'The Action of the Brain'. Machine Models and Adaptive Functions in Turing and Ashby

Given the personal acquaintance between Alan M. Turing and W. Ross Ashby and the partial proximity of their research fields, a comparative view of Turing’s and Ashby’s works on modelling “the action of the brain” (in a 1946 letter from Turing to Ashby) will help to shed light on the seemingly strict symbolic/embodied dichotomy: while it is a straightforward matter to demonstrate Turing’s and Ashby’s respective commitments to formal, computational and material, analogue methods of modelling, there is no unambiguous mapping of these approaches onto symbol-based AI and embodiment-centered views respectively. Instead, it will be argued that both approaches, starting from a formal core, were at least partly concerned with biological and embodied phenomena, albeit in revealingly distinct ways.     «

Given the personal acquaintance between Alan M. Turing and W. Ross Ashby and the partial proximity of their research fields, a comparative view of Turing’s and Ashby’s works on modelling “the action of the brain” (in a 1946 letter from Turing to Ashby) will help to shed light on the seemingly strict symbolic/embodied dichotomy: while it is a straightforward matter to demonstrate Turing’s and Ashby’s respective commitments to formal, computational and material, analogue methods of modelling, ther...     »