Robert Rosen (2013), Essays on Life Itself Chapter 18
“The mechanism of learning is of course one of the most enthralling and baffling mysteries in the field of biology.”
Source: A machine that learns (1951), p. 60.
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William Grey Walter 12
American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist 1910–1977Related quotes

“It was the most enthralling episode in my life”
Interviewed in 1984 about taking Britain into Europe.[citation needed]
Post-Prime Ministerial

“For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.”
Lecture at the University of Maryland (March 2005)

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 4. The Gene machine
Context: Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal.... The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.
“One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.”

[The threefold way: algebraic structure of symmetry groups and ensembles in quantum mechanics, Jour. Math. Phys., 3, 1962, 1199–1215, https://books.google.com/books?id=nnyNUidX1OMC&pg=PA410] (p. 1200)
Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: The question, "How well does one read?" is a bad question... essentially unanswerable. A more proper question is "How well does one read poetry, or history, or science, or religion?" No one I have ever known is so brilliant as to have learned the languages of all fields of knowledge equally well. Most of us do not learn some of them at all.