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'adaptiveness' which is the reason for certification [i.e., forcible confinement
to a mental institution]” (478). Here he tied his essay into a venerable tradi-
tion in psychiatry going back at least to the early twentieth century, namely,
that madness and mental illness pointed to a failure to adapt—an inappropri-
ate mental fixity in the face of the flux of events (Pressman 1998, chap. 2). As
we saw, Walter's
M. docilis
likewise lost its adaptivity when driven mad.
Ashby's first cybernetic paper, then, discussed some very simple instances
of dynamic equilibrium and portrayed them as models of the brain. One is
reminded here of Wiener's cybernetics, in which feedback systems stood in
as model of the brain, and indeed the thermostat as discussed by Ashby was
none other than such a system. And two points are worth noting here. First,
a historical point: Ashby's essay appeared in print three years before Arturo
Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Julian Bigelow's classic article connecting servo-
mechanisms and the brain, usually regarded as the founding text of cybernet-
ics. And second, while Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow (1943) thought of
servomechanisms as models for purposive action in animals and machines,
Ashby's examples of homeostatic mechanisms operated below the level of
conscious purpose. The brain adumbrated in Ashby's paper was thus unequiv-
ocally a performative and precognitive one.
I quoted Ashby as saying that he solved the problem of how the brain can be at
once mechanistic and adaptive in 1941, and his major achievement of that year
is indeed recorded in a notebook entitled “The Origin of Adaptation,” dated
19 November 1941, though his first publication on this work came in an essay
submitted in 1943 and only published in 1945, delayed, no doubt, by the exigen-
cies of war (Ashby 1945a). The problematic of both the notebook and the 1945
publication is this: Some of our biological homeostatic mechanisms might be
given genetically, but others are clearly acquired in interaction with the world.
One of Ashby's favorite adages was, The burned kitten fears the fire. The kit-
ten
learns
to maintain a certain distance from the fire—close enough to keep
warm, but far away enough not get to burned again, depending, of course, on
how hot the fire is. And the question Ashby now addressed himself to was how
such learning could be understood mechanistically—what could be the go of
it? As we have seen, Walter later addressed himself to the question of learning
with his conditioned reflex analogue, CORA. But Ashby found a different solu-
tion, which was his first great contribution to brain science and cybernetics.
The 1945 essay was entitled “The Physical Origin of Adaptation by Trial
and Error,” and its centerpiece was a strange imaginary machine: “a frame
