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the pursuit of inner equilibrium. This is certainly a step in the right ontologi-
cal direction beyond the tortoise.
Second, I described the homeostat as exploring its environment open-
endedly, but this is not strictly true. My understanding of open-endedness in-
cludes an indefinitely large range of possibilities, whereas the homeostat had
precisely twenty-five options—the number of positions of its uniselector. A
four-homeostat setup could take on 25
4
= 390,625 different states in all.
17
This
is a large number, but still distinctly finite. As ontological theater, therefore,
we should think of the homeostat as pointing in the direction of open-ended
adaptation, without quite getting there.
Third, and most important, as the word “uniselector” suggests, adaptation
in the homeostat amounted to the
selection
of an appropriate state by a process
of trial and error within a combinatoric space of possibilities. This notion of
selection appears over and over again in Ashby's writings, and, at least from an
ontological point of view, there is something wrong with it. It leaves no room
for creativity, the appearance of genuine novelty in the world; it thus erases
what I take to be a key feature of open-endedness. It is easiest to see what is
at stake here when we think about genuinely cognitive phenomena, so I will
come back to this point later. For the moment, let me just register my convic-
tion that as models of the brain and as ontological theater more generally,
Ashby's homeostats were deficient in just this respect.
One final line of thought can round off this section. It is interesting to ex-
amine how Ashby's cybernetics informed his understanding of himself. As
mentioned above, a multihomeostat assemblage foregrounded the role of
time—adaptation as necessarily happening in time. And here is an extract
from Ashby's autobiographical notebook, “Passing through Nature” (Ashby
1951-57), from September 1952 (pp. 36-39):
For forty years [until the mid-1940s—the first blossoming of his cybernetics] I
hated change of all sorts, wanting only to stay where I was. I didn't want to grow
up, didn't want to leave my mother, didn't want to go from school to Cambridge,
didn't want to go to hospital, and so on. I was unwilling at every step.
Now I seem to be changed to the opposite: my only aim is to press on. The
march
of time is, in my scientific theorising, the only thing that matters. Every
thing, I hold, must go
on
: if human destiny is to go on and destroy itself with an
atomic explosion, well then, let us get on with it, and make the biggest explo-
sion ever!
