own story. It is your right and obligation to make idiosyncratic meaning choices, but asserting that right and meeting that obligation only launch you onto an arduous path of lifelong effort. Time and again you will find yourself dissatisfied with your meaning results, shaken by new meaning problems, confounded by the dynamic complexity of your competing meaning interests, and exhausted by the work required to live authentically. Only a hero would bother with this. An ordinary person would settle for gods and greeting card maxims."

"You will stand up and be counted, even though only you are doing the counting."

"We have not answered the free will-determinism question, but we have decided to come down on the side of personal freedom, to assert it whether or not it exists. Just as we make our own meaning, we make our own freedom. If this is a cosmic joke, then let us be the ones laughing."

"Billions of people may not be free enough to let go of their made-up gods. You will not allow that sad fact to prevent you from proving the exception. Billions of people may not be equal to seeing beyond limited self-interest to a more mindful self-interest that takes into account the future of the species. You will not allow that sad fact to prevent you from proving the exception."

"There is no way to complete the sentence “The meaning of life is...” without producing a small, sad result."

"Human beings have always had the potential to know meaninglessness. Modern times activated that potential."

"The rose’s fragrance, the garden’s lushness, and the night sky’s grandeur affect us because we are built to appreciate beauty and to experience awe. To leap to a supernatural source for these powerful but ordinary feelings is to indulge in wishful thinking, romantic embellishment, and metaphoric fantasizing."

"As atheists we have the opportunity to be more honest about the blues that we experience...We get to honestly look at the thing itself and not shift the issue to our relationship to some nonexistent god."

"I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there are no gods. We arise from nature—and nature is not a moral entity."

"We may feel blue because we see clearly, and what we see saddens us. We see that the amount of intelligence displayed by most people may not be intelligence enough for the challenges faced by our species."

"Meaning is a choice, not a lost object."

"This individual is regularly nominated not only by himself but by others as well: by the ordinary townsfolk who beg him to save their town, their world, or their galaxy because they see that he has the strength and integrity that they lack."

"“I nominate myself” means “I won’t follow.” This isn’t hubris: it is simply the fruit of your decision to live on your own terms."

"To nominate yourself as the hero of your own story is to step outside society, not with the intention of turning your back on it but with the intention of not allowing it to dictate to you."

"You nominate yourself to be the one who will courageously do what you think ought to be done, even if everyone is pressing you to do something else."

"Few people actually nominate themselves in this way. Most defer to the meaning-making apparatus of their culture, taking comfort in the fact that others have built a meaning nest for them. This built-in cover allows them to avoid taking responsibility and at the same time causes them to grow grandiose, narcissistic, and egotistical. As soon as you put on the robes of your culture and add gravity to your mere humanness by wearing the badge of your profession, your club, your gang, or your clan, you … refuse to engage in the process of personal meaning-making, with its requirements of honesty and self-awareness."

"The smarter, braver part of you knows that a tradition is only of value if it is of value."

"These doubts must be met in the following way. You announce that meaning does not exist until you make it, and then you don the mantle of meaning-maker. The minute you do this, all previous belief systems, both those that told you what to believe and those that told you that there was nothing to believe, vanish. You suddenly enact the paradigm shift that I believe we are now ready to embrace: the shift from seeking meaning to making meaning. You let go of wondering what the universe wants of you, … and you announce that you will make life mean exactly what you intend it to mean. This is an amazing, glorious, and triumphant announcement. The instant you realize that meaning is not provided (as traditional belief systems teach) and that it is not absent (as nihilists feel), a new world of potential opens up for you."

"To define what we are is to reduce and distort what we are: to say that we are nothing but our desires or nothing but our self-interest is to misrepresent us."

"You and you alone are the sole arbiter of the meaning in your life. The second you turn to someone and say, “What does life mean?” or, “What should my life mean?” you have slipped into a mind-set that courts inauthenticity and depression. The second you agree with someone simply because of her position or reputation, whether that someone is a guru, author, cleric, parent, politician, general, or elder, you fall from the path of personal meaning-maker."

"It is simply not true that atheists, because of their convictions and their worldview, are as a group more depressed than believers."

"To be ethical is to make ethics, not to mouth ethics."