ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 106

its environment, finding out about distributions of lights and obstacles; the
homeostat instead searched its inner being, running through the possibili-
ties of its inner circuitry until it found a configuration that could come into
dynamic equilibrium with its environment.
Next we need to think about Ashby's modelling not of the brain but of
the world. 15 The world of the tortoise was largely static and unresponsive—a
given field of lights and obstacles—but the homeostat's world was lively and
dynamic: it was, as we have seen, more homeostats! If in a multiunit setup
homeostat 1 could be regarded as a model brain, then homeostats 2, 3, and
4 constituted homeostat 1's world. Homeostat 1 perturbed its world dynami-
cally, emitting currents, which the other homeostats processed through their
circuits and responded to accordingly, emitting their own currents back, and
so on around the loop of brain and world. This symmetric image, of a lively
and responsive world to be explored by a lively and adaptive brain, was, I
would say, echoing Wiener, the great philosophical novelty of Ashby's early
cybernetics, its key feature.
As ontological theater, then, a multihomeostat setup stages for us a vision
of the world in which fluid and dynamic entities evolve together in a decen-
tered fashion, exploring each other's properties in a performative back-and-
forth dance of agency. Contemplation of such a setup helps us to imagine the
world more generally as being like that; conversely, such a setup instantiates
a way of bringing that ontological vision down to earth as a contribution to
the science of the brain. This is the ontology that we will see imaginatively
elaborated and played out in all sorts of ways in the subsequent history of
cybernetics. 16 Biographically, this is where I came in. In The Mangle of Prac-
tice I argued that scientific research has just this quality of an emergent and
performative dance of agency between scientists and nature and their instru-
ments and machines, and despite some evident limitations mentioned below,
a multihomeostat setup is a very nice starting point for thinking about the
ontological picture I tried to draw there. It was when I realized this that I
became seriously interested in the history of cybernetics as elaborating and
bringing that ontological picture down to earth.
Three further remarks on homeostat ontology might be useful. First, I
want simply to emphasize that relations between homeostats were entirely
noncognitive and nonrepresentational. The homeostats did not seek to know
one another and predict each other's behavior. In this sense, each homeostat
was unknowable to the others, and a multihomeostat assemblage thus staged
what I called before an ontology of unknowability . Second, as discussed in chap-
ter 2, paradigmatic modern sciences like physics describe a world of fixed en-