Editor’s Introduction - Issue 21.4

The collected works of Warren S. McCulloch are vast. Our goal in re-introducing them through this four-part series in E:CO is to whet the reader’s appetite for the wealth of insight found in the full four-volume collection. We also hope to excite the researcher with our use of latent semantic analysis tools in creating a context in which to place the McCulloch works. The 30+ years during which the collection lay fallow deprived current day researchers of a what should have been a rich intellectual ecology to situate the works. Our goal with the use of technology is to provide researchers with a similar intellectual habitus.

The last issue in this four-part series begins with five articles by McCulloch:

1. What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain, Volume 4, Chapter 102, Cited 2698 times
2. What Is a Number, That a Man May Know It, and a Man, That He May Know a Number?, Volume 4, Chapter 106, Cited 120 times
3. Cybernetic Problems of Learning: Conditioning of Control, of Command and of Expediency, Volume 4, Chapter 124 (no meaningful citations)
4. Of I and It, Volume 4, Chapter 127 (no meaningful citations)
5. Ragnar Rokr: The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation, Volume 4, Chapter 128 (no meaningful citations)

It then ends with the text of a lecture McCulloch gave in 1952 entitled: Finality and Form in Nervous Activity. I cannot speak highly enough of this lecture. It should be required reading in every introductory psychology course. That it has been ignored for more than a half-century is a loss to many generations of students.

As with the last three issues, there are commonalities to be found amongst the articles. When their contents are run through the American Society for Cybernetic’s epi-search software the following are displayed as recommended book from the ASC’s ISCE Library:

ISCE Library Recommendations of “Related Books”

What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain

• Action in Perception
• Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
• Going Inside
• Attentional Processing
• On Intelligence
• Vision and Art: the Biology of Seeing
• Plato's Camera
• The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
• Biophysics and Cybernetic Systems: Proceedings of the Second Cybernetic Sciences Symposium [Los Angeles, 1964]
• Seeing, Thinking and Knowing: Meaning and Self-Organization in Visual Cognition and Thought

What Is a Number, That a Man May Know It, and a Man, That He May Know a Number?

• Engaging Science
• Ideas at the Intersection of Mathematics, Philosophy, and theology
• Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How they Know It,
• Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science
• Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain
• The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell
• Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IX: Philosophy of the English-Speaking World in The Twentieth Century 1: Science, Logic and Mathematics (Pt.1)
• Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought
• Intuition and Science
• The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic

Cybernetic Problems of Learning: Conditioning of Control, of Command and of Expediency

• Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy
• Folk Psychological Narratives: the Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons
• Functional Models of Cognition: Self-Organizing Dynamics and Semantic Structures in Cognitive Systems
• Yorick's World: Science and the Knowing Subject
• Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
• Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IX: Philosophy of the English-Speaking World in The Twentieth Century 1: Science, Logic and Mathematics (Pt.1)
• The Cambridge Companion to Quine
• The Philosophy of Science
• What Science offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture
• Treatise on Basic Philosophy: Volume 6: Epistemology & Methodology II: Understanding the World

Of I and It

• Modern Philosophy of Language
• Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach
• Philosophical Darwinism
• Philosophy of communication
• Structure and Being
• Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?
• The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
• Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Rorty and the Mirror of Nature
• The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language
• Radical Constructivism

Ragnar Rokr: The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation

• Going Inside
• Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are
• Neuroculture
• The Good, the True, and the Beautiful: A Neuronal Approach
• Are We Unique: A Scientist Explores the Unparalleled Intelligence of the Human Mind
• The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century
• The Mind Machine
• The Wisdom Paradox
• Neurodynamics of Cognition and Consciousness (Understanding Complex Systems)
• Evolution 2.0: Implications of Darwinism in Philosophy and the Social and Natural Sciences

Finality and Form in Nervous Activity.

• The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
• Information in the Brain: A Molecular Perspective
• Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy
• A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
• Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers
• Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
• The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
• Emergence: From Chaos To Order
• Purposive Systems: Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics
• The Computer and the Brain

This subset of articles is focused on Mind, Brain, Logic, and Understanding. In addition, the notions of Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, Cognition, Evolution, Neuroscience, Neurons, Consciousness and Communication underlie the commonalities in the articles. Running the full text of all the articles combined through a key concept extractor highlights a different aspect of these articles.

Similar analyses are shown for each of the articles. We have prepared a word cloud, extracted key concepts or topics, and run several key word generators—all with a goal of finding a good short-hand representation of the article itself over and above the abstract of the article prepared by the author. When these shorthand representations are combined (using the ASC’s epi-search technology or its equivalent—we recommend http://findrelatedbooks.com), it becomes possible to look for related books and articles which build upon the original McCulloch article and illustrate where a contemporary researcher might find linkages and inspiration. Thus the shorthand representations are followed by a list of prominent works which cite the McCulloch article (citations per Google Scholar) and a list each of related articles (Google Scholar) and books (Google books) derived by running the complete shorthand representation (abstract plus word cloud plus concepts plus keywords) through the recommendation engine at http://findrelatedbooks.com. It is our intent that by providing this material current day researchers will be able to quickly see how a given McCulloch article relates to their own work or to works they are interested in.

What I find to be of the most interest is locating the McCulloch articles in the current context of today. When I use epi-search on the collection of citations, related articles, and related books from each of the six McCulloch pieces in this issue, the following list of related books is produced:

What this collection demonstrates is the high relevance of McCulloch's work to current research. These works, in turn, are focused around the following keywords or concepts: Brain, Inhibition, Cognition, Mind, Evolution, Neuroscience, Neurons, Science, Theory, Communication.

The lists of concepts and key words can, of course, be used to find related material from any corpus. For example, if one wanted to find items in the JStor collection related to these six articles as a group, the following search would be entered into Google: site:jstor.org Brain, Inhibition, Cognition, Mind, Evolution, Neuroscience, Neurons, Science, Theory, Communication.

This results in:

This list of JStor articles shown above is yet another good representation of the work in this issue.

At the end of each article we present the results of the "epi-search" analysis: first a word cloud list of the fifty most used words in the article, then the "topics" as analyzed by the software, and three lists of keywords: the final output of our analysis (generated from the "lexical profile" of the article, a preliminary list generated from the full text of the article using the epi-search software, and a similar list compiled using software from cortical.io.) These are then followed by a list of the top articles which Google Scholar shows to be citing that McCulloch article, a list of "related articles" produced by using the final keywords from the epi-search software as a search in Google Scholar, and a list of "related books" produced by using the final keywords from the epi-search software as a search in Google Books. There have been similar “end pieces” for each McCulloch article in this series.

We will be turning this collection of four special issues into its own book, available in April 2020.

The full four-volume set of the Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch will be available sometime in May.

On behalf of the American Society for Cybernetics, it is my great honor to welcome you to a contemporary read of the great works of Warren S. McCulloch.

Michael Lissack

President, American Society for Cybernetics and Founding Editor, E:CO, Emergence and Complexity in Organizations