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

[Mark Kohut]

Another great post, Monte, imho. Shows TRP with another use of either-or,
no excluded middle and therefore of
the scientific understanding and attempt at control as ...also a metaphor.

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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