ABSTRACT
If we consider two lively subjects of research at the present day, conditioned reflexes and communications, would it be unfair to suggest that underlying the arguments of many able physiologists and cyberneticists is the assumption that the stimulation of the sense organs in man is followed automatically by the formation of thoughts in the brain? That the brain is an organ biologically evolved in such a way as to turn sensations into concepts? More than once I have heard a physiologist follow his demonstration of the capacity of a decerebrated octopus to ‘learn’ under the stimulus of electric shocks by confident explanations of the human consciousness and the human conscience as systems of conditioned reflexes. If one should seek to remind him of some of Professor Ginsberg's propositions—as, for instance, that ‘the basic needs of the human organism laid down in the hereditary structure are transformed by the growth of intelligence and the influence of social factors’; that ‘far from being simply given the ends of life are complex and variable’; and that ‘there are desires which are only possible at certain levels of cognitive development and thoughts which are only possible at certain levels of emotional intensity’—if one should venture to urge such considerations as these one would run the risk of being dismissed as ‘medieval’.
