Computation in Neural Nets - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 98

on the impossible, but also is incapable of explaining the most primitive
types of behavior in living organisms that show one or another form of
retention (Von Foerster, 1965; Von Foerster et al., 1966).

Acknowledgements. I am indebted to numerous friends and colleagues who
contributed their ideas presented in this article, and who helped in shaping
their presentation. I owe to Alfred Inselberg the development of the elegant
mathematics in networks of cell assemblies, and I am grateful to George W.
Zopf for critical comments and advice in matters of physiology, to W. Ross
Ashby and Paul Weston for reading and helping to polish the manuscript,
and—last not least—to Lebbius B. Woods III for his congenial drawings. If
errors and faults of exposition remain, it is not these friends and colleagues
who gave so generously of their time and advice, but I alone who must bear
the blame.
The work reported in this paper was made possible jointly by the U.S.
Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Grant AF-OSR 7-63, the
U.S. Department of Public Health under Grant GM 10718-01, the U.S. Air
Force Engineering Group Contract AF 33(615)-3890, and the U.S. Air Force
Office of Scientific Research under Contract AF 49(638)-1680.

References
Ashby, W. R., 1956, An introduction to cybernetics (Chapman and Hall,

London).
Ashby, W. R., H. Von Foerster and C. C. Walker, 1962, Instability of pulse activity
in a net with threshold, Nature 196, 561.
Bar-Hillel, Y., 1955, Semantic information and its measure, in: Cybernetics , eds. H.
Von Foerster, M. Mead and H. L. Teuber (Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York)
p. 33.
Beurle, R. L., 1962, Functional organizations in random networks, in: Principles of
self-organization , eds. H. Von Foerster and G. W. Zopf Jr. (Pergamon Press, New
York) p. 291.
Blum, M., 1962, Properties of a neuron with many inputs, in: Principles of self-
organization , eds. H. Von Foerster and G. W. Zopf Jr. (Pergamon Press, New
York) p. 98.
Carnap, R., 1938, The logical syntax of language (Harcourt, Brace and Co., New
York).
Cowan, J., 1962, Many-valued logics and reliable automata, in: Principles of self-
organization , eds. H. Von Foerster and G. W. Zopf Jr. (Pergamon Press, New
York) p. 135.
Eccles, J. C., 1952, The neurophysiological basis of mind (Clarendon Press, Oxford).
Farley, B., 1962, Some similarities between the behavior of a neural network model
and electrophysiological experiments, in: Self-organizing systems ,eds.M.C.
Yovits et al. (Spartan Books, Washington, D. C., 1962) p. 207.
Fitzhugh II, H. S., 1963, Some considerations of polystable systems, Bionics Sym-
posium , Dayton, Ohio, USAF Aeronautical Systems Division, Aerospace Medical
Division, 19-21 March 1963.