.
Does it exist? If so, how does it relate to the material world-including that mass of maybe a trillion nerve cells that is the human brain? Or is it a mirage, no more than an idea that Homo sapiens (Man the knower) developed in the prescientific era to explain the capacity for thought, feeling, and deliberate action that marks him off from the rest of nature?
Mirage or not, changing notions about the mind and the na- ture of reality have been important all through history. The foundations of...
.
Does it exist? If so, how does it relate to the material world-including that mass of maybe a trillion nerve cells that is the human brain? Or is it a mirage, no more than an idea that Homo sapiens (Man the knower) developed in the prescientific era to explain the capacity for thought, feeling, and deliberate action that marks him off from the rest of nature?
Mirage or not, changing notions about the mind and the na- ture of reality have been important all through history. The foundations of...
's workings? In 1868, the Dutchman Frans Donders suggested that a start be made with a "subtraction method." For instance, he said, the time required to add two one-digit numbers could be found by subtracting the time it took to add four such numbers from the time needed to add five. Donders studied many mental operations in this way.
Modem cognitive psychology might have developed from that simple beginning, but it did not. Donders's work was attacked.
Critics argued that his method...
Robert Wright
In July 1979, Italy's Luigi Villa, the world backgammon champion, took on a robot in a $5,000 winner-take-all match in Monte Carlo. The robot was linked by satellite to Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University, where a Digital Equipment Corpora- tion PDP-10 computer, animated by a program called BKG 9.8, mulled things over. Villa was a 2 to 1 favorite; no machine had ever beaten a world champion in a board or card game.
But BKG 9.8 beat the odds. It won four of five games and, through...
an ancient Indian legend illustrat-
ing the wisdom of the god Shiva,
each of two men, a thinker and an
athlete, has his head removed and
grafted onto the other's body. The
wife of each becomes confused as to
which portion of her spouse she
should stay with. Shiva, who sensed
the importance of consciousness and
knew where it lay, told them to go
with the head.
Today, readers interested in the
mind have a problem not unlike that
of the wives. The literature is divided
into two camps:...
When the Great Depression reached rock bottom in the winter of 1932-33, there were not many American models of a government ade- quate to deal with the catastrophic economic crisis.
During the 1920s, the State had been responsible for some promo- tion of agriculture; a scattering of targeted subsidies for emerging in- dustries such as oil, airlines, radio; a tariff designed to protect influential business sectors. But federal policy had no significant influ- ence upon the economy, upon science...
n Coptic Christians, who believe her to be not only the mother ofJesus Christ but also of God the Father.
The Wilson QuarterlyIWinter 1984
98
"Revolutionary Ethiopia or death" was the choice offered to Ethiopians their chief of state, Mengistu Haile Mariam, last September, on the 10th anniversary of the revolution that ended the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Such rhetoric is not unusual in postcolonial Africa, known for its cycles of coups and countercoups. But Ethiopia is different....
Addis Ababa (New Flower) takes the airborne traveler by sur- prise. Coming in from the north, one flies first up the narrow, green Egyptian valley of the Nile, then over the barren Nubian Desert in the Sudan. Across the Ethiopian border, the desert rises to a high plateau, broken by deep gorges. On the plateau is a patchwork of grain fields and thatched-roof farmsteads that con- tinues for hundreds of miles. Its pastoral character gives little hint that a city of 1.3 million inhabitants is nearby,...
Westerners] as a terribly remote land; a home of pristine piety; a magnifi- cent kingdom; an outpost of savagery; or a bastion of African independ- ence." So writes sociologist Donald
N. Levine in his comprehensive Greater Ethiopia (Univ. of Chicago, 1974, cloth & paper). Often neglected foreign analysts, he observes, are the Ethiopians themselves.
There are more than 20 major Ethiopian tribes. Yet, despite the dif- ferences among such tribes as the no- madic Danakil, the sedentary Wollamo,...
public agencies and private institutions
"Beyond Monetarism: Finding the Road to Stable Money."
Basic Books, 10 East 53rd St., New York, N.Y. 10022.270 pp. $16.95. Author: Marc A. Miles
In August 1971, President Nixon shut the U.S. gold window, declaring that Washington would no longer redeem foreigners' dollars for gold. Two years later, Washington pulled out of the fixed international exchange rate sys- tem established under the 1946 Bret- ton Woods Agreement. In October 1979, Fe...