The Minds, Machines, and Brains of a Passionate Scientist: An interview with Michael Arbib

Michael Arbib was born in England, grew up in Australia, and studied at MIT where he received his PhD in Mathematics in 1963. He helped to found the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Center for Systems Neuroscience, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Today he is Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, a Professor of Neuroscience and the Director of the USC Brain Project at the University of Southern California. The title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics (1964, second edition 1987), gives a good indication of his scientific interests. For all his extensive research in these areas, however, Arbib has not ignored philosophical, social, and even theological topics (Arbib 1985; Arbib and Hesse 1986). Central to his work in all of these areas is the concept of schema, and this is one of the topics that we discuss here.