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As in the previous chapter, then, we see here how the modern impulse of
early cybernetics bounced back into the cybernetic ontology of unknowabil-
ity. While illuminating the inner go of the brain, homeostat assemblages of
the kind discussed here turned out to remain, in another sense, mini-Black
Boxes, themselves resistant to a classically scientific understanding, which
we can read again as suggestive icons for a performative ontology. Imagine
the world in general as built from elements like these opaque dynamic assem-
blages, is the suggestion. We can go further with this thought when we come
to DAMS, the homeostat's successor.
Making much same point, the following quotation is from a passage in
De-
sign for a Brain
in which Ashby is discussing interconnected units which have
just two possible states, described mathematically by a “step-function” and
corresponding to the shift in a uniselector from one position to the next (1952,
129): “If there are
n
step-functions [in the brain], each capable of taking two
values, the total number of fields available will be 2
n
. . . . The number of fields
is moderate when
n
is moderate, but rapidly becomes exceedingly large when
n
increases. . . . If a man used fields at the rate of ten a second day and night
during his whole life of seventy years, and if no field were ever repeated, how
many two-valued step-functions would be necessary to provide them? Would
the reader like to guess? The answer is that thirty-five would be ample!” One
is reminded here of Walter's estimate that ten functional elements in the brain
could generate a sufficient variety of behaviors to cover the entire experience
of the human race over a period of a thousand million years. What the early
cyberneticians discovered was just how complex (in aggregate behavior) even
rather simple (in atomic structure) systems can be.
The homeostat is highly instructive as ontological theater, but I should also
note its shortcomings. First, like all of the early cybernetic machines includ-
ing the tortoise, the homeostat had a
fixed goal
: to keep its output current
within predetermined limits. This was the unvarying principle of its engage-
ment with the world. But, as I said about the tortoise, I do not think that this
is a general feature of our world—in many ways, for example, human goals
emerge and are liable to transformation in practice. At the same time, we
might note an important difference between the homeostat's goals and, say,
the tortoise's. The latter's goals referred to states of the outer world—finding
and pursuing lights. The homeostat's goals instead referred inward, to its in-
ternal states. One might therefore imagine an indefinite number of worldly
projects as bearing on those inner states, all of them obliquely structured by
