Kenneth Mark Colby (1920 – April 20, 2001) was an American psychiatrist dedicated to the theory and application of computer science and artificial intelligence to psychiatry. Colby was a pioneer in the development of computer technology as a tool to try to understand cognitive functions and to assist both patients and doctors in the treatment process. He is perhaps best known for the development of a computer program called PARRY, which mimicked a person with paranoid schizophrenia and could "converse" with others. PARRY sparked serious debate about the possibility and nature of machine intelligence.
Early life and education
Colby was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1920. He graduated from Yale University in 1941 and received his M.D. from Yale Medical School in 1943.
Career
Colby began his career in psychoanalysis as a clinical associate at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute in 1951. During this time, he published A Primer for Psychotherapists, an introduction to psychodynamic psychotherapy. He joined the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University in the early sixties, beginning his pioneering work in the relatively new field of artificial intelligence. In 1967 the National Institute of Mental Health recognized his research potential when he was awarded a Career Research Scientist Award. Colby came to UCLA as a professor of psychiatry in 1974, and was jointly appointed professor in the Department of Computer Science a few years later. Over the course of his career, he wrote numerous books and articles on psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and artificial intelligence.
Psychoanalysis
Early in his career, in 1955, Colby published Energy and Structure in Psychoanalysis, an effort to bring Freud's basic doctrines into line with modern concepts of physics and philosophy of science. This, however, would be one of the last attempts by Colby to reconcile psychoanalysis with what he saw as important developments in science and philosophical thought. Central to Freud's method is his employment of a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of inquiry that refuses to take the subject at his or her word about internal processes. Freud sets forth explanations for a patient's mental state without regard for whether the patient agrees or not. If the patient does not agree, s/he has repressed the truth, that truth that the psychoanalyst alone can be entrusted with unfolding. The psychoanalyst's authority for deciding the nature or validity of a patient's state and the lack of empirical verifiability for making this decision was not acceptable to Colby.
Colby's disenchantment with psychoanalysis would be further expressed in several publications, including his 1958 book, A Skeptical Psychoanalyst. He began to vigorously criticize psychoanalysis for failing to satisfy the most fundamental requirement of a science, that being the generation of reliable data. In his 1983 book, Fundamental Crisis in Psychiatry, he wrote, “Reports of clinical findings are mixtures of facts, fabulations, and fictives so intermingled that one cannot tell where one begins and the other leaves off. …we never know how the reports are connected to the events that actually happened in the treatment sessions, and so they fail to qualify as acceptable scientific data.”.
Likewise, in Cognitive Science and Psychoanalysis, he stated, "In arguing that psychoanalysis is not a science, we shall show that few scholars studying this question get to the bottom of the issue. Instead, they start by accepting, as do psychoanalytic theorists, that the reports of what happens in psychoanalytic treatment -- the primary source of the data -- are factual, and then they lay out their interpretations of the significance of facts for theory. We, on the other hand, question the status of the facts." These issues would shape his approach to psychiatry and guide his research efforts.
Computer science
In the 1960s, Colby began thinking about the ways in which computer theory and application could contribute to the understanding of brain function and mental illness. One early project involved an Intelligent Speech Prosthesis which allowed individuals suffering from aphasia to “speak” by helping them search for and articulate words using whatever phonemic or semantic clues they were able to generate.