We still know so little about the process of thinking and the
structure of the thinking brain that any theory claiming to explain this
phenomenon as a whole is hypothetical. Thus, our conception of thinking must
also be treated as a hypothesis. However, this conception indicates the place
of thinking in the series of natural phenomena and, as we shall see, puts a
vast multitude of facts together in a system. The complete absence of
particular, arbitrary assumptions, which ordinarily must be made when a theory
includes a structural description of a little-studied object, is another
positive feature. The core of our conception is not some hypothesis regarding
the concrete structure and working mechanism of the brain, but rather a
selection of those functional concepts through which a consistent and
sufficiently convincing explanation of the facts we know about thinking becomes
possible.
Thus, we assert that the appearance of thinking beings, which marks the
beginning of a new stage--perhaps a new era--in evolution (the era of reason)
is nothing short of the next metasystem transition, which occurs according to
the formula
control of associating = thinking.
To prove this assertion we shall analyze the consequences that follow from
control of associating and equate them with the forms of behavior we observe in
thinking beings.
First of all, what is control of associating? Representations X and
Y are associated in an animal only when they appear together in its
experience. If they do not appear together (as a rule, on many occasions), the
association will not arise. The animal is not free to control its associations;
it has only those which the environment imposes on it. To control associating a
mechanism must be present in the brain which makes it possible to associate any
two or several representations that have no tendency at all to be encountered
together in experience--in other words, an arbitrary association not imposed by
the environment.
This action would appear to be completely meaningless. An elder tree in the
garden and an uncle in Kiev--why connect these two totally unrelated facts?
Nonetheless, arbitrary associating has profound meaning. It really would be
meaningless if brain activity amounted to nothing more than passively receiving
impressions, sorting them, grouping them, and so on. But the brain also has
another function--its basic one: to control the organism, carrying out active
behavior which changes the environment and creates new experience. You can bet
that the alarm clock and the holder for the teapot are in no way associated in
your consciousness. Nor in the consciousness of your three-year-old son.
However, this is only for a certain time. One fine day, for some reason an
association between these two objects occurs in the head of the young citizen
and he is overcome by an insurmountable desire to rap the alarm clock with the
holder. As a result, the objects enter a state of real, physical interaction.
In the metasystem transition, some thing that was once fixed and uniquely
determined by external conditions becomes variable and subject to the action of
the trial and error method. Control of associating, like every metasystem
transition, is a revolutionary step of the highest order directed against
slavish obedience by the organism to environmental dictatorship. As is always
true in the trial and error method , only a small proportion of the arbitrary
associations prove useful and are reinforced, but these are associations which
could not have arisen directly under the influence of the environment. And they
are what permits a reasoning being those forms of behavior which are
inaccessible to the animal that was frozen in the preceding stage.
Reference:
Turchin V. (1977): The Phenomenon of Science. A cybernetic approach to human evolution, (Columbia University Press, New York).
