McCulloch’s relation to connectionism and artificial intelligence

Abstract

It is normally accepted that the beginnings of modern computing connectionism can be traced to McCulloch and Pitts’ paper of 1943 [1]. The important points of their historical contributions are however mislead by the drift that developments on theoretical computer architectures took after the 50’s. The so called Artificial Neural Nets and subsequent connectionist philosophy were actually fixed by Rosenblatt’s Perceptrons and his detractors, plus the more recent addenda of multi-layer perceptrons and back propagation adjusting techniques. They clearly used the basic idea of threshold logic and computation but evolved away from McCulloch-Pitts proposals, towards and in a computer tool of many times questionable power, just as parametric classifiers. What is apparent, however, is that the Macy Foundation Meetings from 1943 to 1945, started by Wiener and McCulloch and all chaired by the latter, provided for the roots of many of present day concepts and ideas for the so called Computational Neurosciences. On another side, Artificial Intelligence appears in the 50’s by the hand of McCarthy and Minsky, mostly influenced by Mathematicians and Logicians like Gordon Pask, Von Neumann and Donald McKay. McCulloch, again, stood aside, in spite of his strong friendship and relations to all of them, even helping seriously in the creation of the Project MAC and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab) of MIT in Tech Square. He always thought, however, that what was later called Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI) and, as consequence, its successor, Knowledge Engineering, will contribute nothing to brain understanding, but, rather, they were in most cases “toys or even little monsters”. Through a quick reminder of McCulloch’s activity, we shall try to show how the basic contributions to the computer-brain paradigm of McCulloch came mostly from the two important early papers: the one in 1943 and “How We Know Universals” in 1947. We shall end by reminding some questions that still remain open since his last meetings in Europe (Lisbon, July 1968): on command and control, consciousness, intention, multi-functionality and reliability in the nervous system.