request for comments on an article

From: Gerhard Werner (gwer1@mail.utexas.edu)
Date: Sat Jun 10 2000 - 14:30:26 MDT

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I posted an essay entitled " The inscrutable brain: the dialectic of dogma
and heresy" on the web.
URL: http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~werner/inscrutable_brain.html.
In his article, I review briefly the origin of Cybernetics in the 1950s,
and the developments it engendered in the practice and theory of the
neurobehavioral sciences in the past 50 years. My purpose is to show that
the overriding commitment to digital processing and Turing-Machine style
computation may have foreclosed alternative considerations. I argue that
renewed emphasis on analog processing (for instance in the neuropil,
virtually completely neglected for the past 30 years ) and nonlinear
dynamics with strange (chaotic) attractors merit serious attention in the
Neurosciences, complementary to the currently prevailing approaches.

I would very much appreciate comments on the article, and the possibility
of exchange of points of view.
Gerhard Werner (gwer1@mail.utexas.edu).

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