Comments on: Endless brain gears

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:36:15 +0000

The amount of images that have arranged the cogs so that they work against each other and can’t ever move is quite staggering.

By: C DeWitt

C DeWitt — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:50:35 +0000

I suspect it goes back much farther–to the Deistic idea of a clockwork universe and clockmaker God, which appears in Alexander Pope’s long poem An Essay on Man (ca. 1730)which includes images of creatures as cogs; and to the original idea of a computational engine (which surely preceded Babbage’s specific idea ca 1820; to the 18th century fascination with automatons, cf. http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/automaton/automaton.php?cts=instrumentation (and perhaps back to the Greeks and Romans who I think had such things; and simply to the origins of mechanistic analogies for living creatures.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:32:42 +0000

Isn’t it referencing the Leibniz remark from the Monadology?

By: Bookmarks for November 21st, 2011 through November 22nd, 2011 | PRCog's Gear Grindings

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:01:45 +0000

[...] Endless brain gears – [...]

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:20:43 +0000

It’s cog-nitive – geddit?

By: Emmy

Emmy — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:32:02 +0000

These days it would be better with electrical currents, as apparently the brain is “wired” to do things, even according to professional science websites.

By: Tim Poston

Tim Poston — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:09:26 +0000

Surely it looks more like a Babbage-computational than an electronic device? Even earlier,
“The Emperor Napoleon I, a chess player certainly of prominence and reportedly of ability, lost a chess game in 15 moves to a seeming thinking machine; a clockwork automaton known as ‘the Turk.’ Reports of the time say that Napoleon ‘angrily stalked from the room.’ ”
Wheels and cogs defined what mechanism meant, _up_to_ the mid-20th century, and in this case persist beyond it. As obsolete as the elliptical orbits in the Bohr atom, but what else are you gonna draw?

By: Salma

Salma — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:00:09 +0000

The earliest example close to this that I know of is Fritz Kahn’s industrial body: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/dreamanatomy/da_visible_industrial.html . Not sure if that’s what you were looking for, but it’s pretty cool stuff.