The emergence of general system theory is symptomatic of a new movement that has been developing in science during the past decade: Science is at last giving serious attention to systems that are intrinsically complex. This statement may seem somewhat surprising. Are not chemical molecules complex? Is not the living organism complex? And has not science studied them from its earliest days? Let me explain what I mean.

Biology gives us numerous examples of self-assertional systems whose essence does not precede their existence but is rather revealed through it. Immune system is one of them. The fact of behaving in order not only to satisfy external constraints as a pre-fixed set of possible environments and objectives, but also to satisfy internal “viability” constraints justifies a sharper focus. Adaptability, creativity and memory are certainly interesting “side-effects” of such a tendency for self-consistency. However in this paper, we adopted a largely pragmatic attitude attempting to find the best hybridizing between the biological lessons and the engineering needs. The great difficulty, also shared by neural net and GA users, remains the precise localisation of the frontier where the biological reality must give way to a directed design.

Excerpt: Fodor argues that the construction of genuinely novel concepts is impossible and, therefore, that all basic concepts available to human beings are already present as an innate endowment (1975, 1981). This radical innatism – along with related conclusions such as an innate modularity of available representations and a corresponding innate limitation in the potential knowledge that human beings might be capable of (1983) – has been seen by many as a reductio ad absurdum of Fodor’s position, and his arguments have consequently been dismissed. I will argue that Fodor’s arguments deserve much more careful attention than that: in particular, his arguments are a reductio of one of his essential presuppositions, but it happens to be a presupposition that he shares with virtually all of psychology and philosophy. Fodor’s conclusions, then, are reductios of the major portion of contemporary studies of cognition and epistemology (Campbell and Bickhard, 1987). Furthermore, even when the critical presupposition is isolated, it is difficult to construct a genuine alternative. Most attempts at correcting any part of the logical difficulties involved have inadvertently presupposed the pernicious premise elsewhere in the system (Bickhard, 1980a, 1982, 1987).

Three central themes of Maturana’s work – autopoiesis, the biology of cognition, and cybernetic ontology – are examined. Evidence is offered that Maturana’s treatment of these themes is either unoriginal or flawed. The uncritical acceptance of Maturana’s work by family therapists raises questions about the maturity of their discipline, especially in so far as many practitioners claim an understanding of cybernetics.

We have measured the chromatic threshold sensitivity to stimuli with spectral composition determined by a periodic function of energy over wavelength. This approach is analogous to frequency studies of spatial vision for the study of colour. A device was constructed permitting the synthesis of illuminants over the entire visible range (400–700 nm) in which phase, frequency and amplitude can be independently controlled. We have used 12 frequencies of square-wave functions (from 0.5 to 3.6 cycles/300 nm) and seven values of phase (between 0 degrees and 180 degrees) to obtain the contrast sensitivity function of the chromatic system in three normal trichromats. The results show maximum sensitivity around 1.5 cycles/300 nm and a high-frequency cut-off at 3.6 cycles/300 nm. These empirical values are compared with the predictions obtained from three current psychophysical models of opponent-colour process.

Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporate – everything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments.

Excerpt: I want to speak with the voice of one who takes seriously Wittgenstein’s statement that the function of the philosopher is to help the fly out of the bottle. I am the fly. The philosopher who has helped me most whenever I found myself trapped in the Wittgensteinian bottle is Nelson Goodman. I propose to set forth some conjectures and hypotheses that need particularly to be elucidated by a strong philosophical mind. They all have to do with a subject that is deceptively simple: how people give account of themselves or, in its broader form, what they do when they set forth an “autobiog-raphy.”

Excerpt: Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”