Structural aspects of biological cybernetics: Valentino Braitenberg, neuroanatomy, and brain function.

Abstract

A. Aertsen Faculty of Biology and Bernstein Center Freiburg, University of Freiburg, 79104 Freiburg, Germany e-mail: aertsen@biologie.unifreiburg.de “When a new science emerges every couple of centuries, those who are privileged enough to witness it from its very beginnings to its full development during the span of their own lifetime can indeed count themselves lucky. My colleagues and I, who became fully fledged after World War II, had precisely this privilege. The science to which I refer still has no proper name, but its existence can be testified to by the matter-of-course way in which physicists, biologists, and logicians discuss issues that do not fall into any of the categories of physics, biology or logic. Their consensus is not so much interdisciplinary (which does not bring us much more than admiration from people who don’t know much about it) as decidedly neodisciplinary, i.e., based on a new language and terminology that convinces all sides and that is already so well established that it hardly needs to be discussed any further. Some call this new discipline informatics, others information science; it may sometimes be narrowed down to neuroinformatics or ’technical informatics.’ The term cybernetics, which does not meet with universal approval, has, nonetheless, a good chance of asserting itself in the long run. This is not least due to the fact that the term was coined by its most brilliant founder, the mathematician Norbert Wiener. His solid philosophical and philological background is reflected in the fitting name that he gave to this science. The designation cognitive science, which is currently popular, might well one day apply to everything that we still refer to as informatics and cybernetics. But then again, the plain (and rather sloppy) term computer science might come up trumps at the end of the day, as a tribute, if you like, to the fact that the whole thing did not get off the ground until large electronic data processors were invented. Yet one thing is for sure; this new area that has arisen between the humanities and natural sciences, while not professing to belong to either discipline, actually succeeds in