BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): the Antipointsman

[Monte Davis]

pp. 53-54 (Viking pagination)
Notice the slide from Jessica's narrative present through a recalled
conversation ("Roger has tried to explain...") to The White Visitation
("his little bureau"). He's the one-man Statistics Office.

"576 squares" implies a 24x24 grid of squares half a kilometer on a side.
So Roger's sampling area is 12 km (~7.5 miles) on a side, 56 sq mi -- about
a tenth of Greater London's built-up area. If it's centered at Charing
Cross, then very roughly from Kensington east to Greenwich, and from
Hampstead Heath south to Streatham Common. (UK readers please correct me if
I've screwed up my map-gazing.)

"An Erlenmeyer flask bubbles..." and we get a slow pan around the room,
Roger's split soul captured in a book and a snapshot, as "the graying
Pavlovian, thin as a needle" (heh) looks in from the hall.

Zeros and ones: "Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, [Pointsman]
imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements....
each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep... all Pavlovian
brain mechanics assumes the presence of these bi-stable points."

In 1944, neurologists knew that neurons had an all-or-nothing threshold for
"firing." But they had few details on how adjacent neurons connected, how
many connections went to remote cells instead, or how many went down into
deeper cortical layers rather than across the surface. They wouldn't
understand the electrochemistry of the nerve impulse itself for another
decade. So this flickering "mosaic," with its seductive similarity to
binary circuit elements and digital computing, is an extremely stylized
model.

“Summation,” “transition,” “irradiation,” “concentration,” “reciprocal
induction”... were not observed phenomena, but Pavlov's *inferred* building
blocks for the more complex brain functions he was interested in. They all
vanished from neuroscience in the 1950s and 1960s. The all-or-nothing view
of neuronal activity has changed, too. While the threshold is real, it can
slide up and down with the neuron's recent activity and with neurochemicals
swirling around the cells -- both very different from the simple, fixed
determinism of switches, relays or transistors.

Bottom line: what P wrote in GR about, e.g., V-2 guidance was actual
engineering that had been built and had worked. What he wrote about
Pointsman's neuroscience was less "modern science" as of the date of
writing than it was akin to the Magnetick Hi-Jinks in Mason & Dixon, or
Aetherism in Against the Day. And he knew it.
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