174 EVOLUTION: THE AGES AND TOMORROW 



visual and kinesthetic (muscular sense) control of the feed- 

 back leads to what in medical circles is called "ataxia," 

 where the individual cannot perform the act at all, or to an 

 uncontrollable oscillation known as "purpose tremor." 



Basically the idea of the machine is simple. It is the prin- 

 ciple of the digital calculator (counting on the fingers) with 

 some devices, such as recorded information and so forth, for 

 more complex combinations of processes. One is reminded 

 that the four fundamental means of solving mathematical 

 problems are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and di- 

 vision. Along with these operations the machine can be built 

 to respond to the basic fundamentals of logic where all com- 

 plex propositional forms can be built out of the simple op- 

 erations of disjunction ("or"), conjunction ("and"), nega- 

 tion ("not"), and affirmation. Combining the two sets of 

 arithmetical and logical processes makes possible the new 

 synthesis, the science of cybernetics, which brings mathe- 

 matics and logic into a simple discipline. As Leibniz and 

 Russell envisioned, there is here a great power of proliferat- 

 ing all manner of deductive inferences in the form of tau- 

 tologies turned out by machines or by the brains of man. 



Workers in several fields of science and philosophy have 

 found great possibilities in the analogies of cybernetics. In 

 psychology and psychoanalysis the analogies are very help- 

 ful in understanding both the circulating and permanent 

 memory, anxiety neurosis, nervous breakdown, insanity, 

 and so forth. In philosophy Pitts and McCulloch have used 

 the analogy of the television scanning mechanism to explain 

 how the human cortex recognizes forms as patterns of 

 stimuli (an old problem in Gestalt psychology), and in their 

 analysis of this function of the brain have come up with the 

 profoundly suggestive idea of the intertranslatability of spa- 

 tial and temporal patterns. 



It is F. S. C. Northrop's view of the implications of cyber- 

 netics, however, that is the most interesting to me since his 

 analysis offers help to the philosophy of purpose, particu- 



