The continuing debate on extrasensory perception and other paranormal phenomena is now followable on a regular basis in the lively quarterly journal The Skeptical Enquirer.
The prospects of ape language have been the focus of intensive research and debate in recent years. Jane von Lawick Goodall’s observations in the wild, In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971) and early apparent breakthroughs in training laboratory animals to use sign language or other artificial languages by Allen and Beatrice Gardner, David Premack, Roger Fouts, and others led to hundreds of articles and books by scores of researchers and their critics. The experiment with high school students is reported in E.H. Lenneberg, “A Neuropsychological Comparison between Man, Chimpanzee and Monkey,” Neuropsychologia (vol. 13, 1975, p. 125). Recently Herbert Terrace, in Nim: A Chimpanzee Who Learned Sign Language (New York: Knopf, 1979), managed to throw a decidedly wet blanket on this enthusiasm with his detailed analysis of the failures of most of this research, including his own efforts with his chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky, but the other side will surely fight back in forthcoming articles and books. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) of December 1978 is devoted to these issues and contains major articles by Donald Griffin, author of The Question of Animal Awareness (New York: Rockefeller Press, 1976), by David Premack and Guy Woodruff, and by Duane Rumbaugh, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and Sally Boysen. Accompanying these articles are a host of critical commentaries by leading researchers in linguistics, animal behavior, psychology and philosophy, and replies by the authors. In BBS, a new interdisciplinary journal, every article is followed by dozens of commentaries by other experts and a reply by the author. In a field as yeasty and controversial as cognitive science, this is proving to be a valuable format for introducing the disciplines to each other. Many other BBS articles in addition to those mentioned here provide excellent entry points into current research.
Although there is clearly a link of great importance between consciousness and the capacity to use language, it is important to keep these issues separate. Self-consciousness in animals has been studied experimentally. In an interesting series of experiments, Gordon Gallup established that chimpanzees can come to recognize themselves in mirrors—and they recognize themselves as themselves too, as he demonstrated by putting dabs of paint on their foreheads while they slept. When they saw themselves in the mirrors, they immediately reached up to touch their foreheads and then examined their fingers. See Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., “Self-recognition in Primates: A Comparative Approach to the Bidirection Properties of Consciousness,” American Psychologist (vol. 32, (5), 1977, pp. 329–338). For a recent exchange of views on the role of language in human consciousness and the study of human thinking, see Richard Nisbett and Timothy De Camp Wilson, “Telling More Than We Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review (vol. 84, (3), 1977, pp. 321–359) and K. Anders Ericsson and Herbert Simon, “Verbal Reports as Data,” Psychological Review (vol. 87, (3), May 1980, pp. 215–250).
Many robots like the Mark III Beast have been built over the years. One at Johns Hopkins University was in fact called the Hopkins Beast. For a brief illustrated review of the history of robots and an introduction to current work on robots and artificial intelligence, see Bertram Raphael, The Thinking Computer: Mind Inside Matter (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976). Other recent introductions to the field of AI are Patrick Winston’s Artificial Intelligence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977), Philip C. Jackson’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Princeton, N.J.: Petrocelli Books, 1975), and Nils Nilsson’s Principles of Articial Intelligence (Menlo Park, Ca.: Tioga, 1980). Margaret Boden’s Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man (New York: Basic Books, 1979) is a fine introduction to AI from a philosopher’s point of view. A new anthology on the conceptual issues confronted by artificial intelligence is John Haugeland, ed., Mind Design: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford, 1981), and an earlier collection is Martin Ringle, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979). Other good collections on these issues are C. Wade Savage, ed., Perception and Cognition: Issues in the Foundations of Psychology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978) and Donald E. Norman, ed., Perspectives on Cognitive Science (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1980).
One shouldn’t ignore the critics of AI. In addition to Weizenbaum, who devotes several chapters of Computer Power and Human Reason to an attack on AI, there is the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, whose What Computers Can’t Do (New York: Harper & Row, 2nd ed., 1979) is the most sustained and detailed criticism of the methods and presuppositions of the field. An entertaining and informative history of the birth of the field is Pamela McCorduck’s Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into History and Prospects of Articial Intelligence (San Francisco: Freeman, 1979).
Dawkins’s provocative views on genes as the units of selection have received considerable attention from biologists and philosophers of biology. Two good and relatively accessible discussions are William Wisatt’s “Reductionistic Research Strategies and Their Biases in the Units of Selection Controversy,” in Thomas Nickles, ed., Scientific Discovery, vol. 2, Case Studies (Hingham, Mass.: Reidel, 1980, pp. 213–59), and Elliot Sober’s “Holism, Individualism, and the Units of Selection,” in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association (vol. 2, 1980).
There have been many attempts to establish different levels of description of the brain and to describe the relations between them. Some pioneering attempts by neuroscientists are Karl Pribram’s The Languages of the Brain (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), Michael Arbib’s The Metaphorical Brain (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1972), and R.W. Sperry’s “A Modified Concept of Consciousness” in Psychological Review, (vol. 76, (6), 1969, pp. 532–536). Consciousness and Brain: A Scientific an Philosophical Inquiry (New York: Plenum, 1976), edited by G. Globus, G. Maxwell, and I. Savodnick, includes several discussions of the problems faced by anyone who tries to relate brain-talk to mind-talk. An earlier work, yet still full of fresh insight, is Dean Wooldridge’s Mechanical Man: The Physical Basis of Intelligent Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
The general problem of levels of explanation in discussing mind and brain is one of the central themes of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is also the topic of the books The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2nd ed., 1981) and Hierarchy Theory, edited by Howard H. Pattee (New York: George Braziller, 1973).