THE HUMAN THINKING MACHINE

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 237, 7 October 1936, Page 16

THE HUMAN THINKING MACHINE

r A ROBOT like the photo-electric cell made to operate burglar alarms or open doors, or the gyroscope controlling & plane, is an unthinking automaton. Its powers are conferred by the human thought put into its construction, says E. S. Gren in the London “Observer."

It is possible to construct machines which seem to embody a little more brainwork. The Russian physiologist, Pavlov, laid bare some of the brain’s simpler responses with his dogs. When one of Pavlov’s dogs was offered a chunk of meat its gastric juices began to flow and it slobbered. The invita-

tion stirred up an automatic response. But if a dinner bell was rung at the same time the dog’s brain registered the coincidence.

! After a time, the ringing of the bell H?as enough to make the dog's mouth Uvater. Pavlov’s dogs started what was irreverently called the science of slobbering, which was the examination of the ways in which sensations from outside stir tho brain to make responses. America has been busy in making Bnaehihcs to imitato these moro obvious iaetions Of the-brain. One of the first Was made at Yale, where an arrangeWnt of switches, battery, glass tubes, land a small glow lamp could be showu ito reproduce something like tho reactions of Tavlov’s dog, first to the Sight of its dinner, and afterwards to the sound of the bell.

The battery was the brain, the Switches the chunk of meat or the bell, [the glow .lamp the dog’s response. It fell worked well—the lamp, glowing, [fading, and after a pause, lighting tegain, in the most natural manner. Another thinking machine constructfed at Washington reproduced by an arrangement of electro magnets the way an which rats, by a process of trial and Error, learn how to take a given path among the twists and turns of a maze. All learning is experience, a process of [trial and error, and the machine learns like the rat, but learns quicker. -The mere description of these machines would absorb many columns, with illustrations, and what strikes us most about them is the amount of mechanism needed to stimulate the most elementary behaviour. A model reproducing all a rat can do would require a mechanism as large as the of Parliament. One reproducing tho whole behaviour of man, if it woro possible [to construct it, would occupy the Whole of England.

Our own thinking machine is stored in the compass of the brain and its appendages of nerves. Its complexity is revealed by the things it learns and floes. There is the art of walking, or iof any movement. By means of perpetual alterations of positions we are telway3 building up in the brain a jmodel of ourselves which is constantly jphanging.

How We Learn to Talk

Recently in Damascus, Syria, the police displeased the guild of thieves and robbers, which, in retaliation, caused a strike in the hope that the inactivity of the police force would result in numerour dismissals. Tor many weeks the burglars and bandits of the city refused to steal a single thing.

Every new posture or movement is registered on this plastic “scheme" of our body, in tho brain memory. Without it we could not know how to move any limb. But this is child’s play compared with tho interlinked processes, mental, physiological, and automatic, by which we learn to talk. We all learn to speak by constant practice, exactly as a lawn tennis player acquires a difficult stroke or a skater a new figure. At one stage a child has more words than ideas, and repeats them over and over again to practice them. But single words, if we accept the “detonating commas" of oaths, are meaningless. We do ndt think in words but in words referring to one another in a particular manner. The sentence becomes a unit, not a word heap. Its production is a mental process improved by practice and conscious effort. We speak internally or aloud'not to tell others what we think but to tell ourselves what wo think. Speech is the interpretation of thought. The thinking machine governing this aptitude is far more complicated than the last century imagined it to be. After Broca had disclosed in the brain the so-called speech centre, where a mosaic of impulses was collected and directed to set speech in motion, other anatomists followed in localising in the brain other centres of bodily action. But in our own day Sir Henry Head has shown beyond a peradventure that this scheme is far too simple.

The brain centres are not conglomerations of cells where bodily functions, such as speech, are begun, but points where the progress of some mode of action can be reinforced, turned aside, or prohibited. The brain does not localise in its convolutions any bodily function. It acts as a whole.

Through it speech is acquirod not as an isolated act but as an orderly exercise of functions, conscious, subconscious, or wholly automatic, all working together in harmony. The brain which can compass this is a thinking machine of uncomprehended complexity. We 'fall short of understanding it, because, to quote Sir Henry Head, the logical formulas of the intellect do not correspond exactly to physical events. The universe does not exist o.s n,n exercise for the human mind.