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I am now, in other words a Time-worshipper, seized with the extra fervour
of the convert. I mean this more or less seriously. “Time” seems to me to be big
enough, impersonal enough, to be a possible object of veneration—the old man
of the Bible with his whims & bargains, & his impotence over evil, and his son
killing, has always seemed to me to be entirely inadequate as the Spirit of All
Existent, if not downright contemptible. But Time has possibilities. As a vari-
able it is utterly different from all others, for they exist in it as a fish lives in the
ocean: so immersed that its absence is inconceivable. My aim at the moment
is to reduce all adaptation to its operation, to show that if only Time will oper-
ate, whether over the geological periods on an earth or over a childhood in an
individual, then adaptation will inevitably emerge. This gives to time a position
of the greatest importance, equalled only by that “factor” that called space &
matter into existence.
This passage is interesting in a couple of respects. On the one hand, Ashby
records a change in his perspective on time and change (in himself and the
world) that is nicely correlated with the flourishing of his cybernetics. On the
other, this passage returns us to the relation between cybernetics and spiri-
tuality that surfaced in the last chapter and runs through those that follow.
Walter made the connection via his discussion of the strange performances
associated with Eastern spirituality, which he assimilated to his understand-
ing of the performative brain and technologies of the self. There are also
definite echoes of the East in this passage from Ashby—one thinks of Shiva
indifferently dancing the cosmos into and out of existence—though now the
bridge from cybernetics to spirituality goes via time and adaptation, the key
themes of Ashby's cybernetics as exemplified in the homeostat, rather than
technologies of the self.
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The self does, however, reappear in a different guise in this passage. “The
old man of the Bible with his whims & bargains” is the very paradigm of
the modern, self-determined, centered, human subject writ as large as pos-
sible. And it is interesting to note that Ashby's rejection of this image of the
Christian God went with a nonmodern conception of himself. Just as a multi-
homeostat setup dramatized a decentered self, not fully in control and con-
stitutively plunged into its environment, so “Passing through Nature” begins
(Ashby 1951-57, pp. 1-3) with the story of a meeting in January 1951 at which
Warren McCulloch was present. Realizing how important McCulloch was
to his career as a cybernetician, Ashby took the initiative and shook hands
with him, but then immediately found himself going back to a conversation
with someone of “negligible . . . professional importance.” “What I want to
