Preface

In this book I argue that a reason for the limited success of various studies under the general heading of cybernetics is failure to appreciate the importance of continuity, in a simple metrical sense of the term. It is with particular, but certainly not exclusive, reference to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) effort that the shortcomings of established approaches are most easily seen. One reason for the relative failure of attempts to analyse and model intelligence is the customary assumption that the processing of continuous variables and the manipulation of discrete concepts should be considered separately, frequently with the assumption that continuous processing plays no part in thought. There is much evidence to the contrary including the observation that the remarkable ability of people and animals to learn from experience finds similar expression in tasks of both discrete and continuous nature and in tasks that require intimate mixing of the two. Such tasks include everyday voluntary movement while preserving balance and posture, with competitive games and athletics offering extreme examples. Continuous measures enter into many tasks that are usually presented as discrete. In tasks of pattern recognition, for example, there is often a continuous measure of the similarity of an imposed pattern to each of a set of paradigms, of which the most similar is selected. The importance of continuity is also indicated by the fact that adjectives and adverbs in everyday verbal communication have comparative and superlative forms. Primitive organisms are more obviously dependent on continuous processing than are higher animals, though at all levels life depends on complex regulatory processes having continuous character. The suggestion here is that continuous processing should be seen as more primitive, with concept-based thought evolved from it. It is only possible to speculate about the mechanism of the evolutionary development, but a plausible theory is advanced. Because evolution does not erase traces of earlier forms, this may shed light on little-understood subconscious processes that underlie concept-based thought. I realised the need to combine continuous and concept-based processing in connection with a project to make an automatic controller with learning capability for an industrial plant. Since then, the same need has been acknowledged and to some degree satisfied in many contexts by the advent and vast elaboration of fuzzy theory. From the evolutionary point of view this is wrong, as it amounts to accepting the